In sales and marketing, you’ll often hear about buyer personas – a detailed representation of the average consumer of the product or service. While part of the company’s target audience, a buyer persona offers a much more specific and individualized look into a common consumer’s unique personality, challenges and interests. It creates a fictional character that the company can speak to, directly addressing his or her pain points and opportunities.
But, this need not be limited to purchasers of a product or service. The practice of developing a persona is an incredibly useful exercise for social media managers, as well – creating a representation of the average content consumer.
Creating social media personas can help social media managers to better understand the demographics, personalities, pain points and needs of the specific members within their audience – rather than the general traits of their audience as a whole. By seeing that information tied to a “person,” it better enables social media managers to create content and messaging that resonates with the unique individuals in their audience and humanize their posts to create deeper relationships and stronger engagement.
Here are five things to consider when creating social media personas:
- Start with your target audience first
Before developing a persona, you must first identify the target audience that you are trying to reach. It’s very possible that there are a couple, or several, target audiences for your organization, and a unique persona should be developed to represent each of these distinct audiences.
Let’s paint an example through a picture of an ice cream shop – we can call it The Scoop – looking to develop personas for its Instagram presence. The shop knows that its primary audience is generally mothers and caregivers, with a secondary audience being teenagers.
- Analytics are your friend
Once the broader target audiences are identified, it can help to pull recent insights or analytics about your followers to understand their general demographics – age, gender, location, mobile vs. desktop user, etc. This data may be used to inform some of the characteristics of the personas being developed.
Back to our ice cream shop example. The Scoop pulled its latest Instagram insights and found that its highest percentage of followers was evenly split between the 25-34 and 35-44 age ranges, 64.7% of its followers are female, and the largest percentage of them are located in Philadelphia.
- Start with the basics
Now, it’s time to start building out that persona! Here, you can start with the basics. When developing the persona, begin by assigning your character a gender, age, location, marital and family status, education level and occupation. Avoid vague or broad answers and get as specific as possible. Remember, this persona isn’t meant to capture the entire target audience, but rather the average member within it. Being specific will allow you to better humanize the content you are creating.
Based on its understanding of its followers, The Scoop sketched out the following:
- Gender: female
- Age: 36
- Location: East Falls, Philadelphia, PA
- Marital status: Married
- Family status: Two kids – ages 4 and 7
- Education level: Bachelor’s degree
- Occupation: freelance writer
- Bring it to life with the details
Next, you will want to dig deeper into the behavioral patterns, interests, lifestyle and opinions of your fictional character. You may want to describe when they are active online, how tech-savvy this person is, how they seek information, and more. The more granular you can get when describing this persona, the more it may help in developing more impactful content to reach similar members of your target audience. When possible, you should even give this person a name and perhaps even assign a stock photo, putting a face to a name.
Upon considering the details, The Scoop came up with the following behavioral and psychographic description of its primary persona:
Anne-Marie is a highly creative, often eclectic, woman who values freethinking and encourages her children to be their authentic selves. As a freelance writer, she sets her own schedule, allowing her to focus plenty of energy on her family and lean into her own waves of creativity. In her spare time, she enjoys interior design, visiting pop-up beer gardens and volunteering at the local animal shelter. She spends most of her time online after 9 p.m., once her kids are in bed. She considers herself to be tech-savvy and is a frequent content creator on Instagram and TikTok. Most of her news and information comes from online sources and word of mouth.
- Explain what motivates them (and what drives them up a wall)
Lastly, describe the opportunities and challenges facing this person – both generally and those that relate to the business. Consider what attracts them, what barriers they face and what makes their life easier. Once those are considered, you can include details about how your business can solve for these areas. Identifying these areas will be highly valuable in driving exactly the kind of content that can be shared to address these topics, ultimately increasing engagement.
The Scoop may explain Anne-Marie’s opportunities and challenges like this:
Anne-Marie is motivated by things that simplify her life as a working mother. She is attracted by clear, concise photos and graphics, and always loves a good sale. With two young kids, most things they do as a family tend to take a bit longer. She appreciates when both her physical and mental load can be lightened.
The Scoop can address these through eye-catching Instagram posts, paid campaigns targeting its existing followers to promote specials and sales, and by making online ordering easily accessible directly from its Instagram bio.
When developing personas, there is no right or wrong answer. Think creatively and get granular to paint a detailed picture of your average content consumer. By undertaking a persona development exercise, it can aid in developing stronger content, increasing engagement, allowing deeper connection with followers, and – ideally – ultimately driving business.
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