Creating Buyer Personas for Your Social Platforms

Written by Alexandra
Written by Alexandra

Content Manager at SocialBee

This is Chapter 4, Part 1 of the Buyer Persona Guide.

Let’s have a look at how you use social media platforms to help create your buyer personas.

Twitter – How to Use Twitter to Create Your Buyer Persona

When it comes to Twitter, one of the most important things is to treat each message you send out as an individual. This means that each tweet should be adjusted to speak to an ideal customer that you want to reach. So, it’s very important to discover your ideal customers, and send each tweet out to them with your buyer persona in mind. This will help turn each one of your messages into a very personal one.

If you aren’t accurate in who exactly you’re talking to, your messaging is going to fail to reach its target.

Also in case, you have existing customers and established business with a website, make sure to use your resources and data to create your buyer persona (customer avatar). You can look at your website analytics and social media platform analytics, in this case, your built-in Twitter analytics.

You can also use social analytic tools that have free versions such as Twitonomy.

How to Develop Your Buyer Persona Using Twitter

Twitter is great to learn about people’s behavior, habits, likes, dislikes, wants, and needs. 

Here are some ways you can create your buyer persona using Twitter:

1. Look at the Profile Description

Simply look at people’s bios and find out valuable information such as job title, hobby, and where they live. And if they have a profile picture of themselves, you can clearly find out whether they are male or female.

If you are interested in more demographic info like their age and education, you can research that by following their LinkedIn or Facebook profile.

2. Check the Twitter Accounts They Follow

You can learn a great deal about your audience by simply checking what accounts they are following. You can do that by going to their profile and clicking on the ‘Following’ button – you’ll be able to see every account they follow.

3. Look at Your Folowers’ Network

While knowing who your audience follows, it’s just as important to know who follows them. So, again, go to their profile and click on the ‘Followers’ button to learn about the people following them.

4. Check the Hashtags Your Audience Uses

Twitter hashtags are great for finding personas. You could check some general hashtags that your industry is interested in like #Marketing #StockAdvisor or #BeginnerInvestment if you give advice on how to invest, and find the people who are interested in this particular topic.

At this point, it’s important to check out what other hashtags those people are using and keep an eye on them. This will help you find your target audience.

5. Pay Attention to What They Share

Pay close attention to the links they are sharing, and the sources they prefer sharing content from. You can find out a lot about a person by the content, blogs, and websites they are sharing.

6. Look at What Influencers They Follow

Keep a close eye on who your audience engages with the most. Who do they mention a lot in their tweets? This way you can find out who they admire, and who their favourite influencer is.

Pay attention to these details when looking at your audience on Twitter – it will help you better create your buyer persona.

Bottom line:

Using Twitter to help create your buyer personas has its advantages, mostly because Twitter can help you understand the different types of customers and consumers who purchase a specific product or service.

If you are aware of who you are talking to on Twitter, you’ll have a better understanding of why they need your product or service, what they’ll actually use it for, and how it will benefit them now and long term.

This way you’ll know exactly to who you are addressing your messages, which will clearly make a huge difference in your brand’s success and customer reach.

So, when it comes to Twitter, just like with all the other social platforms, using a buyer persona takes really knowing your followers at a different level. Why? Because you’ll be tweeting directly to that specific customer segment and with that specific person in mind.

Examples of well-targeted tweets: 

image30

Clearly, Brigette Hyacinth’s tweets are targeted toward leaders, managers, and human resources. This means that her customer avatars are: leaders, managers, and HR representatives.

And here’s how Starbucks targeted relationships and love in their heartfelt messages that went out to all of their customers who were celebrating love on Valentine’s Day. Their messages were inspirational and have again shown the human side of Starbucks.

image19

image28

LinkedIn – How to Use LinkedIn to Build Buyer Personas

Can you use LinkedIn to create your buyer persona (customer avatar)?

Yes, you can. In fact, LinkedIn’s features can help in the development of your buyer personas. Here’s how.

1. Bios

The important factors in creating a customer avatar using LinkedIn are the ones that provide a better understanding of the work, objectives, and pain points your customer faces that could be met and solved by your product or service.

You can easily gather these insights by searching for people on LinkedIn by industry or geographic area. Then you can narrow down your buyers by job title and workplace.

Here’s some valuable buyer persona info you can gather using this method:

  • Things that are common between your buyers in similar industries and job positions
  • Your buyer’s demographics, location, and career history
  • Your buyer’s strengths, weaknesses, and the factors that motivate them
  • Your buyer’s interests, hobbies

2. Job Postings

Reviewing job postings for positions that fit your key buyer is another great search function on LinkedIn. In fact, it provides valuable information that can help in creating your buyer persona.

The great thing about job postings is that these posts list the characteristics of the people who will be getting the position and some of their particular job functions. And, all of this information can be extremely useful in identifying the needs, wants, and pain points of a potential buyer.

3. Awards, Endorsements, and Recommendations

By reviewing people’s awards, endorsements, and recommendations you’ll be able to see how their connections view your targeted personas.

✔️Awards

With listed awards, you can see what your prospects are considering to be important career achievements and the areas of their position they value the most. By knowing this piece of information you have the opportunity to craft content that will highlight your product or service to be the help and solution for your prospect to achieve even more success in that specific area.

✔️ Endorsements and recommendations

Looking at endorsements and recommendations you’ll find out the following information:

  • what your prospect needs to be successful
  • your prospect’s leadership and management style and values
  • work ethic, skills, and abilities

4. Advanced Search – People Finder

LinkedIn has developed its functionality to facilitate finding people, potential business partners, as well as people with very specific abilities and keywords included in their profile description.

You can also perform searches by typing an individual’s name, keywords, or titles into the search box at the top of the page.

Additionally, you can perform advanced searches by using specific criteria such as location, industry, school, etc. Click the “advanced” link at the right of the search box or at the top of the search results page.

Make sure to search for keywords that may be included in your target buyer’s title, bio as well as experience background.

image26

image20

LinkedIn provides the possibility to save up to three people searches for free.

In order to save a search, click the “Save This Search” option on the right –  this way you’ll have the possibility to easily run the search again later.

Another great thing about this is the fact that you can choose the option to receive weekly or monthly reminders once new members in the network will match your saved criteria.

5. LinkedIn Groups

With LinkedIn Groups you can discover which LinkedIn groups your buyer personas joined.

Why is this information so valuable? Because you can join these groups as well and post questions that would give you insight regarding your buyer personas objectives, goals, interests, wants and pain points.

image29 1

6. Survey Relevant Connections

If you opt to survey your relevant connections, simply review your current connections and search by title, organization, location, etc. Then, make a list of all the connections that have professional or personal features that fit your buyer personas.

Also, when approaching your contacts to be surveyed for information, make sure to mention the fact that your call, email, message, or online survey isn’t a sales action and it’s mainly just for research purposes.

Bottom line:

Always remember that the key to a successful marketing campaign is to address the pain points of your potential buyer and connect on a personal level.

Using LinkedIn to gather information and outline targeted personas can be a very beneficial tool for marketers because they can craft content that would attract and engage potential buyers.

Instagram – Use Instagram to Target Your Ideal Customers and Get More Exposure

How can you define your buyer persona on Instagram?

1. Start with Larger Audience Segments

Simply begin with the buyer personas that your marketing team already goes after today.

You can add more specifics and detail to these personas once you start looking into the social data more in-depth.

2. Opt for a Social Listening Solution

Using a social listening solution to understand the conversation on Instagram is very important. Why? Because it allows you to learn about the conversations on social media about your industry and target topics. So, you’ll basically be able to find out what everyone is saying.

What is social listening?

With social listening, you can track, analyze, and respond to conversations about your brand and industry online. It is an essential element when it comes to researching your audience.

In case you don’t have a social listening strategy, you’ll be missing out on extremely important insights regarding what your customers think about your brand and their opinion about your competitors.

Also, if you aren’t using social listening, your marketing strategy is lacking some very important insight and information. We mean, just think about it this way: people are talking about you and your business online and you are not listening to what they have to say.

The bottom line is that if you care about your customers, you care about their insights, needs, and wants. And you can get all these details from social listening.

3. Combine What You Know About Your Personas with the Social Data

Try to put the pieces together – what you already know about your customers and what the data is actually showing you.

Basically, after taking the time spent to have a look at the conversations your customers are having on Instagram, you’ll be able to fit the different conversation types and their participants into each one of your persona types and make them Instagram-relevant.

Tip: Try to look beyond topics related only to your brand, and when you find a popular Instagram user discussing topics that are relevant to your brand, make sure to look into their profile to get some insight into what she/he is interested in. Understanding your buyer persona as a whole is extremely important.

4. Check the Hashtags People Use

Instagram hashtags are great for finding personas. Simply look at the hashtags that your followers are following and try to identify some of those hashtags that you could use in your own posts.

On Instagram, hashtags also give you the opportunity to actively reach out to those users who fit your buyer persona but who may not have necessarily heard about you yet.

In order to do this, all you need to do is identify some of the hashtags that are relevant to the content that you generally post on Instagram, and then check what others are posting under each of those hashtags. And in case you see a post that is relevant to the content that you generally post, make sure to like it.

And definitely take a look at interest or hobby hashtags –  provide insightful and helpful comments as well as follow tags related to your chosen category. All these should also have a positive effect on recognizing and getting in touch with your target audience and discovering your buyer persona.

Tip: When you see content that you like on Instagram, that’s also relevant to your target audience, hit the like button and also consider following the profile that posted that content. Why? Because it’s obvious that the author of that post has a certain interest in the products/services you provide – which clearly makes them a great representative of your target audience on Instagram.

Bottom line:

In order to succeed on Instagram, your social analysis should contain two main elements:

  • The listening part – make sure to listen and keep an eye on the wider conversation on a regular basis.
  • The analyzing part – analyze your own content. Make sure to craft and publish the right content based on the insight you already have about your buyer persona. And make sure you do it well so you can successfully reach your goal.

Conclusion

When it comes to creating buyer personas (avatars) on your social platforms, the more you can visualize and understand your customers on each of your social platforms, the less you’ll talk about yourself (your business) and your product and the more you’ll talk about them, the people – your very own buyer persona. The most important thing is to be aware of your customer’s pain points, listen, observe and then come up with the solution they need and expect.

When writing a post on social, you need to learn and adapt to speaking directly to your buyer persona and focus on what they want and need to hear. The result? You’ll get better at creating copy that attracts, engages, and converts them into loyal customers.

In fact, by putting a face to your ideal customer, your writing will shift to a more conversational, natural tone… because you know exactly who you are talking to.

In case you don’t have existing contacts or leads for your research yet, create a prospect profile and then make sure to spend some time on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram and try to find out as much as possible about the behaviors, wants, needs, dreams, hopes and pain points of your ideal customers.

Google Analytics – Use Google Analytics to Target Buyer Personas

While Google Analytics (GA) isn’t a social network, but can be easily integrated with your Google My Business software, the guide would not be complete without mentioning all the data you can pull from GA.

Studying your potential buyer is something that can’t be left to chance and it certainly shouldn’t be a guessing game. Quite the opposite, it should be structured across a carefully crafted analysis of data supplied by smart tools like Google Analytics.

image32 Image Crop via Google Marketing Platform

Google Analytics provides you with crucial data on your real customers – therefore you are given the possibility to learn more accurately about your potential buyer.

Here’s the data you can collect with the help of Google Analytics:

  • The demographics of your users
  • The interests of your potential buyers
  • The geolocation of your visitors
  • The sources of your website traffic
  • How your users choose to use your website

And by having all these data available you can easily figure out what’s working and what’s not. Basically, by knowing who your potential buyer is, you can create your ideal buyer profile so you can focus on finding the right solution for your buyer.

image34 Image Crop via Google Marketing Platform

Also, Google Analytics provides you with four areas through which you can really get to know and understand who your customers really are and how they interact with your website. These four areas include audience, acquisition, behavior, and conversion.

And let’s not forget that GA’s analysis of data allows you to determine and gain insight into your users’ behavior. You can also learn and understand which aspects of your website’s performance need improvements for an efficient user experience.

image35 Image via Your Target

Bottom Line:

Creating your buyer persona should be based on information about your real customers – their needs, wants, pain points, and desires. Why? Because you need to deliver the solution they expect.

How can you gather accurate data about what your potential buyer wants? Through collecting and analyzing structured data, using the right tools such as Google Analytics

Manage your social media with SocialBee: publishing, AI assistance, Canva magic, analytics, unified inbox, and more.
SocialBee supported social media platforms logos
14-day free trial, no credit card required

Article written by

Article by

Alexandra
Alexandra

Content writer at SocialBee

Related articles

Level up your social media game with exclusive resources delivered straight to your inbox

SocialBee calendar popup visual

Out of post ideas? Get our social media calendar

Access 500+ content ideas, post examples, and Canva templates.

Use SocialBee’s Free AI Post Generator to create content for your social media profiles.

Use SocialBee’s Free AI Post Generator to create content for your social media profiles.

🎙️ Customizable tone of voice ❤️ Several variations to choose from 📄 1,000 pre-made AI prompts