Knowing who your typical customer or social media user is becomes very crucial in engaging and selling to them online. How can you engage effectively someone you literally do not know anything about?

A well-crafted social media persona allows you to personalize your marketing on a large scale by humanizing core target groups of your customer base. Let’s face it. Everyone brand on social media is looking to sell something to their audience or gain awareness.

A social media persona is simply your typical customer or target customer based on a detailed audience research. It is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. Each persona should include basic demographic details such as behaviors, goals, pain points/ dislikes, aspirations and buying patterns. The main idea is to come up with how your ideal social media audience looks like in real life, so you can craft very personalized messages to them. The messages must use the right tone of voice, language adaptability, style and must address specific needs and meet their desires, ambitions and aspirations.

A persona helps you define how your typical customer who consumes your social media content look, thinks, feels, acts and behaves. This demands a great deal of specificity and detailing and is key to customer engagement online. It is almost impossible to know every audience of your social media following, but you can single them out in groups. Ideally, a brand can have more than 1 persona for each segment of their market and reach them with different content that will resonate and engage them.

Even though social media users consume messages on a mass scale, they engage with the content on an individual basis. This basis is what we refer to as a persona or how your typical customer looks like. Getting your social media audience persona also helps in effective planning since you can almost likely predict with accuracy what they can do next.

Personas help you create content to customers as real people with feelings and emotions. Let me explain this in another simple way. In your daily life, you communicate to people differently depending on who you are communicating to. For example, you chat with your friends on WhatsApp groups with a different voice tone than you would do with your colleagues on Slack/Email. You would also communicate differently if you found yourself in a job interview as you would to a hotel staff attendant on a honeymoon. My point is simple, different people require a different tone of voice.

Creating social media personas also help brands to cash into profitable niche areas and engage effectively with them. I earlier indicated that brands mostly look out for two things online; to sell or to create brand awareness. Personas help reveal the true essence, character and nature of customers deeply to brands and this leaves room to sell to them better. For example, some makeup brands sell and engage better with their color-obsessed persona than represent themselves wholly as a broad beauty product.

Here are 8 things to consider when building a customer persona for your brand:

1. Age or Age group (as they tend to exhibit unique behaviors)
2. Location (As this affects worldview, choice and life perspective)
3. Gender (As this determines the types of products/services they purchase
4. Income/spending power (as this indicates their purchasing power)
5. Pain points/frustrations (as this shows what they would not love to be with)
6. Personality traits (as this gives an indication of what they will spend on)
7. Goals / Ambitions (as this gives out their aspirations)
8. Brands they support (As this helps position a brand in their mind)

Cherubim Mawuli Amenyedor

Account Manager, Digital Innovations

Global Media Alliance

LinkedIn: Cherubim Mawuli Amenyedor