Use Social Media Personas to Get Personal

Personas are an old friend in user-centered design. They’ve been used for many years now to help designers build the best products and websites. That same tool can be leveraged to build a better social media strategy. Here’s how.

What is a Persona?

If you aren’t familiar with personas, they are simply descriptions of individual users. These users are fictional people, but their persona reads like the bio of a real individual–they could just as well be real people. The purpose of a persona is to describe, with great clarity, what a typical user (or a person in a particular user segment) is like.

Here’s an example of a persona we created at Coherent Interactive.

How do You Use Personas?

In website and product design, personas are used at the beginning of the process and throughout development and testing. They can be used in the same stages of social media strategy development, and offer the same kinds of benefits.

Creating personas requires you to understand your customers. The very process of creating a persona requires asking detailed questions about customers and therefore leads to a greater understanding of them. To build a realistic and credible bio, you have to get to know your customers in a way you might not normally.

Personas lead to ideas. As you create and review the personas for different user segments, you inevitably begin to uncover the customer’s needs and think about how you can best meet them.

Personas guide the design. When you begin to design your strategy, you start with the personas. You design FOR that person (Joe, Sally, Zoe).

Use personas to check your strategy. As you design your social media strategy (or website/product features), you keep referring back to each persona and asking, “how well would this work for so-and-so.” You envision the individual interacting, reading your content, using your website or your Facebook application. By putting yourself in your persona’s shoes and visualizing the interactions, you can identify problems and make changes.

Personas serve to keep the focus squarely on your customer segments. They are especially helpful if you’re taking a truly customer-centric approach to your social media strategy, and focusing on creating social offers.

What Social Media Personas Should You Create?

To create personas for use in social media, start with your business goals. Use the business goals to determine social media goals and your social audiences. You may have information to leverage, such as marketing customer segmentation information or information about the different types of customers you support, if you are using social media for customer service.

One difference with personas for social media is that you need to consider the communities that your audience participates in. Determine where your social audience is living online: what social networks they use and even what groups or pages they participate in within those social networks. Research how your audience behaves in different communities.

What Should You Include in your Social Media Personas?

Although personas always include certain core information, you can adapt them to include different information depending upon the particular business and product needs.  Consider including at least the following details:

• The person’s name. Personas are complete characters and need real names.
• A picture. Include a picture. That helps make the persona real.
• Age, gender, and other key demographic information. If marital or parental status is important to you, or location, include those elements.
• A description of the person. Even if your business is B2B, try to include personal details as well as professional information.
• Social media use. Describe which social networks/tools the person uses, how frequently, and so on. There are a number of different profiles that companies have come up with to describe social media users, and I’d suggest applying one of them to label each persona’s social media use. I like ExactTarget’s profiles, for example.
• Social media goals. Be sure to include information about why this person uses social media: to keep connected, to gather information, for entertainment, for career or business purposes, etc. And, as described above, note how this customer wants to be perceived in different communities. You may even want to include a table showing the different communities this person is active in and different traits, goals, and personalities the person has in each.
• Mobile use. In today’s world, it’s important not to forget mobile. Include information about this customer’s mobile device use. Is he or she an iPad or Smartphone user? Both? What does the customer use his or her phone to do: check email, update Facebook, play games? How actively does he or she download and use applications. All of these questions will help you determine whether mobile is a critical part of your social media strategy.

Feel free to add other sections and information to your personas–whatever is relevant for your business.

If you haven’t used personas for social media yet, hopefully you’ll feel inspired now to use them. If you have used personas, leave a comment below to tell us how they’ve helped you.