I’m getting “old’ish” (my kids would say “old” but I’d like to keep things in perspective).

I noticed my age when my colleagues and I were discussing which social media sites our clients should use. Several of my colleagues are ladies in their twenties and I’m a fellow in his late forties.

My colleagues were singing the praises of Instagram. And several times they repeated they “don’t use Facebook any more.” In my personal dealings I don’t use Instagram at all and Facebook infrequently but I’d consider myself somewhat of a “power user” of Linkedin.

So it turns out we have very different preferences when it comes to social media sites. In fact it might be fair to say we are quite different types of people—or as we say in “marketing speak”: We are different personas.

A couple of our local business clients then asked us “how would you prioritize which social media platform we should be on? What’s #1, #2, #3 etc?” You’ve probably realized the answer to this question is: It depends.

It depends on who your clients are. More specifically what’s your client’s persona? Or more likely what personas (plural) describe your clients.

What’s this persona thing?

So what is a persona anyway?

A persona is a fictional client or prospective client. You can think of a persona as an extension of the concept of market segments. The key difference in a persona definition is getting to the personal issues and challenges in the head of your target prospects rather than just a broad definition of a group of people.

Here are some questions (developed by Hubspot) that you should ask in order to develop a persona for your clients and prospects:

• What is their demographic information?
• What is their job and level of seniority? (applies mostly to a business-to-business setting)
• What does a day in their life look like?
• What are their pain points?
• What do you help them solve?
• What do they value most?
• What are their goals?
• Where do they go for information?
• What experience are they looking for when seeking out your products or services?
• What are their most common objections to your product or service?

And here’s a nice example of a finished persona developed by the Anca Group.

You will notice above one of the questions asked in order to develop a persona is: “Where do they go for information?”

The best way to figure out where your customers go for information is to ask them! You can set up a phone interview with them or use online surveys (with a tool such as Survey Monkey). If you have a sales team, you can ask them what they’ve heard from your customers and prospects. If you work in a physical store you can gather some great insight by simply talking to your customers and asking them where they found you and what social media sites they use.

To help you in this process, here is some of the research that’s been done on which types of people use each social media site. This information is aggregated so it will not necessarily apply to your personas but it’s good background and useful for sanity checking what you hear.

Source: OnlineMBA

And here’s similar information from Marketo on Instagram.

source http://eu.marketo.com/infographics/what-your-instagram-filter-says-about-you

You’ll notice from the infographics that the demographic profile for Linkedin skews older and Instagram skews younger and towards women. So it looks like my colleagues and I are fairly average personas.

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