When building a buyer persona for your brand, you can pull from a variety of resources — including native analytics and search functionalities on your social platforms. Here, we’ll walk through the demographic information available on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn that can be used in your persona marketing strategy.
First and foremost, if you don’t know what a buyer persona is, or how to define one for your brand, stop and read this piece on buyer persona basics.
How do you find social data to use in a persona marketing strategy?
Many social platforms have their own native analytics that provide insight into the demographics and marketing behavior of your followers. In addition, LinkedIn and Facebook have search capabilities that allow you to mine a large amount of data about your target buyers.
How to find buyer persona data on Facebook
Facebook Graph Search is a goldmine of data on Facebook users which you can use to help build a persona marketing strategy. Facebook Graph Search is a semantic search engine, which provides results based on the content of your query. You can search for information on people, pages, places, and more. When using this function to research your ideal buyer, look for overlapping interests, and incorporate findings into an appropriate buyer persona.
On Facebook Insights, look under the “people” tab for data on your fans, people you’ve reached, and people you’ve engaged with on Facebook. This tab includes information about age, gender, location, and language.
How to find buyer persona data on LinkedIn
LinkedIn is extremely useful for gaining detailed insights into your ideal buyer. The first thing you can do is find the profiles for your best customers or other individuals who could fit your persona marketing strategy. Then, break down the details on their educational and professional backgrounds, as well as any personal interests they have. Incorporate this data into your different buyer personas. For example, you can take note of different alumni groups and professional organizations, then use this information to create more targeted content that differentiates you from your competitors.
In the “followers” section under the analytics tab of your company’s LinkedIn page, you can find information about your followers’ job title level (seniority), what industry they work in, company size, and job function.
How to find demographic data on Twitter
Twitter doesn’t have the search capabilities of LinkedIn or Facebook, that reveal in-depth information on specific audience segments, but it does have solid analytics about broader audiences.
Audience Insights: In Twitter Analytics, you can access key demographic and behavioral information under “audience insights.” You can filter data by selecting “all Twitter followers,” “your followers,” “your organic audience,” or “your tailored audiences.”
Demographics: Discover information about followers’ location, occupation, income, and gender under the “demographics” tab.
Lifestyle: Under the “lifestyle” tab, examine their interests, political party affiliation, and favorite TV genres.
Consumer Behavior: Under the “consumer behavior” tab, find information about followers’ consumer buyer styles, consumer goods purchased, credit card type, and aftermarket auto buyer types.
Mobile: Under the “mobile” tab, you can find information on followers’ wireless carriers, and what kind of devices they use to access Twitter.
TrackMaven Pro-Tip: How to get audience demographic data on competitors
Want to see what sort of audiences your competitors are attracting? TrackMaven makes it easy. Click on the “brand profile” tab in the TrackMaven platform to see competitors’ social media follower count across platforms, alongside the age demographics and gender split of each competitor’s homepage visitors.
Visitors to the McDonald’s website, for example, are largely between the ages of 25 to 34 years old (25.19 percent) and 50.68 percent are female (49.32 male). Of McDonald’s social media followers, 92 percent come from Facebook (60 million followers).
TrackMaven’s all-in-one marketing analytics platform helps marketers at hundreds of the world’s best brands track their audience, competitors, and content. Request a free platform demonstration to learn more.