How to Build Your Twitter Personas

For a highly-targeted marketing campaign that sees a lot of conversions, you need to understand your audience. You should know what they want, what their motivations are, and the kind of pain points they are looking to solve. Developing buyer personas is your first step to figuring it out. Twitter is a great place for you to get audience insights about your customers, both B2B and B2C. Finding your Twitter buyer personas will help you with better targeting and effective messaging for your marketing campaigns, thereby helping increase conversions.

Let us look at some interesting statistics about Twitter.

• 187 million daily active users
• 59% of its users regularly get news from Twitter
• 82% of B2B content marketers used Twitter for organic content marketing in 2020
• 90% of the US population is familiar with Twitter
• 28.9% of Twitter’s audience is 25 to 34 years old
• The US has more than 68.7 million users of Twitter
• More than 500 million tweets are sent every day

Source: Hootsuite & Sproutsocial

The above statistics are proof that Twitter has a lot of potential and its reach will keep increasing with the passage of time. Twitter is changing the way we consume content, and it has pivoted a lot in terms of its functionality to appeal to its demographic.

In this article, we will look at how to find your brand persona and buyer/audience persona on Twitter.

Benefits of finding buyer personas for Twitter

For finding your buyer personas, you need to put in a lot of effort. During the course of this research, you will be able to find a lot of people from different personas who have common interests. Let’s say, a large section of your audience likes reading books, then you can add a lot of content that is related to books. It will capture the interest of your target market and they are likely to consume more information from your Twitter handle.

#1 Overcome sales objections:

When you are aware of your customer’s pain points, you will be in a better position to handle any objections that they have. Since you are aware of the pain points, thanks to the personas that you have created, you will end up customizing your content accordingly. Your sales team will also be better prepared to handle any objections.

#2 Identify negative persona:

A negative persona is someone who you should not be targeting. Knowing who you should not target is as important as being clear about knowing who to target. It will help you save a lot of time because you wouldn’t be going after the wrong personas.

#3 Targeted marketing:

With buyer personas clearly defined, you will be able to segment your marketing campaigns accordingly. It will help you send personalized and targeted content to each persona. You can communicate in a voice that will attract them, including pushing content to the right demographic.

#4 Help you develop targeted content:

Instead of creating content that will not evoke any emotion inside your target audience, you should make content that moves them to take action. You will get inbound leads on Twitter when you create educational-based content that aims to solve the pain points of your target audience.

How to develop your brand’s Twitter persona

Twitter is a great place to use as a lead generation tool or at least to create a brand. Every tweet that you make from your official account contributes to your brand persona. It will have an impact on how your prospective customers perceive you. Like every other portal, Twitter has its own charm, idiosyncrasies, the whole shebang. You need to develop your own story to connect with your audience in a way that Twitter’s users will accept it.

What do you want your customers to think about your brand?

How do you want them to think of your products or services?

How do you want to tell your story?

Here are a few tips to developing your Twitter brand persona:

#1 Create guidelines:

To make sure that your communication across the entire channel is clear and consistent, it is better to create a style guide. Ensure that the style guide is shared with everybody in your social media team. Twitter has a lot of trolls, and no matter how formal or right you are in your interactions, people will find ways to troll you. Coming out of a troll attack unscathed is an art in itself. That’s why it makes more sense to have a set of guidelines specially prepared for Twitter.

#2 Find your brand voice:

Twitter is a platform abuzz with discussions. Plenty of them. You should use images, videos, behind-the-scenes content, and so on to connect with your followers. To do this, you need to have an authentic brand voice. Do remember that your brand voice should be consistent in every tweet that you share or every RT (retweet) that you do.

How do you want your customers/audience to think of you? Fun? Bold? Inspiring? Your tweets should convey that. Do not sound as if a robot tweets for your account. Your followers should feel as if there is a real person on the other side. Use plain language, be respectful towards your audience and do not use jargon.

If you plan to use the same content from your tweets on other social media platforms too, then it will make you look like an unoriginal brand. Make sure that your tweets are unique and non-spammy. Use Twitter to connect with your target audience, not just to increase your followers. If you post interesting content on a regular basis, you will naturally start attracting the right audience that you want.

#3 Share testimonials:

Did some of your customers swear their love for your brand over an email or a phone call? Share about it on Twitter. Your prospective customers will love you for it because it will help them vindicate their decision of buying from you. Even better if you can get your customers to share their success of working with you, and you can RT their tweet.

#4 Share interesting tidbits about the company:

If the idea for the company happened over a few beers, and there’s a good story to it, why not share it on your Twitter account? Many people would be interested to know about your story. What were the struggles that the brand faced during its initial stages? How did you rise above the struggles? Believe it or not, these kinds of things will bring your audience closer to your brand.

Give them the details, start a Twitter thread to tell about your customer’s success stories. There are high chances that it might go viral too.

#5 Share your content on Twitter:

It is a given that you would have a blog where you share content regularly. Make sure that you share the same information on Twitter by adding a few thoughts shared by any of your employees or founders. When you add personal opinion of executives to the mix, it will add a lot more gravitas to those tweets. Your audience will start trusting you more.

#6 Share industry info:

Your audience will want to know more about what’s happening in your industry because it will affect them directly as well. Build thought leadership in your industry by sharing relevant stories about an ongoing controversy or what you think about the latest technology that is transforming every company in your niche. Make sure that you subscribe to competitor’s blogs, industry content, industry newsletters, etc.

#7 Share your thoughts on various subjects:

If you want to stand up for values that are close to your business, then you might as well be firm on it. Let’s say that you dilly-dally on certain subjects, then people will start ridiculing you. Do not put yourself in a position where you will face a PR disaster. But if you do stand your ground on what you believe in, your audience will appreciate you for it.

How to create your Twitter audience/buyer persona

Twitter is an incredible place to find a lot of information about your customers. How a user behaves on Twitter can be completely different on a platform like LinkedIn or Instagram. You cannot assume that the behaviour patterns of people will be the same everywhere. It is imperative that you find buyer personas on Twitter and create content that fits the audience on this platform.

#1 Look at their bios:

You can find out valuable demographic information like job title, interests, where they live, name, gender, etc. It is possible to find more information based on the kind of topics they follow.

#2 Which accounts do they follow:

One more way to learn a lot about your audience is to see who they are following on Twitter. You can simply go to their profile, and click on ‘Following’ to see every account that they follow. By having an idea of who they follow, you will be able to figure out the kind of messaging that they will like.

If you sell fitness accessories, then you can search for people who follow accounts that talk about fitness. Let’s say you are into providing adventure camps for adults, you can find out the ones who would be interested by looking at the kind of accounts they follow that are into adventure sports.

#3 Which hashtags do they use?

Find your personas on Twitter with the help of the hashtags that they follow. While there will be a lot of generic hashtags such as #fitness or #marketing based on the industry that you are in, look for sub-niches as it will give you a deeper understanding of their interests. Look for the other hashtags that these people often use, keep monitoring them and you might be able to find out a pattern in their behaviour.

#4 Who follows them?

It should be possible to glean information about your customer personas by checking who follows them. It is possible that people who are interested in the same niche as the accounts you target follow them for similar types of content. You can go to their profile and click ‘Followers’ to get an idea about the kind of people who follow them.

#5 What content do they consume:

It is not only possible for you to monitor hashtags, but you can also see the sources that they are sharing content from which will give you an idea of the content they consume on a regular basis. Based on their captions for each article they share, you will be able to find out why they consume a particular content.

#6 Who are the influencers they follow:

To understand about the topics that your audience is passionate about, you need to find out who the influencers they follow are. If you find there are patterns where they share content from a particular set of influencers on a regular basis, then you can easily predict that they are more passionate about this topic than others.

• Who do they mention in a lot of their tweets?
• Whose content do they keep consuming?
• Who do they tweet a lot about?

Pay attention to details like the above, and it will be able to create your Twitter buyer persona.

#7 What Twitter chats do they engage with?

One more way to find out about your users is to observe the kind of chats they are involved in. Using various audience insights tools like TweetDeck, Hootsuite, tchat.io, etc., you will be able to find Twitter chats. With this list, you will be able to see the hashtags that are being used, and search on Twitter to see who is using that hashtag.

Using information collated based on the above points, you will be able to develop your Twitter buyer persona.

Conclusion

Using Twitter to create your buyer persona has a lot of advantages because you will be able to see a variety of audiences with varied interests. When you have an idea of who you are talking to on Twitter, it becomes possible to have a deeper understanding of why someone needs your product or service, for what purpose they might use it for and how your product or service will solve their pain points. This will optimize your content strategy and improve the odds of a conversion.