Up Your Twitter Game With ‘Personas’

Could the new Personas tool finally provide the insights necessary for any company to be good at Twitter?

Businesses have the opportunity to engage in highly personal interaction with customers on Twitter. But there’s one big problem: what do followers want?

This problem may have been solved with the introduction of Twitter’s “Personas”, a tool that allows brands to easily target tweeters according to which category they fit into. So one campaign can be targeted at millennials, while another can be focused on parents or business leaders. Personas are an addition to Twitter’s Audience Insights which was launched in May; this dashboard is a resource for brands to access information about users in terms of demographics, interests, purchasing behaviour and so on.

“[It] allows marketers to pinpoint and target new audiences on Twitter while keeping user information private,” said Andrew Bragdon on the Twitter blog. “Campaign insights help you better understand who you’re reaching with your ad campaigns. Within your campaign dashboard, you can simply click ‘View audience insights’ to learn more about your paid audience, and then use this information to optimise your targeting and ad content.”.

The concept of creating personas to represent your customers is an old marketing technique, and companies have been able to piece together this kind of information about Twitter users in the past. But this is the first time Twitter has made it so easy, dividing the world into 11 Personas:

• College graduates
• Millennials
• Generation X
• Baby boomers
• Professionals
• Small Businesses
• Adults 18-54
• Parents
• >$100k income
• Seniors
• Business decision-makers

This is the result of Twitter’s ongoing partnerships with data companies Acxiom and Datalogix, and the insights available to companies go beyond the Personas alone. The details provided by the analytics are quite detailed, providing some interesting ideas for businesses to use to take action. Marketers can target college graduates who are women, live in the US, and who are interested in technology. Alternatively, companies can communicate directly with people who have recently bought certain products, like reality TV, and who like to tweet about sports – and so on.

The analytics also show what kind of medium is best for reaching a specific audience. Do they go nuts over Vine loops, or do they prefer pictures? The dashboard will enable companies to get specific in their targeting, explained Bragdon: “If you want to reach millennials who are using iOS, you can simply select ‘millennials’, and then choose ‘iOS’ as a mobile platform to discover more about this specific group of users.”.

Impressively, Twitter will now even track information such as which users have visited the company website and who has installed certain apps. These people are likely to be bigger fans of the brand so they may appreciate being approached in a manner that recognises the fact that they aren’t rookies. Similarly, someone who’s not too familiar with the product, or even the industry, may like a bit more hand-holding. “You can easily compare insights between your reached and engaged audiences,” said Bragdon, explaining that the “reached audience” are users who’re viewing the campaign, while the “engaged audience” includes users who are replying, favoriting and retweeting company tweets.

Being able to identify an audience, right down to how they spend their free time and what they value, means a company will be much more likely to succeed in creating messages that resonate with them. Lauren Dugan wrote in AdWeek: “When it comes to Twitter, using a marketing persona takes ‘knowing your audience’ to a whole new level. Because you’ll be tweeting directly to a specific person, your tweets will be more personable and more likely to impact your audience.”.

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