How to Score a Home Run with Social Media Personas

Baseball is a weird sport and when condensed into the relatively short three-round postseason, it gets even weirder. Statistics that make sense in the context of a 162-game season are now reset for a brief 11 to 20 game affair.

With the smaller sample size, it’s more important to focus on the statistics at play than ever before.

Will the Chicago Cubs break their century-long curse? Will the Cleveland Indians end Cleveland’s excruciating city-wide four-month championship drought? This Tribe fan hopes so.

Regardless of the outcome in baseball, it’s just as important to focus on the process. The same can be said for operating your organization’s social media accounts.

You know what purpose social media serves (to communicate) and the means with which to operate it (tweet, post on Instagram, construct a Snapchat story, etc.). Still, it’s equally as important to understand the demographics of the people who follow your social media accounts.

Operating a Twitter account isn’t just sending out 140-character messages into the abyss and hoping you hear it echo back – it’s about understanding the individuals and type of individuals who subscribe to your account.

It’s not just cold hard statistics; baseball offers us so many beautifully corny cultural phrases and concepts to better understand the world. Let’s borrow one in particular – the bases each runner must cross to score a run – to better understand social persona audits and why we should conduct them.

Play ball!

1ST BASE: Understanding Social Persona Audits

So what is a social persona audit? A social persona audit is an audit or study you conduct to better understand the traits or needs of your social media followers.

According to the Pew Research Center, nearly two-thirds (65 percent) of American adults are using social media, an increase of 7 percent from 2005. And undoubtedly many of those adults are following your carefully curated social media accounts.

It’s important that you understand what those followers are particularly interested in. You can even conduct these audits for accounts unaffiliated with your organization to better understand how to reach untapped demographics or analyze a competitor’s social media strategy.

2ND BASE: Choosing an Insights Tool

And how exactly do we go about conducting this social persona audit? The easiest way is to use an insights tool.

Technology like the Cision Communication Cloud™ can help you listen to conversations and generate data about an individual social media campaign or entire media program.

Social media is an expansive, ever-growing universe and to measure the impact your organization has within it, you’re going to need the right tools. A player would never enter the batter’s box without his bat – though it would be a fascinating at-bat to witness.

3RD BASE: Gathering Data

Now that we have the means to conduct a social persona audit, let’s figure out what kind of information we want to draw from it.

Of course, you want the demographics of your followers, including age, gender and location. But it also can be helpful to learn more about their individual interests and the influencers they respect.

In our baseball analogy, we might examine what kind of food New York Yankees fans like or which celebrity the majority of Chicago Cubs fans follow on Twitter. You can be as expansive or specific in information gathering as you’d like, as our latest research report shows.

The important thing is to develop a plan of attack and stick to it – though every now and then a whimsical or indulgent audit can pay dividends.

HOMEPLATE: Bringing It All Together

Now that you have access to all this new data through your social persona audit, what can you do with it?

That’s up to you!

You’re the manager of your own team and you’ve got a stocked bullpen. You can decide when to deploy the crafty lefty or the fire-throwing righty. But a good place to start would be to learn.

Maybe it turns out you already had a thorough understanding of what your social media followers want or maybe you were way off. Either way, you now have the tools at hand to better communicate with your audiences.

And that’s a real…touchdown. What? October’s for football too.

You can check out an example of social media analysis in action with Cision’s latest research report. Download Major League Insights into Baseball’s Social Media Fans and you’ll not only learn about the interests and demographics of 8,386,000 baseball team Twitter followers, you’ll also get more tips on using social media data to manage your marketing programs effectively.

Alec Bojalad is a senior customer content specialist at PR Newswire, a Cision company. PR Newswire’s Customer Content Services team is available 24/7 to counsel brands on content creation and distribution.