Using a persona model to target social media

I’ve written a bit about the social channel “persona” model I created a few months back (see here and here) and now that I’ve used it on a few consulting gigs I thought I’d share some observations in this forum, and see if readers might have some additional ideas on how the model could be applied/extended going forward.

The model is basically constructed around a spider chart, with Age of channel users, Relationship (nature of connections), Activity, Persistence, and Tone making up the 5 dimensions.   This is certainly a simplistic view of the world, but it worked for me – and allows one to compare and contrast social channels as follows:

In practice, we can also use this type of framework to:

• Target demographics – e.g., which channel is best for reaching a young audience at work?
• Align tone – e.g., corporate tone fits on LinkedIn, but not on Facebook (Nestle is learning this)
• Schedule posts – e.g., Blogging once a week is okay, but Twitter needs much more frequent updates
• Mapping alternative or future channels – e.g., how do private company forums compare?

 

Of course, getting a picture of how your customers and other target users currently use these channels is a key starting point (as discussed here). And determining what cross links need to be “wired” first – Twitter to blog or forum content, Web to Facebook or LinkedIn etc. are also really important to pick up audience where they currently congregate…and steer them to the most relevant/engaging resource.

What do you think?  Are there other dimensions I should add?  And how else could we use this model to better target and assemble the right mix of social channels?