From Social Media Examiner:
If you were a car salesman, who would your ideal customer be?
People of all ages buy cars, but if there’s one specific audience that’s guaranteed to want a car, it would be teenagers who just got their driver’s license. A successful car salesman will do some research before targeting these teenagers, and might find out that many teenagers can’t afford to buy a car. So the savvy salesman will figure out that he needs to target their parents.
This is where the buyer persona is helpful. Creating a buyer persona for your business will help identify the ideal type of customer so you can produce effective content to sell your products, instead of blindly creating blog posts and videos hoping someone will buy from you.
A buyer persona is a detailed profile of your ideal customer, which includes specific details about the customer who’s most likely to buy your product.
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Creating a buyer persona is similar to creating a Facebook profile. When you create a buyer persona profile, you include every little detail about your best buyer: their location, age, gender, employment, the company they work for, marital status, interests, their shopping habits, and more.
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Every buyer persona should include these four sections:
Personal Background Info: includes details such as job, family, age, income, and gender
What They Want: includes their goals, kinds of challenges they’re facing, and what you can do to provide solutions
Why They Buy Your Product: lists reasons this person would buy your product, which specific problem it solves, and what holds them back from buying
Best Way to Reach: describes the most convenient way to reach this customer and how you would explain your solution
You’re probably wondering how you can find such specific details to create a buyer persona. Well, Facebook has already done that job for you.
When creating a profile on Facebook, people share all of these bits of information with the entire world. Through its advertising platform, Facebook gives all types of businesses access to this user information, which you can use to effectively target your audiences with ad campaigns.
Before you begin, make sure that you’re using Facebook Audience Insights. Facebook Page Insights will only offer limited details related to a specific page. You need to go beyond that.
To access Audience Insights, log into your Facebook account and go to your Ads Manager, open the Explore panel on the left-hand side, and find the Audience Insights link on the drop-down menu.
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#1: Create a Custom Audience
While it’s easier to use Facebook Audience Insights to identify and create an audience, you shouldn’t guess when you’re defining details of your buyer persona.
The best approach is to create a custom audience using your email list. Your email list consists of people who have already shown interest in your products, so it’s more effective for finding your ideal customer traits.
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You can download your email list as a CSV file and upload it to Facebook. Then Facebook scans these emails to find the profiles of your leads to create a custom audience. Facebook recommends that you use an email list or a list segment of at least 1,000 people to create a more accurate custom audience.
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#3: Create Your Buyer Persona
Once you identify the key data related to your customer, you can start creating a profile to organize all of the information in one place.
Depending on the industry and the type of business you have, you’ll need to create a unique buyer persona to profile the necessary details of your customer for ease of use.
You can create your buyer persona from scratch or you can use a buyer persona template to get an idea of how to create one. There are even online tools such as Xtensio’s free User Persona Creator that let you quickly create a buyer persona profile.
Link to the rest at Social Media Examiner
PG says that Facebook’s recent and well-publicized problems may impact how useful its tools are in the future, the OP provides a useful outline about how authors may wish to identify, describe and reach potential readers.
The Amazon recommendation algorithm only looks at what we look at/buy. As we all check our own books for reviews, page rank etc, it’s not surprising that our own books rise high on the list of recommendations.
But Amazon is only interested in our dollars. It doesn’t care about our politics. Facebook, on the other hand, encourages self-categorization via the groups we join and the people we interact with while we’re on Facebook. It also tracks us when we’re off Facebook via all those sharing buttons and Like buttons that adorn almost every website on the internet.
Amazon does share some data, but it also provides opt out options, of sorts. If you read their privacy statement and follow the links on what they do with your data, somewhere near the end you’ll find links to two, self-regulated organisations that provide ways of opting out. Unfortunately, you have to accept /their/ cookies in order to ward off other cookies. In other words, their cookies are supposed to sit on your system and warn other cookie droppers away.
Does this system work? I don’t know, but there’s a disclaimer about these guardian cookies not working after a while, plus the list of companies that voluntarily adhere to the opt out system is very small given the size of the internet.
Does Facebook have some sort of opt out policy? No idea, but I’d be interested in knowing what happens when a Facebook account is deleted.
Does Facebook delete all the data that exists on other people’s accounts?
What about all those third parties that already have my data for ‘analysis’? Do they have to give my data up as well?
Or will my personal data continue to float around the internet forever and a day?
“Or will my personal data continue to float around the internet forever and a day?”
Yes, and more data is added daily!
A friend emails you a happy birthday while their facebook app is running in the background.
And you’re wondering why a company you’ve never dealt with before has sent you an email offering you a birthday discount at their store/site.
-sigh- that’s what I thought.
The days of being lost in the forest of trees are long gone, but the consequences are just starting to come home to roost.
Slammed the door on FB this week. When I first published, FB and a couple of other apps were de rigeur for promo, and the small press virtually required I have a presence there. So I did; did some modest marketing, never signed up for the “author page” thing, and got my name out there a bit. But like Melanie, recent events disgusted me and I’m outta there. If ever they do correct things, that may re-earn my trust, but confidence once violated is a fragile thing.
Richard, regarding your comment: I recently released one of my e-books in print format, and it wasn’t 24 hours later that I got an e-mail from Amazon, saying “Here is a book you might like…”
You guessed it. It was mine. You’d think their algorithms could avoid flogging as a “good read” a book that you wrote.
Since I check my Amazon pages to see how readers will see it, Amazon almost weekly suggests my ebooks to me …
Meh. This is the wonders of data-driven targeted advertising that we have been hearing about for a couple of decades now. It generally sucks. As a consumer, I don’t care that the ads I get are comically beside the point. It would be nice if my Amazon and Netflix recommendations were better, but this also is not a big deal. But were I an advertiser, I would be very concerned that even those companies who know my browsing and/or purchasing history the best can’t feed me ads that make a lick of sense.
Done with Facebook, after wanting to get off for years. Recent events were the right push to finally just do it.
*says some unpleasant things about Facebook and slams the door on her account*