How to Use Personas to Write Great Facebook Posts

Welcome to part 5 in our series on Writing Great Facebook Posts! In our previous post we talked about how you can build your own personas to help you write great Facebook posts, as well as tips for what a persona should look like and what it should include at a minimum.

Now that you know how to create great personas for your community, it's time to learn how to put them to work in your community to help you begin building and engaging a community of your ideal customers!

How Do I Use My Personas to Write Great Facebook Posts?

Now that you have your personas, you’ll want to work closely with your content team to make sure that every piece of content you create is written for them. They are your audience, and any content you share with them should be written with them in mind. 

What does that mean?

• Write for the education level of your persona.
  For example, if your personas are not lawyers or legal scholars, you’ll probably want to avoid having unexplained legal terminology in your content. Don’t patronize them, but if you’re covering a subject that they may not be very familiar with, be sure to explain any concepts they may not already understand.

• Write for their age group.
  The topics, terminology, and images that your content includes should appeal to the age range of the persona it was written for. You wouldn’t share an article about technology for millennials and then use a photo of a retired couple at their computer for the post.

• Make sure your content is solving their problems. 
  No matter how appropriately your content is targeted to the persona, if it doesn’t speak to their specific problems and show them an actionable way to solve them, then they’re not going to care. It is paramount that you figure out why people follow you, what they hope to gain from listening to what you have to say, and make sure that your content delivers on that.

The most important takeaway here is that you should never lose sight of who your content is for.

Whether you’re writing the content yourself or curating it from other sources, it needs to closely match the needs of your personas.

Where Do I Get My Content to Write Great Facebook Posts?

Now that you understand who your audience is, and you’ve created your personas, it’s time to start posting content for those personas. There are two ways for you to supply this content, each with its own advantages and disadvantages.

1. Curate the content from other sources. 
   • Save time. Less demanding of your time than creating content. There’s no shortage of great (and not so great) content on the web about almost any topic, so it won’t take you long to find a steady supply of information your personas will find useful. 
   • Become an influencer. Even if you’re promoting someone else’s expertise and insights, doing so can still demonstrate that you are a source of good information in your industry, even if that information comes from other influencers and thought leaders, rather than from your company.
2. Create the content yourself.
   • Drive qualified traffic. Rather than driving traffic away from your website (potentially to competitors), you’re instead driving traffic to your own website and using your content to showcase your own knowledge, insights, and expertise, rather than promoting others. 
   • Drive organic traffic. There are also SEO benefits to creating your own content that can help you gain additional website traffic. 
   • Become a thought leader. If you’re having difficulties finding great content about your industry that would appeal to your personas (who are again, your ideal customers), then by creating your own you’re solving a problem for your social channels (a lack of quality content) and you’ve also identified a great opportunity for your company to become that supplier of great content for other people’s social channels. 

Of course the biggest downsides to creating your own content are the time commitments and, if your team doesn’t already have a knowledgeable content marketer or you haven’t partnered with one, the steep learning curve to understanding how to write great content, how to balance your content to read well for both humans and search engines, and how to convert visitors into leads and leads into customers. 

Finding the option that’s right for you will depend on the time, resources, team members, and expertise you have available. Many companies start out curating content before working their way up to producing their own, and many also combine both approaches, posting a mix of curated and created content.