Persona research/creation

@ReubenH has a good take on personas. They are specific to you and your product. I think they are a powerful way to get super specific about your target audience, focusing to get the most valuable early feedback. I've never thought to look at a competitor's social feed to get a sense of their customer personas - if it works, please post here with details!

I highly recommend using the Value Proposition Framework to help identify your ideal users and customers. It helped me zero-in and focus my messaging and marketing. It's a cheap book or you can find PDFs if you search.

Another thing to consider is whether you're creating a buyer persona or a user persona. These are often different, with different goals for users and buyers (I want to get a good deal, or solve a problem for my team vs. I want to solve a pain point I have). These might be the same people at different points in the journey for B2C, or could be different people in different departments for Enterprise B2B.

I'm not a fan of personas. I know they are used all over the place. But mostly what I've seen is generic. You're either trying to solve a personal pain point or you're trying to solve a much bigger pain point. I'm also throwing it out there... but when someone says I'm developing an app, a website or something else... i'm like what's that bigger purpose? What's that bigger ambition? An app is just the execution of that.

I'm no expert in the field of marketing strategies, just a fellow developer like yourself. But my understanding of a "persona" is based on the one described in Disciplined Entrepreneurship by Bill Aulet, which I recommend :)

A persona is unique to you and your product, the idea is to have a crystal clear "face" of your ideal customer, their name, age, likes, back story, reason for wanting your product, so that you can stay crystal clear when building out your product.

Before creating a persona you should have brain stormed all of the target industries for your app, and people within each industry who would have a reason to use your app.. and then spoken to them in person. One of these people you have identified as a potential customer becomes your persona. You take the name, and "fill in the gaps", creatively try answer questions that might not have come out in an interview, as I say - create a real person as the target of your app.

It sounds like you also want to use social media to scout out real people that might fit you target demographic, unfortunately I wouldn't have advice on using social platforms in this way, but I'd say initially reach out to people you know or would not mind talking to you in person from your target demographic, and use them as your target persona! Good luck!

Research to create your personas for marketing.

what is "persona research"? do you mean influencers/KOLs?