Measuring social media user demographics has long been a method for marketers to target their desired customer base. As AI (Artificial Intelligence) develops, researchers can measure personality traits from data on social media with increasing accuracy.
It’s an exciting development for marketing teams looking to get the edge over the competition. Appealing to a certain gender or age group can lead to a flat, over generalised messaging that misses the mark. Speak to someone’s personality, and use their preferred communication style to connect with them, and watch your conversion rates take off.
Social Media And Personality
Research into how social media usage and personality intersect has brought back some useful and interesting findings.
Personality predicts social media usage
One meta analysis that combined the results of 30 studies on social media and personality found the following patterns:
- Extraverts and neurotic people spend more time interacting with other people on social media
- Highly agreeable people post more photos.
- Less agreeable people are just as likely as those with high agreeableness to be social.
- Highly agreeable people talk more about food and less about money.
- Consientious people don’t spend as long using social media to seek information about others, and spend less time gaming on social media.
- Conversely, people who scored highly on openness spent more time learning about others and gaming.
- Neurotic people were more likely to portray a less authentic, idealised version of themselves online.
Personality and language use on social media
Exploring how different personality types use language is not a new science. There’s a whole body of interesting research that predates the widespread use of social media.
- Extraverts talk more, are more repetitive, and communicate with less diverse vocabulary.
- Introverts use more formal language and fewer positive emotion words.
- Highly conscientious people use fewer negative emotion words and avoid negations.
- Neurotics use more first person pronouns, negative emotion words and fewer positive emotion words.
- People who score highly in openness talk less in the past tense
- Unsurprisingly, agreeable people use fewer swear words.
With this body of information, AI scientists have created sophisticated models that can automatically predict personality types and communication preferences from written text with a high level of accuracy.
Social media channels are a rich source of consumer-generated content. From this data, marketers can predict the personality types that make up their consumer base, and adjust their messaging to target customers more precisely.
Personality and preferred communication styles
Demographic segmentation is a commonly used technique among marketers, but there’s robust evidence that psychographic segmentation is highly effective in improving click and conversion rates.
In their 2017 study, Matz et al created ten Facebook advertisements for a UK beauty retailer: half with imagery and messaging that appealed to extraverts, (E.g. Dance like nobody’s watching, but they totally are) and the other half to introverts (E.g. Beauty doesn’t have to shout). The ads were sent to women given the nature of the product being sold.
Users were 1.54 times more likely to purchase from the retailer if they were sent messaging that matched their personality type than if they were sent incongruent messaging. These findings were robust even when age was taken into consideration.
These findings have considerable implications for online marketing and publicity efforts.
Introducing Symanto AI
At Symanto, our APIs are used on a vast and varied set of projects. Get to know the psychographic makeup of your existing consumer base, and use that knowledge to target your desired customers on social media.
Our advanced natural language processing (NLP) technology measures emotion, sentiment, preferred communication style and the intent behind written text and the key personality traits of the authors behind them.
With our technology you can anwer questions such as:[Text Wrapping Break]
- Are your customers driven by logic or emotion?
- Do they prefer to communicate using facts of experiences?
- Are they looking for information or action?
- How likely are they to recommend your brand to others?
- How does your consumer base compare to those of your main competitors?
Our work has shaped and defined what’s possible in the fields of AI and liguistics. Our state-of-the-art technology has advanced the accuracy of natural language processing, providing reliable insights to inform your business strategies.
Our clients benefit from understanding their customers on a whole new level, anticipating their needs, and communicating with them more effectively than ever.
Get Started With Symanto
Discover more about our technologies and their applications and get to know your customers better today. Get in touch or book your free personalised demonstration to see our NLP APIs and our Symanto Insights Platform in action.
