CHICAGO, Nov. 1, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- What do marketing and baseball have in common? Numbers and personalities. As baseball managers have directed their attention away from superstition and instead towards data, so too have master marketers focused their attention on the numbers. According to the Pew Research Center¹, nearly two-thirds of American adults are using social media, and a Social Media Examiner study² in 2015 found that 63 percent of B2B businesses said social media helps them build a loyal audience from those users. Are you taking advantage of the insights that can be gained from social data to direct content strategy and even brand direction?

To illustrate this concept, Cision analyzed seven Major League Baseball (MLB) teams and their fans by examining the social media mentions of more than 8 million baseball team Twitter followers to determine their interests, demographics and regions — right down to what sort of food they most often discuss.

Coinciding with the historic World Series, Cision's Major League Insights Into Baseball's Social Media Fans white paper explores how communications professionals can use data generated from social media to manage their programs more effectively based on the personas of their potential customers.

The analysis looked at three key data points that brands should use to build a social persona of its follower base or that of its industry: demographics (age, gender, location and ethnicity), interests and activities (media, culinary choices and television viewing habits) and leading influencers.

Some key findings of the analysis included:

• Which baseball teams are the most internationally recognizable
• The most popular foods and musical choices of baseball fans, which can be valuable for targeting
• Baseball fan interests and their strong tie to humor and comedy

The goal with conducting a social persona audit for your brand should be to provide real-time insights that go beyond measuring the performance of your content and into understanding the interests, activities and beliefs of your target audience. When you know more about the people who follow your competitors, your industry and brands that are affiliated to both, you can build a plan that doesn't rely on luck, but appears to generate it. View the full guide here to learn more about the key findings and how to conduct an actionable persona analysis on your brand's target audience.

About Cision:

Cision is a leading media communication technology and analytics company that enables marketers and communicators to effectively manage their earned media programs in coordination with paid and owned channels to drive business impact. As the creator of the Cision Communication Cloud^™, the first-of-its-kind earned media cloud-based platform, Cision has combined cutting-edge data, analytics, technology and services into a unified communication ecosystem that brands can use to build consistent, meaningful and enduring relationships with influencers and buyers in order to amplify their marketplace influence. Cision solutions also include market-leading media technologies such as PR Newswire, Gorkana, PRWeb, Help a Reporter Out (HARO) and iContact. Headquartered in Chicago, Cision serves over 100,000 customers in 170 countries and 40 languages worldwide, and maintains offices in North America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Latin America and Australia. For more information, visit www.cision.com or follow @Cision on Twitter.

Contact:
Stacey Miller
Director, Communications
(301) 683-6038
stacey.miller@cision.com

¹ http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/10/08/social-networking-usage-2005-2015/

² https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/SocialMediaMarketingIndustryReport2015.pdf

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SOURCE Cision