A persona is an imaginary person that represents a segment of users, audience members, or customers. A persona is typically presented in a persona profile that presents characteristics of the persona such as a photo, name, and other attributes.
There are many domains that can employ a persona, including system design, marketing, content creation, and advertising. There are many notable benefits for an organization that uses personas.
Jung, S., An, J., Kwak, H., Ahmad, M., Nielsen, L., and Jansen, B. J. (2017) Persona Generation from Aggregated Social Media Data. ACM Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2017 (CHI2017). Denver, Colorado. p. 1748-1755. 6-11 May