Facebook Audience Insights, used wisely, helps you connect your brand directly to your customers.
Facebook is one channel to interact with your audience.
But how do you know you’re reaching the right people?
You need to dig deeper than knowing just age and gender of your followers. You need more detailed insights like job titles, hobbies, and relationship status.
So you can say, show, and share the right things. At the right time. With the right content.
So you can tell your boss, “it’s working!”
So she-or-he can tell you—”great, you can keep your job.”
What is Facebook Audience Insights?
It’s a tool to better understand your Facebook audience.
Facebook Audience Insights (FAI) shows you aggregate information for three groups:
- People connected to your Page
- People in your Custom Audience
- People on Facebook
This will help you create more meaningful content. And, to find more people in your targeted audience.
Time to learn how, now.
How to use Facebook Audience Insights
Do you have your business set up on Facebook? Meaning, are you currently a Facebook ‘business user’ ?
No? Create your business page first.
Then, find Facebook Audience Insights within the Facebook Ads Manager.
Here we go.
1. Select the audience you want insights for
- Open the FAI dashboard (Got multiple accounts? Dismiss the popup to choose a different one from the top right dropdown menu.)
- Choose an audience. The dialog will show your options.
Easy so far, right?
Which option to choose?
- Everyone on Facebook: Learn how to attract new people on Facebook
- People connected to your Page: Learn more about your existing audience, to create better content just for them
- Custom audience: Did you create a custom audience? If so, you’ll see that option in this dialog.
For this guide, let’s go with numero uno—Everyone on Facebook.
This will help you gain insights based on your Facebook advertising strategy.
2. Build your target audience demographics
Time now to gain insights for your targeted audience.
Note the Demographics tab highlighted. This is where you’ll be trying and applying various settings as you move down the left side of the page.
- Select a demographic on the left
- View the results in the charts on the right. Cool, huh?
Let’s look at each demographic.
Location
Got a physical location for your business? Say a comic book store in downtown Nashville? An interior design shop in Portland? A lawn mowing business in Charlotte? Choose your country, region or city.
Selling services online? Or building your brand across the web? Include countries worldwide.
Selling physical products? Stick with countries where you ship to. And maybe where shipping costs are reasonable.
Age and Gender
For age, got to be 18 years or older. That’s just how it is with Facebook.
Select an age range that matches with your research and audience personas. Same for gender.
Not sure about these demographics? No problem, leave these blank for now. As you gain more insights, you might very well return to them.
Think of this insights exercise as a process, versus an event. Learn as you go and grow.
Interests
Ah… interests are where it gets interesting.
Lots of options with this demographic. Entertainment. Cooking. Sports. Tech. Relationships. Donuts. Tractors. Telepathy (try it, I did). Oohlala. Go wild.
Drill down using the drop downs. Or type in anything. Start broad, go narrow. Or visa versa. Play with this, and watch what happens with the graphs as you learn and refine and understand.
For example…
- Start with U.S. and any age → See 56% women and 44% men across Facebook users
- Add Food and Drink as an interest → 60% women, 40% men. Hmmmm.
- Narrow it to Restaurants → 67% women, 33% men
- Narrow it even more, to Coffeehouses → 70% women, 31% men.
Are you in business brewing and selling coffee locally, say in Seattle? Add that to your location.
Rather than 70% nationally, women now show up at 62% in Seattle. You just learned who to speak to—including their ages.
That’s some quality time spent with your computer and Facebook Audience Insights.
Fun, ain’t it? Let’s keep going…
Advanced
Let’s see… Location, Age & Gender, and Interests all specified—with useful insights revealed.
What next?
How about… Language, Relationship Status, Education, Job Titles, and Market Segments?
Politics and Life Events are fair game, too (like people who started a new job or moved to a new city).
The “Advanced” section allows you to view even more precise details about your chosen demographic.
Back to your Seattle coffeehouse.
Select All Parents.
Wow, just went from 62% to 72% for women. Even more telling, notice the effect on Relationship Status, Education, and Age.
So then… an ad promoting your business seems in order for these demographics:
- Parents (men and women)…
- From 25 – 54 years old…
- College educated…
- With kids
The more details you add, the smaller your audience becomes. And the more focused your ad can (and should) be. It’s a beautiful thing.
It’s better to resonate with the few than appear vague to the many.
It’s on you to create the right message. And now you know who to target.
3. Discover what your audience already likes
Pat on the back—you’ve identified your Facebook target audience. Now learn what they already like.
- Click the Page Likes tab
- Observe the Top Categories and Page Likes sections
Top Categories
See the general interests of your coffeehouse patrons.
Eats, charity, more eats, books, art, movies, magazines, live music, and organic groceries.
Looking at the top 10 categories, that’s what people sitting and sipping in your coffee venue care about.
Use this intel to inspire ideas to test out in your organic Facebook marketing strategy. Maybe run a contest where followers share their best coffee served at organic grocery stores.
I bet you’ll come up with better notions than that. But you get the idea. Having these audience insights lets you guess less and score more with your targeted crowd.
Of course, these are just suggestions by Facebook.
What if there was actual data for relevance and affinity?
Ah, but there is…
Page Likes
Want to know what Facebook pages are connecting with your audience? And how probable it is they will like those pages?
This is the place. Known as Relevance and Affinity.
Facebook defines “relevance” as:
“The Pages that are the most likely to be relevant to your audiences based on affinity, Page size, and the number of people in your audience who already like that Page.”
And they define “affinity” as:
“How likely your audience is to like a given page compared to everyone on Facebook.”
Time to behave like Sherlock Holmes once again.
Click through a load of pages, investigating and noting what these businesses are doing. Understand, swipe, and refine some of their ideas to use for your business.
But wait, there’s more. Use these Page Likes to refine your audience:
- Make a list of the pages above (or simply take a screenshot)
- Click the Demographics tab
- Type in a page name into the Interests field
- View any changes in your Demographics chart
See what pages’ names have an impact. Not all of them will. Use this to further narrow your target audience.
Use the Save and Save As (under the More menu) options to mix and match your settings. So you can see different results for different (but related) audiences.
4. Discover location and language details
Learn where people live and what languages they speak for the stuff you sell.
- Click the Locations tab
- Click through each of the sub tabs
You’ll see details for Top Cites, Top Countries, and Top Languages spoken for your target audience.
For your local store, this might not be so interesting. But for your online business, this can tell you where to sell. And what languages to focus on.
Got Batman action figures to make, sell, and ship? Wondering what other countries might be interested?
- Open a new instance of the Facebook Audience Insights tool
- Type “Batman action figures” into the Interests field
- Click the Top Countries tab
You might have expected to see the U.S. at the top. But you might be surprised by the other countries in the list.
Explore the cities and languages, too, by clicking on those sub-tabs
5. Discover activities and device details
Learn how people behave on Facebook, and the devices they do this with.
- Click the Activity tab
- Observe Frequency of Activities pane to see how they interact with Facebook pages
- Note the same for the devices they use in the Device Users panel
Now this is interesting. Notice the the primary devices your different audiences use.
For your Batman action figures audience, Android is the device of choice for accessing Facebook.
…and for those local coffeehouse patrons, it’s the iPhone.
Maybe you’re thinking of a second business to sell iPhone cases to your customers? Here ya go.
6. Create an ad for your target audience
That’s a bit of work you did to develop your Facebook audience insights custom audience. Nice job.
Got more than 1,000 people in this audience? If so, you’re all set to create and run an ad for them.
Ad Manager will populate the targeting fields based on your Audience Insights. It will also track the performance for each ad campaign.
You might see overall conversions drop as you create more ads. Don’t worry. As you show your ad to a smaller audience, your ROI can still climb. Because again, your goal is to connect deeply with a few people rather than vaguely with many.
Test and track to find your sweet spot. Developing KPIs will certainly help you achieve your social media goals.
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