How to Analyze Facebook Data to Understand Your Audience
With over 2.7 billion monthly active users and 1.82 billion daily users, Facebook is the largest social network in the world. What began as a networking opportunity for college students has become an indispensable marketing tool for more than 90 million small businesses.
Generate all of these users a lot of of files.
To help companies take advantage of the enormous amount of information created on the platform, Facebook released its Insights tool, which shares data on the best day to post, the ideal time to post and the performance of posts will.
When marketing on Facebook, it can be confusing at first to understand how all of these numbers relate to your business and audience.
But do not worry. This post explains how to analyze Facebook data to get valuable metrics on who is coming to your page and clicking around. In the end, you’ll have a better understanding of how Insights can help you connect with current and prospective customers.
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How to analyze Facebook data
Facebook Insights is divided into two main categories: Audience Insights and Page Insights.
- Insights into the audience Provides metrics about your Facebook audience that you can use to create relevant content, improve ad targeting, and attract more people to your page.
- Page insights Displays analytics for your page so you can see which posts are working well and which are not.
This post focuses on Audience Insights to help you better understand both existing and potential customers. This Facebook Marketing Guide provides detailed information on how to gather information from Page Insights.
To access the data goldmine in Audience Insights, you must first create a company page. After setting up your page, navigate to Audience Insights by clicking Analyze & Report on your Business Tools menu. Now comes sleep. Take a look at your company’s audience profile for reference as it’s time to research.
Step 1: choose your audience.
A popup will appear and ask you to choose between the following options:
- Everyone on Facebook: Start here with information to refine your target audience or attract new people to your page.
- People connected to your site: Click these to learn more about anyone who likes your page to see if your audience is showing up.
This part requires a strategy. Are you using Insights to build a buyer personality, to see if your strategy is attracting the right people, to learn about your audience’s interests, or to learn something completely different? When you have a goal in mind, the information is easier to use.
Step 2: filter on your goals.
Once you’ve set your goal, it’s time to narrow the audience down. You can filter by:
- place
- Age and gender
- Interests
- Side links
1. Place
Knowing where in the world your audience lives is helpful for many reasons. If you are an online store looking to expand, you might want to know if a particular country is interested in your products.
If your business has a physical location, select your city for relevant local metrics. And if you’re not bound by location restrictions, keep them open by including countries around the world.
2. Age and gender
All Facebook users must be at least 18 years old. So keep that in mind when evaluating the audience. If you have a specific buyer personality that you are looking for, filter on that age group.
However, if you want to expand your audience, it is worth widening your age range or considering both genders to see if you are missing out on potential customers.
3. Interests
Filtering is fun here – and a bit complicated. Keep your search broad by picking out a handful of common interests like eating and reading, or picking dozens of interests for a focused audience.
You have the freedom to play with drop-down filters or type anything that comes to mind in the search bar. Cooking, entertainment, Adventure, flying, technology, cake.
The list goes on, so let your imagination run wild. Just keep track of the number of people in your audience as you refine. If it falls below 1,000 people, the data will not be filled in by Facebook.
4. Side links
This filter shows the most popular pages from people in your audience profile. By looking for competitors, you can know who to watch. Maybe you’re looking for content inspiration, and browsing related pages will give you ideas for a campaign collaboration or giveaway. Either way, it’s good to know what other pages are showing up in your audience’s newsfeed.
Step 3: understand your audience.
Let the applause ring out – you’ve filtered out your audience profile. Now it’s time to dig deeper into four categories: Demographics, Side likes, place, and activity.
Demographics
With Facebook Insights, you can view audience information beyond the basics, including language, relationship status, education, Job titles, and Market segments. For example, let’s say you’re a new food blogger targeting men ages 18 to 32.
By entering this information, you can get an in-depth look at what your audience is doing for work, how well educated, or whether they mainly cook for one or more people.
If your ideal audience with time-consuming office jobs turns out to be largely single, this can help focus your content strategy.
Your audience may want to post on simple ideas for lunch at work or meals that are even better than leftover food. I’ll generalize here, but the more you dig into demographics, the more data you’ll need to put into your marketing efforts.
Side likes
Similar to Interests Filter, this option shows what your audience likes. Check out the top categories to see what people are most interested in with options like Movies, Charities, Companies, music, Public figures, News and media, and Products.
Maybe these men are interested in TV series like “The Chef Show” or “Chef’s Table”. If you were to wrap up your favorite cooking shows or episodes in a blog post, that audience would probably do well. The key here is to research what content is relevant both inside and outside of your industry to review competitors and related interests.
place
Use this filter to explore the main countries, cities and languages of your audience profile. For example, suppose you are based in the US, but discover that your audience is heavily represented in Montreal, Canada.
It might be worth tweaking your marketing efforts to include content that will appeal to both Americans and Canadians. And as you expand your audience, you can even consider adding a French language option to your website to serve Québécois customers.
activity
See how active your audience is compared to the average Facebook user. The most important information in this section is the activities within the last 30 days, broken down by actions such as Remarks, Posts favor, Posts shared, and Ads clicked.
You might want to run Facebook ads, but you aren’t sure if someone in your audience would click on them. The activity data gives you a better idea of how many people would take action. For more information on how to analyze Facebook ad performance, see this Facebook Advertising Guide.
Discover more Facebook insights
Now you can use the possibilities of Audience Insights to build buyer personalities, improve your target group and increase the reach of your customers. However, if you’re in a research role, you can go to Page Insights to explore more metrics to see how your content is performing, who is resonating with, and which posts to promote.
So next time you’re wondering whether you’re attracting the right followers or looking for out-of-the-box ideas to engage your audience, take a look at Facebook Insights and put the data to work.
