Yomego Blog 5 Useful Pieces of Data from the Facebook 'Audience Insights' Tool to Inform Your Marketing Strategy

Facebook's free 'Audience Insights' tool is quickly becoming one of the most useful weapons in my 'Community Management' arsenal. 'Audience Insights' is tool designed by Facebook that, in their own words, 'lets you learn about your target audience so you can create more relevant content for them'. Despite the fact that the tool has been around for over a year now, it's still quite rarely talked about in the social sphere. I think part of the reason why this tool seems to have remained social's best kept secret could be because people aren't aware of how Audience Insights differs from the standard 'Page Insights' tool provided by Facebook. The Page Insights tool only allows you to view data specific to your page, whereas this tool allows you to generate rough data on your competitors and indeed, the entire population of Facebook. The data is very fresh and is generally updated on a daily basis. While Audience Insights is primarily used by Facebook advertisers at the moment, it allows you to access a wealth of data that you can apply outside of advertising. Here are 5 useful types of data you can pull out from the tool to inform your marketing strategy: 1. Uncover Key Demographic Information About Your Audience As long as you have over 1000 page likes, you should be able to view some enlightening demographic information about people who are connected to your page. Facebook does not share data for audiences of fewer than 1000 people to protect their privacy. In the UK, the data currently available to view is: Age Gender Relationship Status Education Level Job Title / Industry If you don't yet have a page, or are looking to launch a new one you can still use this tool to uncover general demographic information based on general assumptions about your audience. 2. Discover Who Your Biggest Social Competitors Are While you can't use this tool to gain 100% accurate information about the fans of your competitors, it can give you some pretty useful general data you can use as a great starting point. With just a simple search, you can easily get a snapshot of the Facebook pages that are most liked by your target market, as shown in the example below. 3.Find Out Which Interest Pages to Target in Your Ad Campaigns The Audience Insights tool is an amazing resource for Facebook advertising, as it essentially removes a lot of the the guesswork around which 'pages' and 'interests' you should target. Running with the young women's clothing website example, the 'Page Likes' section will let you sort pages in order of 'affinity' ('how likely your audience is to like a given page compared to everyone on Facebook'). 4. Learn How Your Audience Uses Facebook On the 'Activity' tab of the Audience Insights tool, you can discover the 'median number' of times a person has performed a specific action on Facebook in the last 30 days and compare that with the general Facebook population. This will let you know how active you can expect your audience to be on Facebook. This tab will also allow you to view exactly how your audience have accessed Facebook in the last 30 days. 5. Pinpoint the Best Locations for Marketing Activities with an Offline Element The 'location' tab of the Audience Insights tool allows you to see exactly which cities and/or countries are the most popular in terms of your chosen targeting options. This allows you to get the most impact and bang for your buck out of any offline campaigns. Are you using Audience Insights to inform your marketing strategy currently? Are you new to this tool and excited about the opportunities it can open up for your business? We'd love to hear from you in the comments section below! By Kirsty Price , Community Manager, @KirstyAnnePrice @yomegosocial