Facebook Audience Insights: Understanding your fans

Companies like Airbnb show us how: Part of a successful social media strategy is knowing your fans well. The Facebook Audience Insights tool provides site operators with all sorts of additional statistics that go beyond the data provided by Facebook Pages (age, gender, place of residence). This allows for content to be processed in a more targeted manner. What does this mean? We will show you different data evaluations and conclusions that can be drawn from them.

Demographic information facilitates the design of suitable content

Age and gender already give us an insight concerning wording, topics and trends. But Audience Insights takes it even further and shows the relationship status, education level and the professions of the target group. By comparing the target group (blue bar in the graphic) with the average Facebook user (gray), you can better understand whether it is worth pointing out certain features and taking them into account when designing content.

"Likes": What fans are interested in

Which Facebook pages do fans like besides the own company site? This is revealed by the “Likes" tab: arranged by categories, the most popular fan pages, and the percentage of fans on the respective pages, are listed. In our example (see screenshot), 27,000 fans of a food manufacturer also like the page "ültje". In addition, 97,500 other users have liked this site – out of all "ültje" fans, every fourth user is also a follower of the food manufacturer. This results in a probability ("similarity") by which the target group compared to the average user will like the page “ültje".

A look at the competition is worth twice: On the one hand, to see how other brands are performing. On the other hand, to adapt your own content strategy accordingly and thus stand out from the competition. In certain cases, the contents of other brands may also be accessed and used for your own purposes.

Activities show how often fans react to content

Are your fans rather active or passive? How often do they like and comment compared to the average Facebook user? Conclusions can be drawn from this information as to whether posts with questions for the community or polls are worthwhile, for instance. When placing ads it is also interesting to see how often fans click on advertisements. In the case of the target group displayed in the following screenshot, a clear recommendation can be made, since they are obviously click-affine.

Mobile or desktop? The use of devices

As soon as we know which devices our fans use to access Facebook, we can prepare the content for them accordingly. Does the target group use Facebook particularly often from their smartphone? Then contents should be optimized for this purpose, for example with suitable image formats and little text. In this case, the Canvas advertising format is particularly interesting, since it is especially designed for mobile use (and only works there).

In addition to the features mentioned above, Audience Insights has even more to offer, for instance, looking at a specific target group for a planned advertisement: How active are single men between the age of 18 and 25 in Germany, who are interested in agriculture and have a University degree and an iPhone 7 – of course, given the fact that the users have provided this information on Facebook.

Conclusion: Through the statistics of Audience Insights, content can be tailored much better to the appropriate community. With the help of regular monitoring, it is then possible to check whether the target-group-specific measures are effective.