One of the big reasons why marketers love Facebook Audience Insights is its ability to connect with super-specific groups of people. Since Facebook has such a gigantic user-base (around 2.45 billion in 2019), the tool has no trouble finding the right people for your business.
Marketing works best if you know who you want to market to. Unfortunately, many seem to forget about it or simply ignore it which sucks because finding relevant audience is not that hard. All you need is a little understanding and the use of the right tools.
In this case, Facebook Audience Insights. Facebook Audience Insights is essentially a tool that lets you find and study your target audience and helps you understand their preferences so you can make better offerings and improve your social media marketing strategy.
The Power of Facebook Audience Insights
One of the big reasons why marketers love Facebook Audience Insights is its ability to connect with super-specific groups of people. Since Facebook has such a gigantic user-base (around 2.45 billion in 2019), the tool has no trouble finding the right people for your business.
You can get extremely specific and target people based on their: Â
- Age
- Location
- Educational Qualification
- Gender
- Relationship status
- Interests and behavior, etc
Most beginners in social media marketing are often in a delusion that using generic keywords works fine simply because it covers a larger audience. That’s not how it works.
You’re better off trying to target a specific group of people who actually want your products even if they are not that big in numbers than to target a wider group of people who won’t show any interest in them.
This way, not only will you save a ton of your advertising cost but also reach your target audience faster and much more effectively. Facebook Audience Insights allows you to see a variety of info, including:
- Demographics
- Page Likes
- Location
- Activity
We’ll be seeing how these affect your reach with relation to your audience.
How to Use Facebook Audience Insights
1. Access Audience Insights Tool
First, log in to your Facebook account and head on over to ‘facebook.com/ads/audience-insights‘. If you haven’t used the tool before or anything like it, you might be a little overwhelmed at first but don’t worry, it’s really easy to learn and get used to.
2. Select Your Audience
 Once you’re in the interface, select the audience that you want to work with:
- Everyone on Facebook
- People connected to your Page
The audience you choose here will be the base from which you’ll further filter out undesirable people. I recommend choosing ‘Everyone on Facebook’ since it gives you a bigger base to work with.
In case you already have a well-known business page with a lot of followers and you want to market your products specifically to them, go ahead with ‘People connected to your Page’.
3. Define Your Seed Audience through Filters
After selecting your base audience, it’s time to dig in deeper and define your seed audience. Seed audience is the core of your target audience. They are the group of people who your products are built for and taken into consideration when innovating and introducing new products. Â
You can customize your search parameters based on location, age, gender, and interest. Keep in mind that your goal here isn’t to target more people, but to target the right people.
For instance, instead of typing “Writing” in the Interests section, try typing “The Writer’s Block” for a more specific reach.
You can also go even more specific under the ‘Advanced’ menu. You can select parameters such as Language spoken, Relationship Status, Education, Political views, etc.
After setting up all the desired filters, you will see that the number of monthly active users has dropped significantly, but don’t worry. That’s a good thing. Those people are the ones who will actually interact with you and show interest in your products. Â
4. Analyze Top Categories and Page Likes
After doing all the above, head over to the next tab ‘Page Likes’ next to ‘Demographics’. You will see a list of all the Top Categories that your seed audience is interested in, along with some of the most popular pages relevant to each category.
You can also scroll down to see a more detailed list of pages sorted according to their relevance, audience, affinity, and MAP (monthly active people) on that page.
- Based on Relevance – the pages that are most likely related to your audience
- Based on Audience – the total number of people that like that page
- According to Facebook – the number of monthly active users of that page
- Based on Affinity – the likelihood of your audience liking a page on Facebook
Keep in mind that if your seed audience is less than 1000, Facebook will not display any data. It will ask you to make some changes in your targeting criteria i.e. remove some filters to expand your reach.
On the other hand, if your seed audience is too large, Facebook will show you suggestions that might not be relevant. In that case, try using a more “strict” targeting criteria. Â
5. Optimize Your Reach on Audience Insights
It’s very likely that you will have to play around with Facebook Audience Insights for quite some time. Do so until you see enough relevant results in Top Categories and Page Likes.
You can rank pages according to your preferred way of ranking. For instance, if you want to see results based on Affinity, just click on it and Facebook will organize the pages accordingly.
I recommend maintaining a spreadsheet where you can type in all of this info and then compare different results to see which one best suits you by judging the relevance and number of active users.
Keep in mind that you will not be targeting all the relevant pages. You will have to do a little homework and not base your marketing decision entirely on Facebook Audience Insights.
Visit the pages that you think are a good option, take a look at the members’ list, view the comments on posts and see how people react to ads. More importantly, see what kind of ads they prefer.
Conclusion
Facebook Audience Insights is a great tool and you can definitely rely on it if you know how to use it. My personal recommendation, though, is to do your own research too.
Facebook Audience Insights can definitely help you in quantitative aspects. But you can also learn a lot about people by simply visiting their profiles. Take a quick look at what they are most interested in, their lifestyle, their way of doing things, etc.
All of this will help you get better results at large and make the most out of your social media marketing with minimum advertising costs.