Whether you like it or not, Facebook is a powerful marketing tool (especially if you pay to use their ads). Almost every business is on Facebook in some capacity and many use it to connect with their audience regularly. While Facebook currently provides some good tools to manage our analytics, things are about to get a lot more detailed!
Facebook recently announced their newest tool: Facebook Audience Insights. This tool is designed specifically to tell you all about your target audience, their tendencies, how they interact on Facebook, and so much more. And it’s not just your current audience! While this information will be available for those who currently interact with your page, you can also monitor metrics on your custom audiences (if you use the ads tools), and the whole Facebook audience in general. Wowzas! That’s a lot valuable information!
Facebook Audience Insights will dig deeper and into much more detail than the current Page Insights. While Page Insights now provide details about your current audience, Audience Insights will compile trends and information about Facebook audiences (including those not interacting with your page) in general.
Here’s what you can expect to find out about your audience with the new Facebook Audience Insights:
- Relationship status of an audience
- Educational levels of an audience
- Likely career industries (based on publicized job titles) of the audience
- Favorite pages and categories that an audience “likes” on Facebook
- Frequency of an audience’s engagement (likes, comments, shares, ads clicked, etc.) on Facebook
- Spending activities of an audience (based on household size, house market value, and current census information)
- Lifestyles (including: Dynamic Duos, Country Comfort, Career Centered Singles, Solid Single Parents, and more)
- Where the audience lives and which language(s) they speak
That is some serious insight into your audience!
All of this information could be very valuable to businesses and marketers. Being able to understand current and potential audience trends on Facebook (and possibly even outside of Facebook) will allow marketers to customize Facebook content and shares to target the right people. And while this won’t directly increase our organic reach on Facebook, the more opportunities we have to give people what they want, the better chances we have of producing the engagement we desire on Facebook.
Of course, as consumers and users (not marketers), there is concern about privacy and how our information is being shared with these businesses. Facebook insists that all information gathered comes from publicly shared data within Facebook and data collected from trusted third-party partners. All of the information is compared with others in the group and the information is generalized as a trend. There are no specific details about any individual users available through the Facebook Audience Insights.
This new tool is currently available within Ads Manager to all US marketers and will be rolled out globally over the coming months. If you want to see if you have access or learn more about the new Facebook Audience Insights tool, go to their business page for more information.
