The Power of Audience Insights

Facebook released audience insights in May 2014, but it’s largely been a tool that’s fairly anonymous, even amongst digital marketers. Audience insights allows you to use a front end interface to query the Facebook ads system, allowing you to pull out information on your target audience.

Audience insights has a lot of the standard data you’d expect from a Facebook audience tool, such as age, gender, and interests. The key is to segment your audience, and then expand upon them by digging through the data in the tool.

The most powerful data is that in the ‘Page Likes’ tab, particularly the concept of affinity. We’ve talked about affinity for some time here at Datify - finding other Facebook pages and brands that your audience have affinity with allows you to understand your audience at a deeper level and tailor your content and ad targeting appropriately. Take a look at the below screenshot showing Pepsi fans in the USA for an example:

The data above is showing how many times more likely a Pepsi fan in the USA is to like the above mentioned brands (the affinity column), as compared to the average Facebook user. This is powerful data that allows you to see where audiences overlap, and shows this in context, allowing you to see where there is an over-indexation in terms of affinity.

The activity tab has some great data for your audience in terms of how they interact with Facebook in general. This gives you a benchmark in terms of what you should be expecting from your audience based on their overall activity.

Where things get particularly interesting is in the household tab. This tab shows household income, home ownership, household size, home market value, and spending methods as shown in the example below:

At present this data is only available for the US market, but should be rolling out in other countries in the near future.

Whilst not as detailed, this data source is trying to give you insight like the big data players can. The advantage of this data is that it’s much more real time, and more importantly - it’s free!

If you’re running a campaign for a client, or about to start a new social content strategy for your business, then consider checking out audience insights to get ahead.