Audience Insights is an intelligent tool that allows you to discover demographic, behavioral, and social data on audiences before you ever target them with your ads. It’s a great method of gathering data and insight on your audience, and is easy to use.

How to Get There

To get there, you click on Ads Manager, click on tools, click on audience insights, and then everyone on Facebook. Your audience will be the dark blue bar graph, compared to the general Facebook user data. Once you begin selecting customizations (such as age, interests, and relationship status), you’ll be able to see how your custom audience differs from all Facebook users.

Studying Your Audience

You can study your audience as a whole, or break up your audience into segments (such as only looking at female followers, or only individuals 18 to 25). To segment the audience, enter in information (such as age bracket) on the left-hand side. How much you want to segment your audience depends on the campaign you’re gathering data for.

Once you’ve created your audience, you’ll be presented with data under six tabs. Each one offers unique information on your audience.

For example, the first tab provides you with information their lifestyle, relationship status, education level, and job titles. Another useful tool is “page likes,” which displays the pages that are most relevant to your custom audience. Once you know the pages most likely to be “liked” by your audience, you can add these pages to the interests when you create an ad.

Examining the data on your audience equips you to better tailor your advertising efforts and your content marketing efforts. You’ll want to check back into the audience data occasionally, as your audience demographics can change as you gain new followers.

Studying Your Competition

The “Page likes” data can be used for more than tailoring your ad audience. You can discover other pages that resonate with your audience, which you can study to improve your own page. When you see what types of content they post, which messages perform best, etc., you can use that information to try to replicate their success (and avoid their failures). Again, you’ll want to check back up on this section occasionally as the most common “page likes” can shift as your audience grows.

Audience insights offers a large amount of free data on your audience and its many segments, which can be used to improve your social media marketing. If you want to take advantage of this tool, but don’t have the time, Alpine Small Business Solutions is here for you! We’re ready to assist with any aspect of small business building. Reach out to us with a phone call or email today.

For a more in-depth look at Audience Insights, check out this free informational webinar.