What You Can Learn About Customers Using Facebook Insights
A few months ago I walked you through using Facebook Audience Insights to gain a deeper understating about your target audience. If you’re running paid ads through Facebook, that means you’ve got a Facebook Page and some sort of fan following.
There’s a lot you can learn from your followers that you cannot find using Audience Insights. In this article, I will give you a breakdown on how to use data from Facebook Insights to better plan your ad campaigns.
How to Access Facebook Insights
If you’ve never used Facebook Insights before, open up your Facebook Page and click the Insights button at the top of the menu bar:
This will lead you to the dashboard panel where you can gain data on your Pages:
- Likes
- Reach
- Visits
- Posts
- Videos
- People
Learn Insights On Your Posting Strategy
If you click the post tab, Facebook provides useful metrics on what times fans interact with your content, which posts types they tend to engage with the most, and the top posts based on engagement from your Page. Understanding this data will help your better plan your organic and paid posting strategies.
For example, the image below shows that this business would be better off scheduling their content and ads to be served from 9am up until 9pm to receive the greatest visibility of their ads to their fans:
After clicking the Post Types tab, Insights reveals that their based image updates generate 4x as much reach than updates containing links (blog articles):
If you’re not sure which type of content is best suited for your paid ads, Facebook Insights does exactly what the name states and offers value Insights on how to better improve your Facebook posting strategy.
If you hover further down the page, you will find all published posts (paid and organic) which can be listed by date, most likes or engagement:
If you post a mixture of organic and paid content on a daily basis, you can quickly get lost in the sea of updates and not really know which content performs best. Being able to rank your posts by engagement lets you quickly identify topics and content fans want to see.
Learning More About Your Fans
Google Analytics may give you an accurate representation of who visits your website, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you should target the exact same audience on Facebook, as each platform attracts its own demographic.
By clicking on the People tab, you can learn more about the ratio of male-to-female followers, countries, cities and languages your fans speak:
From the data above it’s clear cut that serving ads just for men who live in Bangkok Thailand would certainly yield the greatest amount of engagement for this Page.
The People Reached tab returns metrics on who has seen your posts in the past 28 days. The data from the picture above reveals that Thailand and English speaking countries contains the bulk of their prospects, but the People Reached tab also shows that users from Sweden could be another demographic to target:
These nuggets of data can help you identify new customer groups or find new areas to grow and expand your business that you never knew about.
What Your Facebook Likes Can Tell You
A big part of managing a Facebook Page is getting people to engage with content. The more likes you receive the bigger your organic reach. Click the Likes tab to see your running average of likes over a specific period of time:
We can quite clearly spot that something abnormal happened in the month of April for the Page above that resulted in an insanely huge increase of likes. If you notice spikes in your results, look back on your organic and paid posts during that period, it may reveal that certain content or topics are favored above others.
The excessive likes in the Page above resulted in running a highly targeted campaign that included a video. Funnily enough, they’ve never promoted since using a video!
Track Your Results Alongside Your Competitor
One of the cooler features of Facebook Insights is the ability to put your Page head-to-head with 5 or more rival businesses. Facebook measures Pages by the overall increase of likes from the previous week, total posts for the week and overall engagement for the week:
This is perfect if you receive the majority of your business from Facebook and compete with competitors. Stay one-step ahead by watching how they post and engage with prospects.
Summary Of Facebook Insights
I love Facebook Insights because it’s 100% free to use, provides telling data to help you target prospects and shows indicators on the type of content they will respond to best. To win at business you need information, Facebook Insights is yet another wonderful tool offered by Facebook to help businesses better understand and reach their fans.
Nick Bridges
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