It's worth knowing that social media is one of those powerful tools that can connect businesses to their ideal customers.
Social channels such as Facebook are excellent platforms where you can interact with your target audience & tailor your content to meet their interests and needs.
But to get the very best out of such social engagements and interactions, you will need to analyze the details that produce the results you are aiming for and continually optimize for those.
And that's where Facebook Audience Insights comes in handy.
Facebook Audience Insights helps you to dive deep into the social data available on Facebook. It's one of the most effective and powerful tools that one can easily use at their disposal (if you know how to use it).
In this article, we will define Facebook Audience Insights as the bread and butter of digital marketing. Let's dive into the central idea of this article.
Importance Of Audience Insights For Brands
- Get To Know An Audience’s Interest
- Base Your Assumptions With Data
- Illustrate The Significance Of An Audience
What Are The Facebook Audience Insights?
How To Access And Use Facebook Audience Insights?
Drawbacks Of The “New” Facebook Audience Insights
- No Option To Select Regions From The Filter Options For Locations
- Audiences Duplication Across Facebook And Instagram
- Several Previously Available Audience Breakdowns Are Absent
Alternative To Facebook Audience Insights: Statusbrew
You can directly jump to a section of your choice or keep scrolling.
Importance Of Audience Insights For Brands
You are missing out on a wealth of information that will help you to find and understand your target audience easily if you haven't used audience insights before.
You will also not be able to uncover new sources for partnerships that will support your goal and be useful for your audience.
Audience insights will give you a summary of your target audiences and followers and how they interact with your content.
It's one of the most dynamic and powerful pieces of information that brands and businesses should know about. It provides essential demographic data that brands can use to understand those who are interested in their industry.
Having this data at fingerprints is hugely beneficial for brands when they are trying to slim down on their audience. Audience insights can also be used to create personalized messages and content for your audiences.
Several audience insight tools come with several options to streamline your views to specific demographics and other remarkably deep options such as education level. It can help you to validate the current information about your audience. Here are the top benefits of analyzing audience insights:
Get To Know An Audience’s Interest
You might be populating an audience in Ads Manager and wondering how relevant a particular audience's interest is for your business.
You can, of course, test the performance by adding it to your ad targeting. But, it can be more helpful to dig into audience insights to analyze the audience in greater detail.
Base Your Assumptions With Data
People often assume a particular audience's interest contains more of a specific demographic segment. For instance, assuming that a specific topic is made up of fewer younger people versus older, more women versus men, or more people in a certain city versus another.
Audience Iisights allows you to check if the assumptions you made are correct or not. In many cases, the reality is quite different from what one expects!
Illustrate The Significance Of An Audience
If you have ever had trouble convincing a client that Facebook and/or Instagram have a large enough audience for a particular segment, the audience Iisights tool might be a fantastic resource to quickly illustrate this significance of a particular audience.
You can sit side-by-side with your clients and use live data to compare different interests and audiences in real-time. The demographic breakout functionality of audience insights adds additional context.
Now that we are aware of the importance of audience insights let's get to know what Facebook Audience Insights are.
What Are The Facebook Audience Insights?
Facebook Audience Insights is one of the free tools that brands can use to gain the knowledge needed to boost Facebook ad campaign results.
Facebook offers many tools that one can use to engage with their target audiences and meet their interests. Facebook Audience Insights is one of such tools that businesses can use. It is one of the best marketing tools that gives you data on your target audience's demographics.
You can use the tool to get high-level information about your followers, such as their gender, age, what they buy the most, what they like, what they are willing to purchase online, their interests, etc.
This tool can help you laser-target your ads and reach out to the right audience who are more likely to convert into customers.
That's not all.
Facebook Audience Insights can help you tailor your posts to ensure that you are offering the appropriate content in the right voice and at the right time to best connect with your followers.
The data retrieved from Facebook Audience Insights can assist you in improving your overall Facebook marketing strategies, such as more insightful competitive research and a stronger buyer persona.
Know more about How To Create A Detailed Buyer Persona
Facebook once hosted its Audience Insights section in Ads Manager.
Unfortunately, Facebook shut down Audience Insights on July 1, 2021, in a move to encourage people to transition to new native tools in Meta Business Suite Insights.
Facebook Audience Insights tool allows you to access your audience insights across Facebook and Instagram platforms. In addition to audience data, you can view trends and metrics on the performance of your Facebook page and Instagram business profile.
The audience insights that you can view in Meta Business Suite Insights include:
- Page likes (Facebook only)
- Followers (Instagram only)
- Age
- Gender
- Top cities and countries
- Location
- Interests
You can also filter & save audiences to use in Ads Manager. You will want to ensure that you are logged into your business account before accessing Meta Business Suite.
How To Access And Use Facebook Audience Insights?
Facebook Business Manager has a tool called "Insights." And Audience Insights is now a subsection of that tool.
The steps given below will lead you to the primary Facebook Audience Insights tool.
If you don't own a Facebook business page yet, you will have to create one before diving into these steps. You can easily create a Facebook business page by following the steps given here.
Ensure that you are logged into the Facebook account you use to access your Facebook business pages.
Log in to your Facebook account & click on the "Ads Manager" button located in the lower-left corner. This will bring you to the Meta Business Suite page where you can access Facebook Audience Insights.
Once you are on the Meta Business Suite page, click on the three horizontal bar icons in the left-hand navigation menu. From the menu that opens up, click "Insights." Click on "Audience" from the left menu to access Facebook Audience Insights.
OR
If you are already logged into your Facebook account, you can simply click on this link to get redirected to the Insights section in Meta Business Suite. Then you can click on "Audience" from the left menu to go to Audience Insights.
Essentially, either option will get you to where you need to be: Facebook Audience Insights, enabling the view of both current and potential audiences.
Current Audience
Once you have selected the "Audience" option from the left menu, you will see a breakdown of the current audience for the page/pages you have chosen in Business Manager. This view will display a breakdown of age and gender segments. It will also show the Top Cities and Top Countries details across both platforms, along with percentages.
You can change the Page for who's audiences insights you are viewing from the drop-down option at the top. If you do not see a page for which you want to view Facebook Audience Insights, you can change the Facebook Business account by selecting from the far left bottom side.
You might not be able to view the demographic details always for every page. This is because a page needs to have at least 100 likes/followers to display these Facebook Audience Insights. Otherwise, you will see a message like: "Demographic data isn't available."
While it's great to view the audience details of your Facebook and Instagram page in a single place, the true strength of this Facebook Audience Insights tool is to view the overall audiences across the Facebook and Instagram platforms and explore specific segments in detail.
Potential Audience
The previous Facebook Audience Insights tool showed an analysis of essentially any targetable audience on Facebook. You can still do this type of analysis with the revamped Facebook Audience Insights tool.
Click the "Potential audience" tab beside the Current audience option from the top. From there, you will see an overall view of the Facebook and Instagram platforms.
Filters control the estimated audience size and breakout segments in this section. Beneath the "Estimated audience size" range, you will see the small description for the filters that were applied for this analytics. The first filter listed is the preset default platforms (Facebook and Instagram) and geography.
Next, it is simply mentioned, "2 other filters selected." If you hover your mouse over this description, you will get to see all the selected filters. Those other two filters are the default/preset age and gender settings.
To manage and change these filters, select the "Filter" option on the top right.
From there, you can configure various interests and audience segments to better understand their impact on estimated audience size.
You can change the data range from the top and can even export data in the form of PNG, PDF, or CSV.
Drawbacks Of The “New” Facebook Audience Insights
No Option To Select Regions From The Filter Options For Locations
Unfortunately, you can't easily analyze regional data in the new Facebook Audience Insights without the ability to enter a region within the locations filter. For instance, you can't enter "South America" and quickly see a breakdown of all countries in the continent. Basically, you will have to select the region directly from the location tab, but you cannot go the route of selecting Continent -> Country -> Region.
Image Source: ManyChat
The most significant drawback observed in the new Facebook Audience Insights tool is that you can't enter "Worldwide" as a region of interest. Using "Worldwide" as the location filter in the previous Facebook Audience Insights tool could illustrate an overall platform-wide audience across Facebook and Instagram. That being said, you can still separately enter multiple countries.
Still, you can arrive at comparable analysis by entering a large number of location filters. But you have to enter them one by one as there is no option to apply filters in bulk.
Audiences Duplication Across Facebook And Instagram
This drawback depends entirely on whether users have connected their Facebook and Instagram accounts. This issue is not a limitation of the new Facebook Audience Insights tool itself but instead a result of how Facebook treats audience size estimates size overall. Here's an article by Facebook on how they describe this issue.
In cases where a user has connected its Facebook and Instagram accounts in the Accounts Center, both the accounts will be counted as a single account for ads estimation purposes. If users have not connected their Facebook and Instagram accounts in the Accounts Center, their accounts are counted as multiple accounts for ads estimation purposes.
Several Previously Available Audience Breakdowns Are Absent
The old version of Facebook Audience Insights offered detailed comparison views like Relationship Status, Education Level, and Platform Activity. These are no longer available now. There does not seem to be a workaround or manual way to access this information within the current Facebook Audience Insights tool. These data points were an interesting consideration for a better understanding of an audience, so this change is a net loss.
Image Source: Savvy Businessg Goals
Alternative To Facebook Audience Insights: Statusbrew
With Statusbrew's Reporting feature, you can strategize and evaluate your marketing campaigns with the metrics that matter to your brand. Reporting on Statusbrew offers insights for almost every activity, growth, demographics, engagement, impressions, reach, and a lot more.
Statusbrew offers over 180+ metrics from across the industry that you can leverage to create the type of social media reports you always wanted. With the help of these metrics, you can get complete oversight over your business profiles and prospects. You can craft fully customizable reports that showcase the value of social media to your stakeholders and clients in a format that makes sense to everyone.
With Statusbrew's Audience Insights, you can get valuable information about who your followers are, what your follower vs. unfollower graph looks like, and how is their worldwide distribution on the world map. You can translate the data obtained into more effective paid and organic content. The categories of Facebook and Instagram metrics for which Statusbrew can fetch data are:
- Facebook Page Metrics
- Facebook Customer Action Metrics
- Facebook Content Consumptions Metrics
- Facebook Check-in Metrics
- Facebook Customer Feedback Metrics
- Facebook Followers Metrics
- Facebook Page Reach & Impression Metrics
- Facebook Post Reach & Impression
- Facebook Page Post Reaction Metrics
- Facebook Page Fan Metrics
- Facebook Page Video Metrics
- Facebook Page View Metrics
- Facebook Page Content Metrics
- Instagram Email Metrics
- Instagram Followers Metrics
- Instagram Audience Demography
- Instagram Customer Action Metrics
- Instagram Profile Metrics
Get hold of the complete list and description of metrics from here.
Statusbrew also allows you to monitor audience activity. Statusbrew even estimates the best times to post.
Using Statusbrew's Report Builder, you can create reports that can be customized according to your business needs and requirements. You can add widgets that can be customized and reordered to display the metrics according to your requirement.
Sharing Audience Reports With People Outside Statusbrew
Statusbrew's Reports Lab allows you to create reporting dashboards that can be easily shared with team members, clients, and stakeholders in or outside your organization.
The External link feature lets you share live reporting dashboards with people who don't have access to Statusbrew.
With Statusbrew, you can share live reports with anyone you would want to. You can then make instant changes with respect to client and stakeholder feedback without the hassle of sharing reports again and again.
Scheduling Statusbrew Reports
You can always access your reports in Statusbrew's Reports tab. But if you want to save time, you can schedule them to send automatically. You can schedule any report during the creation process.
Wrapping Up
This article is centered around how to use Facebook Audience Insights tool to build a laser targeted audience.The importance of using Facebook Audience Insights cannot be overemphasized. It's an excellent great tool that will definitely inform you about your targeting strategy and add to the content you create.
By knowing about your target audience and targeting them in a laser-targeted way, you can gain more traction and also save some precious marketing dollars.
Using Statusbrew's reporting and monitoring tool, you can get wide-ranging audience data that will help you to create content that your followers like the most so you can reach your goals more efficiently.
Looking for a social analytics tool to track the performance of your marketing campaign? Try Statusbrew. With several ready-to-use reporting templates and total flexibility to customize these reports, Statusbrew will help you determine whether your social initiatives have led to positive results and where adjustments are needed to strengthen your marketing campaigns - in no time.
Statusbrew is an all in one social media management tool that supports Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube, and even Google My Business.
Explore the Statusbrew range of social media tools
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