Facebook Audience Insights Tool is one of the most powerful assets you have in your bag of social media tools. It allows you access to the massive store of information availed by Facebook to brands that are looking to master their presence on the platform. Going beyond the Facebook basics, it gives you an in-depth analysis and understanding of your audience, allowing you to better target them. It provides multiple layers of Facebook statistics, user profile information, demographic and behavioural data that is useful for identifying and targeting your audience. In this article, I will guide you through what features the tool offers and how to use it to promote your music and artist brand.
What Is Facebook Audience Insights?
Facebook Audience Insights is an analytical tool provided by Facebook to help brands target their audiences more effectively. It gives access to Facebook users data that is beneficial to understanding your audience better. It leverages information from users’ profiles and third- party sources along with their activities on Facebook to generate data on their likely interests and preferences. The tool avails additional layers of data to the basic information found in the Facebook page insights tab of your Facebook page. This makes it a great asset for any artist looking to better capture their audience on Facebook.
Facebook Audience Insights Tool
Where is the Audience Insights Tool on Facebook?
Facebook Audience Insights Tool can be found within Facebook Ads Manager or under ‘Analyze and report’ in your Business Tools menu. It is divided into two major sections. The first helps you to specify your target audience. You can refine this audience by setting your preferred parameters.
These vary from location, age, gender, and interests to more detailed options such as job titles, education level, marital status, among others. The second section allows you to analyse the data on your selected audience. You can compare this with the general Facebook audience or with audiences for other pages on Facebook. I will break down the different components of each section below.
Creating An Audience
When you initially interact with Audience Insights, you will be prompted to choose an audience to start. You can select between ‘Everyone on Facebook’ and ‘People connected to your Page’. The first option gives you an overview of the overall Facebook audience. The second option leads you to select your own page or one of the pages you manage. You can choose either depending on whether you want to reach a new audience or target your followers.
The next step is to refine your audience using the parameters on the sidebar. Basic parameters by which to narrow down your audience include location, age, gender, interests, and connection to your page. If you are looking to refine your audience even further, you can delve into the more advanced parameters. These include language, relationship status, education, job titles, cultural affinity, parenthood, political affiliation, and life events.
Parameters like cultural affinity and political affiliations are only applicable to US-based audiences. Below is a breakdown of what each parameter entails.
Parameters
Location: Here you can select the country, region, or city for which to focus your audience to. You can select multiple locations for your target audience.
Age and Gender: Choose an age bracket for your audience from 18 to 65+ and specify gender; either ‘Male’ or ‘Female’ or ‘All’ (both male and female).
Interests: You can select topics from a wide array of options that your audience might be interested in. The topics are placed into nine main categories.
• Business and Industry
• Entertainment
• Family and Relationships
• Fitness and Wellness
• Food and Drink
• Hobbies and Activities
• Shopping and Fashion
• Sports and Outdoors
• Technology
These are further broken down into several sub-categories which you can explore.
Connection to your Page: Here you can select between people connected to your page and people not connected to your page. This is to help you either target the audience already following your page or a new audience, respectively. If you manage multiple pages you can select between your pages.
Language: Narrow down your audience by the language(s) they speak. You can type in and select one or multiple languages.
Relationship Status: You can choose multiple options between
• Single
• In a relationship
• Engaged
• Married
Education: Select the level of education of the intended target audience between
• High School
• University
• University (postgraduate)’
Work: Here you can type in and select the job title(s) of the people likely to fit in your target audience.
Market Segments: Choose between different multicultural affinities including ‘African
Americans’, ‘Asian Americans’, and ‘Hispanics’. Under Hispanics you can narrow down further to those that are bilingual, English dominant, or Spanish dominant. It is important to note that this parameter is only relevant to US audiences.
Parents: You can target parents depending on the age of their children. The categories range from parents with children in the age brackets below.
• 0-12 months
• 0-2 years
• 3-5 years
• 6-8 years
• 8-12 years
• 13-18 years
• 18-26 years
Politics: This category only applies to US audiences. You can choose to target audiences by the following political affiliations.
• Very conservative
• Conservative
• Moderate
• Liberal
• Very liberal
Life Events: You can select audiences based on certain life events with the options below to choose from.
• Away from family
• Away from home town
• Long-distance relationship
• New job
• New relationship
• Recently moved
• Upcoming birthday
Analyse The Data
After defining your audience, this second section allows you to see what the new audience you have created might prefer or be interested in. It gives you an estimate of the number of people you could reach within the audience you have selected. The data for your new audience is compared to that of Facebook’s general audience within the selected parameters. There are four tabs covering different aspects of data available, including demographics, page likes, location, and activity.
Demographics
In this tab, you can view the composition (in percentage) of your selected audience based on age and gender, relationship status, education level, and job title. It gives you a breakdown of what percentage of your selected audience falls under a certain age bracket, gender, relationship status, and field of work.
Page Likes
This tab gives you an overview of the composition of your audience based on the top categories of pages liked. The data is displayed in two sub-sections, ‘Top Categories’ and ‘Page Likes’. The first shows you the categories of pages that audience engages with most along with the top pages in those categories. The second displays the specific pages this audience is more likely to like.
This is based on the fraction of the selected audience that like the page in comparison to the number of monthly active Facebook users that engage with the page. The pages are ranked according to their relevance based on the above formula, page size, and the number of people in the selected audience who already like the page.
Location
Within this tab, you can view the top towns/cities, top countries, and top languages for your selected audience. It displays the percentage of people in your audience that are based in a certain location or speak a certain language. This data is compared to the location of and languages spoken by the average Facebook user. It is ranked according to relevance to your audience.
Activity
This tab looks at the Facebook activity of the selected audience based on the frequency of their activities and the devices they use. The frequency of activities is calculated as a median (average) of the activities of the selected audience and is broken down into two. The first shows the number of pages they liked over their lifetime on Facebook. The second shows the number of comments, posts liked, posts shared, promotions redeemed, and ads clicked in the last 30 days.
The devices the audience uses is also broken down into two, ‘All Devices Used’ and ‘Primary Devices’. ‘All Devices Used’ displays the types of devices the audience uses between desktop and mobile, and further drills down to the specific device. The data is displayed as a percentage of the selected audience in comparison to the general Facebook user.
How To Use Facebook Audience Insights For Better Targeting
It is worth noting that the more parameters you add to refine your audience, the smaller the number of people it is likely to reach. That said, the more specific the target audience is, the more likely they are to respond to your content. The trick is to strike the right balance. Make your audience broad enough to reach significant numbers and yet narrow enough to target those that are most likely to respond. After you have refined the audience to your liking, save the audience by clicking the ‘Save’ button at the top-middle part of the page.
Selecting the audience to target for your music on Facebook is like building a profile for your ideal customer. It requires an in-depth analysis of your fans’ demographic information, interests, behaviour, among other characteristics to better understand how they will interact with your content. If you have no idea or need more information on how to go about that read this article on building your fanbase.
Each ad you run might require an adjustment of the parameters selected. For example, when running an ad for your latest song release, you would want to consider the genre of music it falls under. If it is in the electronic music category, then it is a good idea to select that genre as one of your parameters. You can refine the audience further by searching for other artists that make music in that genre and analysing what their target audience looks like. Basing on the information you find you could add the different parameters that are associated with that type of music.
Say you are a pop artist who ventured into electronic music for that one track or project. The parameters you would use for the page’s target audience would be different from the ones you would use for the electro song. You could combine the parameters for the page and the song to see what results that would generate. Once you have an idea of what your fanbase’s characteristics are, you can use that information to set parameters for a new audience that is likely to love your music and content. The same information could be used to inform the content you generate to drive better engage with it.
Summary
The Facebook Insights Audience Tool gives an edge to anyone looking to understand and grow their audience on Facebook. It gives access to essential data on Facebook users that is useful to not only running successful Facebook ads, but also unearthing new information on the interests and preferences of your audience.
This can help you generate content that is more engaging to your fans (and potential fans) and even find out which other brands you could approach and collaborate with to grow your music career further. It opens a vast array of unlimited possibilities. Now that you know how to use it, go ahead, apply what you have learned!
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