Social media is a powerful tool for marketing. It allows you to connect to your audience, build a bigger audience and sell your product. And no other social media network has more users than Facebook. This makes Facebook a top platform for marketers to reach their audiences.
That said, Facebook prioritizes content from family and friends, so it’s very hard for businesses to reach an audience through Facebook. Thus, while Facebook is a vital tool, marketers will only reap the benefits if they do Facebook marketing correctly. To do so, marketers need to understand their audiences.
In this blog, we’re going to show you how to use Facebook analytics to gain deep insights into your audience. We’ll discuss the importance of social media analytics and show you how to use these analytics to your advantage.
Facebook Analytics Basics
Facebook’s analytics tool is called Facebook Insights. It helps you measure the performance of your page and do many other things. Among its capabilities, it lets you track page views, likes and “reach”, i.e. the number of people Facebook showed your content to.
Facebook Insights helps you make informed decisions about your social media strategy and, of course, your overall marketing strategy. But more on this later. Let’s take a look at some Facebook Insights basics.
People
Facebook Insights shows you data about the people who visit your page and interact with your posts, whether that be liking, commenting or sharing. You can collect basic demographics including age, location, gender and interests.
Page likes
Aside from the above demographics, Facebook Insights also allows you to view information about your likes. It lets you see how many people liked your page, when they liked it and where these likes came from (mobile, desktop, direct visits to your page or referrals from suggestions).
Reach
Facebook Insights shows you your post reach, in other words, the number of people who saw a specific post. It shows you how many likes, shares and comments you got on each post, and conversely, how many unlikes, hides and spam reports your posts got.
By viewing a graph, you can pinpoint which posts, or which periods of time, had the most engagement, and tailor future content accordingly.
Posts
Insights also allows you to gather more information about specific posts — both your own and your competitors’. With this information, you can see what type of posts your audience gravitates toward and which content they like to engage with.
Advanced Features
The basic features above give you so much to work with when creating your Facebook marketing campaigns. However, Facebook Insights also has many advanced features that can supercharge your strategies.
Multi-platform
Facebook Analytics allows you to view your audience’s behaviors across various platforms. For example, an e-commerce business can see the behavior of someone who commented on one of their items.
That business can see whether that same user viewed another item on their website or on another application. Facebook Insights can even go so far as to connect offline purchases to online user behaviors!
Journey
A very useful feature of Facebook Insights is its ability to map out the user journey. This function shows you all the touchpoints at which a user interacted with your brand, effectively mapping their journey to purchase.
Machine learning also allows Facebook to show you the most common paths that users take, helping you to focus your marketing energies at the most fruitful touchpoints.
How to Use Analytics
By now, you can see the importance of social media analytics. They show you who engages with your brand and how, allowing you to improve your strategy and succeed in your campaigns.
Analytics helps you to:
- Target the right audience
- Tailor content for your audience
- Create successful social media campaigns
- Reduce spending on content creation and advertising
- Reach your marketing goals
- Boost your return on investment (ROI)
Let’s take a closer look at how you can use these analytics to your advantage.
Goals
Make the most of your Facebook analytics by defining your Facebook marketing goals. Your goal might be to build brand awareness, in which case you might focus on metrics like reach and engagement.
Alternatively, your goal might be to communicate specific messages to your existing audiences. With behavioral metrics, you can make your messaging more effective and cost-efficient while gauging whether audiences are receiving and taking action on your messages.
Finally, you could want your audiences to take specific actions like go to a website or buy a product. Use metrics around the user journey to ensure you reach them at the right touchpoints to guide their actions.
Advertise
While Facebook prioritizes content from family and friends, it’s harder and more expensive for businesses to advertise using Facebook. That said, Facebook advertising is still a very profitable marketing tool.
Your analytics will be invaluable to your Facebook advertising campaigns. Use analytics to target the right audience at the right stage of their buyers’ journey. Use analytics to continually improve your ads by split testing content and other variables.
Boosting ROI
Facebook analytics is a vital tool that helps you understand and reach your audience. In this article, we’ve shown you how to use basic Facebook Insight features to improve your social media strategy. We’ve also shown you how to use advanced features to understand your audience on a deeper level. With these tips, you can hone your campaigns, reduce both your ad spend and social media budget, and ultimately boost your ROI.
