How can you get more information about your Facebook fans?

You have gathered a number of fans loyal to your brand, who follow your news via your Facebook page. Congratulations! But who are these fans, really? Where do they live, where do they work, what are their buying habits, what are their interests, etc. You would like to know more about them to develop relevant marketing campaigns.

In this article, we reveal how to collect more information about your Facebook fans.

Why do you need to collect more information about your Facebook fans?

When you launch a product or service, you always create a detailed portrait of your “ideal customer”. But this portrait is still, at least in part, based on assumptions. Once we have collected a database of a few thousand fans on Facebook, we can finally check what our ideal customer looks like in reality. It will allow us to refine our portrait and better target our marketing campaigns, by choosing the right media, messages etc.

A powerful tool: Audience Statistics in the Business Manager

You probably know where to look for the statistics on your Facebook page. These give you some information about your fans (age, language, localization, for example) but they are quite limited. Facebook has another less known but much more powerful tool: Audience Statistics in the Business Manager.

When you click on this menu, Facebook first asks you to make a choice: scan all Facebook users or the people connected to your page. You will, therefore, choose the second option.

Then focus on the criteria to be met in the left column. Often, the country “United States” is listed by default. It will have to be deleted and replaced by the country or countries you are interested in.

At the very bottom, in the “People connected to” section, you will be able to choose the page you want to analyze.

Then, if you wish, you can go back up in the column and add criteria to refine your analysis. For example: analyze only fans who are women between the ages of 25 and 45. In our example, we will not add any criteria. We will then be able to analyze all the fans of the chosen page.

The first information is demographic, and it compares our fans to all Facebook fans – here for Belgium only since we have added this country as a criterion.

On this page, for example, we see that 94% of the fans are women, which is much more important than on the total number of Facebook users. They are mainly between 35 and 64 years of age.

The next block tells us about the love situation and level of education of your fans – always in comparison with the overall Facebook population.

We discover here that our fans are more often than the average married or in couples. We can deduce that a large part of them are certainly mothers or even grandmothers, and therefore have children in their direct entourage.

We also see that 70% of them are university students, which can often be associated with a high level of income.

Finally, we find an analysis of the professions exercised by our fans. We see here, for example, that a large number of our fans work in administrative jobs and very few in manual professions.

Then let’s go to the next tab: Mentions I like a page

In this tab, we discover the other pages most followed by our fans. It gives us excellent information about the media they follow and their interests.

Then, Facebook offers other pages and interests that may be of interest to our fans, depending on their profile.

Then let’s go to the place tab

Here you can see the cities where our fans live, as long as enough fans live there. It is interesting information if you sell products in physical stores, and you can see the match between your fans’ location and that of your points of sale.

Finally, the last tab informs us about the activity of our fans on Facebook in general

These data tell us how active our fans are on Facebook and, in particular, in relation to all Facebook users:

• If they like more or less pages;
• If they comment, like or share more or less than other users;
• If they click more or less on advertisements and promotional actions.

We see here that our fans are much more active than average and more likely to be reactive to advertising.

Finally, we discover which devices our fans use, which is very useful for formatting your content and targeting advertising. We see here that our fans tend to use their phones a lot, and that they are mostly Android phones.

Four practical examples of how this information can be used

We are now much better informed about our fans. But what can we do with this information to improve our marketing campaigns? Here are 4 examples from the above data:

• Our fans are 96% women. We know that they read magazines such as Flair, Femmes d’Aujourd’hui and Psychologies. They are good support that we could use for a media campaign.
• Our fans follow pages related to healthy food and short circuit. So these are areas of interest that we can use to broaden our audiences during Facebook advertising campaigns, to recruit more fans.
• Our fans are responsive to advertisements and promotional offers: chances are we can activate them on Facebook with games or contests.
• Our fans mainly have office jobs. It would be interesting to see if we can produce content that is related to our brand but also to everyday life in the office, to be closer to their daily lives.

And now it’s your turn: go to the business manager, and discover your fans’ profiles!

This article is offered to you by Marie-Hélène Dibenedetto.
Marie-Hélène has created Moondust, social media and content marketing agency in 2016, after 15 years in brand management.