Abhishek
- Oct 19, 2020
- 3 min read

How to use Facebook Insights and For What.

Okay so what do you think will happen if you try to sell dog food to a person who doesn't have a dog? Yeah, that sale is not going to happen. Why? because you didn't know your target market. So how do you know your audience on Zuckerberg's social machine? Simple. Facebook Insights.

So what are insights? Insights are basically your go to spot for information about your Facebook audience. That's where you find demographics, locations, reach & engagement data etc etc. In short, it's where you go to get more information about what your followers like & prefer. So now why will this be helpful? well so if you know what your audience wants, it gets easier for you to create content that is specifically targeted towards these people. Facebook makes it easy for content creators to tailor their content for their own niche audience.

So now, you might ask, why does Facebook care? Why are they being so generous by sharing data? What's their evil secret plan of world domination? Well, a simple answer would be because they want to push their ad platform.

So, when you're creating an ad on Facebook, obviously you would want to target the right people. You would want to know their age, gender, location, interests etc. So Facebook provides these in your page's insights tab to help advertisers refine their ads, and get results. If they get results, they'll come back to Facebook, spend more money on ads and hence will benefit Facebook. So it's a win for all (kind of but not really). More on that in a different blog post on Facebook ads.

So now back to our question, why should you use insights? If you don't have to sell anything via ads, why do you care right? Well wrong. Here's why. So insights tell you when your audience is online, so you can schedule posts for those specific time frames, so that you can reach more people. That's not entirely accurate, because your audience also probably prefers and likes other pages as well, so their feed will also have a lot of content from a lot of different pages. But at least, you can post at times during which most of your audience is online and maximize your chances of being seen.

The Facebook insights also tell you about the age and gender of your audiences. You can tailor your content specifically for a certain age group. For eg, if you have an app, then chances are that younger people will use it more, depending on what the app does of course. So you can take a look at your insights, and see what age group prefers your content and what doesn't. Also, you get to know what city/town/country they belong to. So you know what countries/cities/towns you should aim for.

A phone with facebook on it with social media text

One of the most important thing about Facebook insights is that they tell you which content is working and which content sucks.

So knowing what works for your audience, is crucial data. Without that, you're blindly creating content. Facebook's algorithm is growing and changing constantly. Facebook favours content that gets more engagement. So if you know which posts worked and which failed, you can create more of the stuff that worked. Simple. So the posts tab will let you know multiple things about your posts. The likes, shares, comments and reach that each post has. So when you're creating an ad next time, you can narrow your audience and tailor the ad copy and creative to match your best working posts, or even better, promote those best working posts themselves.

If you have a Facebook business account, then you can get even more data about your pages. The Facebook business manager give you more audience data in the insights tab and lets you download various reports like 'trends report', 'content report' etc. Also, Facebook has a whole different section called 'Facebook Audiences', which is a part of their Ads manager, to help you create custom or lookalike audiences, based on different types of interactions.

So to end, I'll say this. The more data you have, the more control you have over your content, marketing and sales. And that is exactly what Facebook Insights give you. Data. And lots of it. So use that to grow your brand online . Chao.