I just took over the Facebook page for the business I work at and their first question is about age, gender and location of our fans. How do I find that information out on Facebook?
You are joining the world of Facebook business pages at a very interesting time in the evolution of the company’s offering. And it’s not going to be easy. Time and again, Facebook management has said that they are going to be de-emphasizing business and commercial posts in an attempt to restore enthusiasm around Facebook with users. Most recently, the company stated that it’s now groups that are coming to the forefront and that an upcoming redesign will emphasize group activity, participation and discovery. Not business pages.
It’s been true for years, however, that businesses that want to gain maximum benefit from being on Facebook need to pay for advertising campaigns. Whether a “like” campaign, event signups, app downloads, or just greater visibility for posts, Facebook has really stacked the deck against businesses that don’t want to shell out some coin. So you’ll have your work cut out for you!
To start out, you’ll want to learn about Facebook Insights, the analytics side of a Facebook business page. Of course only the page owners can see the insights, but there’s quite a lot of data waiting to be explored in this area. Facebook has a good tutorial on Insights you should check out: Page Insight Basics.
For your demographics query, jump over to the business page – I’ll use Ask Dave Taylor on Facebook for this demonstration – and look at the options along the top:
You’ll always want to pay close attention to “Notifications”, but for this task, it’s “Insights” that has the data sought. Click on Insights.
Now, down the left side, there are a lot of categories of information accessible:
What you seek is near the bottom: “People“. Click on that and you’ll get some splendid demographic data presented in a very attractive manner:
You can see that light blue are women, dark blue are men and that the columns represent different age segments. My biggest group overall are young men 25-34, and my smallest demographic is teenage girls aged 13-17. Apparently teen girls aren’t interested in Facebook how-to content. Go figure. 🙂
Look a bit further down and you can see even more useful data:
My audience is almost all primarily English speaking – no surprise when I only publish content on Facebook in English – but look at the cities and countries. I still can’t explain why my page is so popular in India! Nonetheless, really useful and intriguing data and always good to compare what you think is the source of your fans versus the actual data.
Hope that helps you get started analyzing the audience on your Facebook business page!
Pro Tip: While we’re talking about Facebook, I’d like to invite you to follow me on Facebook – AskDaveTaylor on Facebook – and check out the extensive Facebook help area on the site too!