10 Free Tools to Help You Understand Your Social Media Audience

Author: Alfred Lua / Source: Entrepreneur

This story originally appeared on Buffer

We often recommend crafting your social media posts according to your audience.

But how do you know who the individuals that make up your social media audience are? And how do you know what content they like?

Answering these two questions is essential if you’re looking to execute a successful social media strategy. And often, you’ll find the answers by turning to data and social media analytics.

Related: Never Run Out of Content: More than 70 Places to Curate Great Content

In this post, I’ll share a few ways of using data to find out more about your social media audience across the major social media platforms — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest.

How to learn about your social media audience on the major social media platforms

Here’s an overview of the tools that you can use to help you understand who your followers are. Feel free to click on any of the social media platforms to skip to its section.

Facebook: Audience Insights, Page Insights and graph search

Instagram: Instagram Insights and SocialRank

Twitter: Twitter analytics, Followerwonk and SocialRank

LinkedIn: Linkedin analytics

Pinterest: Pinterest analytics

Facebook

Audience Insights: Demographics, Page Likes and more

The most powerful tool to help you understand your Facebook Page fans is hidden within the Facebook Ads Manager: Audience Insights.

Here’s how to access your Audience Insights:

1. Click on the dropdown menu in the upper-right corner of any Facebook page
2. Select “Manage Ads”
3. Click on the “Facebook Ads” menu
4. Select “Audience Insights” (you might have to hover over “All Tools”)

Or you could access it via this direct link: https://www.facebook.com/ads/audience-insights.

Once you’re at your Audience Insights, select “People connected to your Page and enter your Page name under Connections > Pages.

Facebook might have, by default, selected “All United States” under “Location.” If you want a global view of your Facebook Page fans, hover over “All United States” and click on the cross.

Now, let’s find out who your Facebook Pages fans are!

Under the “Demographics” tab, you can get the following information:

• Age and gender distribution
• Lifestyle
• Relationship status
• Education level
• Job title

Under the “Page Likes” tab, you can get the following information:

• Top categories that your fans might like
• Pages that your fans might like

Under the “Locations” tab, you can get the following information:

• Top cities
• Top countries
• Top languages

Here’s the other information you can dig into:

• Activity — as in Facebook activities and their device usage
• Household — as in household size, income, etc.
• Purchase — as in purchase behavior

Household and purchase information is only available for audiences in the U.S. currently.

You can get a good understanding of your Facebook fans from all this information. For example, here’s what I found about Buffer’s Facebook Page fans:

• In terms of age, the biggest group (45 percent) is people between 25 to 34.
• We have slightly more male (57 percent) than female fans (43 percent).
• Most of them work in “Management,” “Sales,” “Arts, Entertainment, Sports and Media.”
• They also like software and internet companies like Hootsuite, MailChimp and Social Media Examiner.
• In terms of location, the biggest group is people in the U.S. (31 percent), followed by people in the U.K. (9 percent).

What did you find about your Facebook fans?

Page Insights: When your fans are online

Besides knowing your Facebook fans’ demographics, interests and locations, you can also find out when they are using Facebook in a typical week and day.

In your Page Insights, under the “Post” tab, you have a section called “When Your Fans Are Online.” (It should like the screenshot above.)

Under the section, “Days,” you’ll see how many of your fans are active on Facebook on a given day. Under the section, “Times,” you’ll see how many of your fans are active on Facebook during each hour on a typical day. This is a great way to find your best times to post.

Most of our fans seem to be on Facebook every day of the week. On a typical day, they tend to be most active between 12 p.m. and 9 p.m. EDT. How about your fans?

Graph Search: Other Pages that your fans Like

While Audience Insights tells you the Pages your fans might like, Facebook’s Graph Search can tell you the Pages they have Liked.

To do this, type “pages like by people who like (your Page name)” on the search bar at the top of any Facebook page.

In the results, there’ll be a section, “Pages liked by people who like (your Page name).” As the section title suggests, those are the Pages like by your Facebook Page fans. One thing to note is that the results seem to prioritize your friends. So essentially, these are Pages liked by your friends who also Liked your Facebook Page.

So what do you know about your Facebook Page fans now?

Instagram

Instagram Insights: Demographics, location and more

With a business profile on Instagram, the best way to learn about your followers is through Instagram Insights — Instagram’s free native analytics. (If you…

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