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.
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
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:
Or you could access it via this direct link: https://www.facebook.com/ads/audience-insights.
Once you're at your Audience Insights, select 'œPeople connected to your Page and enter your Page name under Connections > Pages.
Facebook might have, by default, selected 'œAll United States' under 'œLocation.” If you want a global view of your Facebook Page fans, hover over 'œAll United States' and click on the cross.
Now, let's find out who your Facebook Pages fans are!
Under the 'œDemographics' tab, you can get the following information:
Under the 'œPage Likes' tab, you can get the following information:
Under the 'œLocations' tab, you can get the following information:
Here's the other information you can dig into:
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:
What did you find about your Facebook fans?
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 'œPost' tab, you have a section called 'œWhen Your Fans Are Online.” (It should like the screenshot above.)
Under the section, 'œDays,” you'll see how many of your fans are active on Facebook on a given day. Under the section, 'œTimes,” 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?
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 'œpages 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, 'œPages 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?
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 don't have a business profile and want to convert, here's how. If you don't want to convert, read the next section.)
Here's how to access your followers' information in Instagram Insights:
Related: What to Post on Each Social Media Platform: The Complete Guide to Optimizing Your Social Content
Here's the information about your Instagram followers that you can get from your Instagram Insights:
Tip: If you tap on the bar charts for age range and location, the percentages will be revealed.
Our Instagram followers are quite similar to our Facebook Page fans.