On May 8th Facebook announced the launch of Audience Insights, a tool specifically for Agencies to gain deeper learning of audiences across the platform. Audience Insights differs from Page Insights as it enables agencies to look at trends for current or potential audiences, rather than just specific actions occurring on a brand page.

This is an advantage, as agencies can now glean better detail on the Facebook audiences of interest, whether fans or non-fans. Such detail includes country, city, age, education level, lifestyle, household income, children in household and purchase behaviour (among others). It is also possible to view this information for general Facebook audiences not just audiences connected to your page or event.

Most importantly, the new insights will enable agencies to base future plans against Monthly Active Users rather than all fans, meaning better detail for campaign reach. If specific Monthly Active Audiences are of interest, agencies can also make and assess clusters to gather learnings before running campaigns at a later date.

Implications

So what led to this better level of Insight? Facebook have used the information they already own and worked actively with many third party partners (such as Axicom) to build this tool. They’re currently pitching Audience Insights as a ‘Marketing tool that can help brands deliver increasingly meaningful messages to people’.

All Audience Insights are updated in real time and pull directly from Facebook data. The demographic and psychographic insights gathered will be an advantage for all planners on Facebook in the future. For example, if you want to raise awareness of a particular product for men aged 18 – 24 that live around your flagship stores, it will now be possible to access information on who they are, how frequently they use Facebook and with which device. Then, this information can be overlaid with purchase behaviour and purchase methods.

Facebook released further details of this launch on their blog on May 8th. Interestingly and perhaps more importantly, whilst it is pitched as a tool for agencies there is much talk of this tool really being used as a bid to capture SME’s who want to better understand who their consumers are and don’t have the budget to spend
with agencies on in-depth audience segmentation. By offering this tool to SME’s, businesses can be encouraged to literally ‘cut out the middle man’ and concentrate on managing their own platforms.

Summary

Audience Insights initially rolled out across the US on May 8th. It will be really interesting to see who uses this tool the most, whether it is agencies or if there is a strong uplift in SME’s that need to cut costs.

With International roll out set to occur over the coming months it will be imperative for agencies to get to grips with this updated platform and remain complete experts across our client audiences, especially if working to develop small/medium clients.