Social Media People Analytics: Better than Facebook Audience Insights
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More than 60 million businesses use Facebook to advertise. As Sheryl Sandberg said, one of the challenges businesses and brands face is how to attract more customers. With more than 1 billion people on Facebook, you can reach any person you want just by knowing how to advertise on the platform and targeting them.
Having access to a fresh pool of potential customers is great, but how can you make the most out of it?
I am a product manager, and I work every day with qualitative and quantitative data to improve the product I work on. I use this data to develop ReponseIO and build our vision. It is part of my job.
Understanding analytics and how it works can give you an edge on your competition.
There is a difference between building with your gut instinct and building with data. What are the benefits and how does it apply to you?
Benefits of analytics
Imagine your page is a field in which you keep animals. The content that you produce and the posts you publish help you attract more and more animals inside; different kinds, different ages and genders. You notice that some of them disappear, some of them interact with each other and some of them are asleep. You may not understand why because for you your field is the same everywhere.
Analytics help you to understand your field and the types of animals you have attracted.
For example, the content that attracts more engagement from women is not necessarily the same as the content that attracts engagement from men. It is the same for age range, jobs or interests.
People Analytics help you understand those differences and get the real identity of your field and the animals in it.
Now the issue is that social media networks are the ones who possess all this data and understand who and why people liked your page.
How can you get an understanding of your field?
As part of my job, knowing my users is what is the most important. To write this post or run ads for ReponseIO, I also need to understand my followers. How do we do this?
If we retake the same image, our field attracts more and more type of people. If we were not trying to understand our metrics, it will be almost if we were not caring/knowing why animals passed by our field and lay down there for a while.
Caring is the most important thing. Developing empathy for your audience will help you in your content creation. I care why they are staying, who was the first one in, who were the first 100 or which one was starting the party and inviting some of his friends to join him.
We talked about engagement last time,focusing on post conversion/engagement analytics. In this blog post, I really wanted to focus on who is that person behind each interaction.
What are people analytics?
Each time an interaction is happening with a user, Facebook creates an edge. The repetition of edges will give a score to your relationship with that person. It is the foundation of Edgerank, the algorithm which decides if your news/post is worth showing to your users. (Read our last post for more explanation on Edgerank)
People analytics are the metrics that help you give an identity to each one of the people behind the edges. It can change the way you see your page and the future content you are going to produce. Analyzing this data will allow you to leverage it and focus on what matters for your followers.
The three ways to get access to that data
In Facebook Insights on your page, you have an option called People.
On this page, you have three options that will give you two things through three different lenses. Your followers, the people you reached and the people who engaged with your page separated by gender, age, language, city, and country.
Every social media management tool out there will give you this data. You can check the analytics pages of Hootsuite, Agorapulse or Sproutsocial and they will give it to you.
To have access to more granular data, you have to use another tool which feeds and gathers information from Facebook API.
Facebook API
You have noticed that by clicking on “shares” or “likes” on your post, you can have access to the list of people who did this interaction. It is great but impossible to follow by hand when you start to have thousands of engagements per day. It is where Facebook API is useful you can crawl that data and get more information than you need.
Through Facebook API you can gather loads of information on who liked your page, who liked your posts, commented, shared. Sure you can access part of it on the insights section of your page, but it is not complete.
Based on the API, you can build yourself your tool and develop what you need. It is expensive though, and it may not be the best option if you do not know how to code or someone who code.
Some platforms can give you access to significant data. For example, Agorapulse provides a list of your most active followers.
We went a bit further at ReponseIO, and we built our platform and our vision around that idea. We gather for you the information you need to qualify leads, to identify your users, to follow who shares what and who comments which posts. If you are interested in trying it, just follow this link to sign up.
Just one thing to keep in mind that is really important. All of these platforms, insights and information respect user privacy. You will never get access to someone that doesn’t share their profile publicly.
What to do next?
If you do not have many followers, it is still possible to do it manually. If not try to have access to one of that platform, that will gather the data for you. Learn from it. Understand where they are coming from, their job, roles, everything about them. Understand which post they shared, which one they liked.
It is the beginning of a new way to manage your pages, your marketing, and your content creation process.
What do you think about Social Media People Analytics? Did you try to find them? Do you use them currently? I would love to talk to you about it.
Share it, like it, it will be awesome. Leave a comment below or tweet me @philnpa
Originally published at blog.reponse.io on December 16, 2017.
