If you’re an admin of a Facebook Fan Page, then no doubt you would have seen the insights into fans that Facebook provides you. E.g. gender, age bracket, location, language spoken, etc… But what if there was a way to learn more about them? MUCH MORE? For example: one page Visual Jazz administer has 30% women who currently have children, love shopping, are currently in a relationship, and have also accessed the fan page from mobile device.

Using a simple Facebook Ad targeting trick, you can get estimate as to how many (& what percentage) of your page’s Facebook fans:

• Are in a certain relationship status, and if they have kids, and what age bracket their kids fall into
• What type of mobile device they have used to post on the page (e.g. Android, iPhone, Windows Phone, Blackberry, etc…)
• You can even determine their sexual preference (straight, gay or lesbian)

(A list of more insights you can determine can be found further below).

You can also get percentage of fans who have a combination of similarities, e.g. percentage of fans who are married woman who like Rock music and also have kids under 12 years of age.

There is simple 4 step process to get these insights into your Page’s fans.

Step 1: Download the latest insights report & note countries & fan count

Go to the Insights section of the page that you admin, and download the latest Facebook insights report from your page. Take note of all of the countries mentioned in the “Lifetime Countries” tab. If you’re having trouble working out what the 2 letter country codes are, you can check them ad find the correct country here. Also take note of how many fans the page currently has.

Determine the common countries from the Page Insights data

Step 2: Create a new Facebook ad and go to the “Targeting Section”

Go to Facebook’s Create New Ad page link and create a new ad (but don’t submit it).

In the “Destination” tab select the page you want to gain insights into (the same page you gathered country insights from in step 1) and select “Facebook Ads” as the ad type. Enter in any random text or images for the ad creative, just enough for you to get to the next section of the ad creation, the ad targeting.

Step 3: Enter in all countries & target all ages

In the Targeting “Location” section, input all of the top countries in the targeting. In addition to this, target all ages with “Any – Any”.

Insert countries into targeting & target all ages

Step 4: Select the page in “Connections”

In the Connections section, select “Only people who are fans of ”.

Target only people who are fans of the page

If you now look at the Ad’s Estimated Reach, it should now closely resemble the current number of fans the Facebook Page has. It may be slightly off as the estimate is based on the Facebook insights data (which is a few days old).

Step 5: Select the insights you want to know

By selecting certain targeting criteria, the ad reach estimator will now tell you how many of your current Facebook Page Fans match that targeting criteria.

For example: if I were to select:

• Target females
• Who are married
• That have children 12 years old or younger

Example of targetting woman with kids under 12 YOA

…then the Estimated reach will tell me how many fans of the page are female, and married with kids younger than 12.

Example of targeted estimated reach as per criteria

Assuming the page in question currently has 25,000 Fans, by simply dividing this by the figure in the Estimated Reach reveals that 6.64% (1,660) fans of page X are married woman with children under 12.

You can select either a single targeting criteria, or any combination to get further insights.

Finally I can now actually determine what percentage of the Page’s fans are single lesbians who like RnB music. Community Managers can use information like this to tailor Page content they post, and also determine what content may be relevant for fans of the page.

Other example of insights you can gain include:

• Are interested in certain activities such as cooking, dancing, gardening, and travel
• Are having a birthday within the next week• General interests such as cars, charities, alcohol, etc…
• If they have any pets (all, cats, dogs, etc…)
• Favourite movie genre
• Favourite music style
• Favourite sport

The catch? Yeah, unfortunately there’s always a catch. When doing the actual wall posts, you can’t actually target the content by these targeting criteria, and you can still only be able to target by location/language Also, keep in mind that these insights are based on the current data displayed in people’s Facebook profile, and is 2 or 3 days old.


More examples:

• Half your page fans are married with kids… how will this affect what content you post?
• You’re about to upload a custom made video to a Page, and you’re wanting to know what style of background music should be included. From the insights you could determine that that 25% of your fans like RnB/Soul and Alternative music.
• 15% of your fans have a birthday next week… will you launch a special offer for people having their birthday?

So given you now know how to determine all of this info about your Page fans, how will you alter the content you post?