Facebook Audience Insights has just been launched in the US and will soon be rolled out in Europe too. What should content marketers know about this analytics tool? Here’s a quick run down.
Audience Insights (AI) has been made available within the confines of the Facebook Ads Manager section, and the idea behind it is simple. Marketers are equipped to acquire insights about customers already visiting their page as well as about potential customers, in order to target marketing future campaigns with greater precision.
Facebook divides users into three pools: a general group, people who are associated with a particular page/event and an existing customer pool (which you can get to via Custom Audiences). The main difference between AI and Page Insights is that AI takes into consideration what’s going on on the entire Facebook network, while Page Insights measurements mainly related to the likes, comments, shares of your own page.
The information from Facebook Audience Insights reveals:
– How many people live in the vicinity of a product/brand on Facebook,
– What their interests are,
– The purchasing behavior of this group in the past, the percentage of people mostly offline or online shopping,
– Age and gender,
– Lifestyle,
– Education,
– Relationship status,
– Career
– Size of the household
– How often the target audience uses the social network and with what devices they login
Facebook’s management assures users that their privacy is not invaded, as the data is anonymously aggregated. “We built Audience Insights with privacy in mind. It surfaces aggregated information people already express on Facebook, along with information from trusted third-party partners — like Acxiom — through our partner categories targeting”, the company says in a statement.
Like Page Insights, Audience Insights shows information about groups of people without the need to share which individual people are in those groups. You could interpret this as an attempt to hedge against protests from European users. Being cautious when privacy issues are concerned might be wise. Only very recently, Google was forced by the European courts to take all claims by private individuals seriously who wish to exercise their ‘Right to be Forgotten’ and have records pertaining to personal information scrubbed out of the search listings.
If the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung’s reaction to AI is anything to go by, Facebook might be in for a similar ordeal. It writes that the network might very well aggregate its AI information strictly anonymously, but that the resulting analytics facilitate campaigns that are ‘played out individually’ and that ‘Facebook has its eye on literally every person’.
The Right to be Forgotten example has shown that it only takes a Spanish home owner to bring a giant to its knees, so I’d say make hay whilst the sun shines.
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