What if there was a way to gain instant insight into the minds of your customers?
Want to know what type of message they’d respond to? Or what images or colors resonate with them?
How about learning what subjects they’re most interested in or what they want to learn more about, or buy more of?
Even if you haven’t properly identified your target market (GASP!) you can still use this free form of market research to create a customer profile for your business.
Using these tools you can identify the people that already connect with your brand, your message, and your company, and then seek out new ways to better connect with them and further enhance the customer brand relationship.
Sound too good to be true?
Well I’ve got good news for you, all of this information is only a short click away.
Social Media Insights
Social media has long been collecting information on you, and pretty much everyone else who uses the service (which again, is pretty much everyone nowadays).
Not only that, they’ve also teamed up with 3rd party providers to pull back the covers even further on buyer behavior, demographic, geographic, and psychographic variables.
They know your name, age, location, interests and even some weird things like if you really like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (yes, you can target a Facebook Ad directly to people who’ve shown interest in good ol’ PB&J),
Social media can also tell if you’ve recently gotten married, engaged, divorced, or if you’re planning on travelling in the next 6 months.
Scary?!
A little bit, but as marketers it’s up to you to use and leverage this information to better help and serve your customers.
Knowledge is power.
Armed with this powerful tool to uncover the layers of your customers psychology, you can create perfect marketing messages and connect with them in new meaningful and impactful ways.
Here’s where to find, and how to leverage and use this incredibly valuable information to build a better company and a stronger more customer centric brand.
Facebook Insights
You can find Facebook Insights by first going to your Facebook business page and then clicking on the tab at the top marked “Insights”
Once in, you’ll find a ton of information – probably more than you need when you first get started – so where should you start?
Posts
The best place to start is by clicking on the tab on the left side of the page marked “Posts”.
The reason this is such a valuable tab is that it shows you all of the content you’ve posted to your page and which posts have resonated best with your audience.
You can see the “reach” (how many people saw your posts)
And the “engagement” (how many people interacted with your posts which is broken down into clicks, and then likes, comments, and shares.
From here, you can review what messages worked and which ones didn’t, so you can build more of what worked into not only your Facebook marketing efforts, but all of your company marketing messages as well.
Facebook posts are a great place to test new messages and content to see what your audience likes best.
People
The next place I like to look is the “People” tab, also available by clicking on the left side of the screen once you’re in “insights”.
The “People” tab gives you valuable insights into the demographic and geographic information of those who like your page.
You can see the breakdown between how many men vs how many women, as well as what country and city they live in, and what language they speak.
This information is valuable to use when you’re creating new content, or deciding how to target a future ad or promotion.
Twitter Insights
Much like Facebook, Twitter also has a ton of free information about the content you’re putting out there, and the people who are following you.
Top Tweets
First, you’ll want to see how your tweets are doing. You can do this by clicking the “Tweets” tab at the top of the page and then clicking “Top Tweets” in the menu below.
Like Facebook post insights, this is also a great way to see what headlines and messages resonate best with your audience.
Twitter is a fantastic tool to help you design the headline for your next post, product, or service as you can test a variety of different headlines all linking to the same page and then see which performs best and receives the highest engagement.
This type of research would typically cost you hundreds or thousands of dollars but it’s yours free compliments of the little blue bird.
Audiences
Next, I like to click the “Audiences” tab at the top of the page which again offers an insanely in-depth look into your current followers and reads more like a census survey than a social media account.
As an example through the Twitter audiences tab for my account @AdamErhart I know that my followers are mostly interested in entrepreneurship, marketing, technology, and leadership. They mostly speak english and fit into the lifestyle category of “online buyers”.
They also tend to like different cultures food (which Twitter calls ethnic explorers) as well as premium brands, and fresh, healthy and organic food.
They’re made up of 37% professional/technical, 30% self-employed, 25% white-collar, 21% homemaker, 18% retired, and a mix of other professions.
Twitter also shows their estimated net worth, marital status, education level, and even their cell phone service provider!
Crazy?!
Perhaps, but as business owners and marketers it only makes sense to use the information available to us, and to use it for the purpose of creating more value for our customers.
Having all of this information available to us helps us provide even more valuable information and services to our customers
Rather than simply blasting away with what we think they want to hear, by knowing who they are, and what’s important to them, we can take a few minutes to look and listen first in order to show them that they’ve truly been heard.
That’s how you build brand value.
