Facebook has accrued something of a reputation for harvesting data about its users, and while this may be unsettling to some, the good news is that for bands and artists who utilize the business end of Facebook, there’s a plethora of valuable insights at your disposal. Here we look at what exactly you should be doing with them.
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Guest post by Randi Zimmerman of the Symphonic Blog
Facebook harbors a significant amount of information about its users.
If you’re an artist or band that uses the business aspect of Facebook, you have a plethora of insights available to you.
Facebook has an amazing marketing tool that uses all of these insights and as an artist, you should absolutely be taking advantage of it.
If you aren’t aware of all this, it’s time to get started.
Although you aren’t able to see personal data about specific users, Facebook allows artists to see what their fans are into based on what they’ve shown interest in. If you’re planning on releasing a vinyl of your newest album, you can advertise this to your fans that have shown an interest in vinyl – it’s as simple as that.
The audience insights offered by Facebook are robust enough to ensure you’re making the most of your efforts by understanding the interests of your core audience. To help you learn even more about your target audience, be sure to look at the basic insights including geography and demographics before digging deeper. This will help you deliver more meaningful messages to certain people.
More specifically, this gives you information like
- Age and Gender
- Lifestyle
- Top pages they’ve liked
- Location and Language
- How frequently people in your target market log into Facebook
- What device they’re using.
- Purchase activity
Insights like this will help you streamline your focus to the people who will benefit the most from what you offer.
For those of you that are on the tech-savvy side, this next feature could do you a lot of good.
Based on the engagement on your page, Facebook also lets you create custom audiences. You can specifically target custom audiences that have been made from the following you already have. If you’re extra tech-savvy, another useful tool to be aware of is Facebook Pixels. (Start using Facebook Pixels by following this link. )
This allows you to track the effectiveness of your ads and create audiences to retarget. Even though you don’t know the super personal information of these people, you now know that they fit the parameters you set up.
Typically, there are a significant amount of people who follow you but aren’t necessarily committed fans. These are the people that view or like your posts but never go further than that. The people that truly care about what you have to say are those who click your links and fully engage with your content. Next time, instead of just posting a link, create a link with an embedded FB Pixel using a service like Bitly to really drive up audience engagement. With this, you can track individual link traffic and measure performance in real time to better adjust for future endeavors.
Many of us don’t even realize the vastness of the number of things you can accomplish with Facebook analytics. In this day and age, any artist can market themselves towards their audience with a level of efficiency like never before.
Maximize your efforts. Work smarter, not harder.
Randi Zimmerman: Content Writing Ninja Intern @symphonicdistro