HOW TO: Research Facebook Audiences

Facebook provides a free, useful way to interrogate its database of users. This can be invaluable whether you're actually thinking about planning a campaign on Facebook, you're looking for some quick-and-dirty audience research, or you just need some corroborative detail.

So where's this tool? It's all part of Facebook's Social Ads platform. Here's how you do it.

Step 1

Go to http://www.facebook.com/ads/create/. You don't need a Facebook account to do this.

The page may look a little different if you're already logged in, or if you've created something using the platform in the past.

Type in any URL. It doesn't matter.

Step 2

Now this is where it really gets interesting. Play around with the various drop-downs and check boxes. How many Australians aged 25-30 have registered accounts with Facebook? How many of these work for the Macquarie Group?

Or ask Facebook how many of its UK users enjoy peanut butter?

 

If you have a Facebook account yourself, you'll know that there are lots of places in your profile where you can answer questions.

So for example, it's perfectly possible to dig around and find out what portion of the Facebook audience say, likes peanut butter enough to feel that it's important that they tell their friends.

Or which age group most (publicly) enjoys Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Caveat 1

We've seen that (at May 6, 2008) there were around 9.7 m registered UK accounts aged 18+ (or approximately 16% of the total 2006 UK population). But - of course, we can be more granular than that, and look at specific cities. For example, we can see that there are around 2.5 m users based in London.

Of these users, 788 K are male. This should raise a few suspicions, because at first glance one might infer that the remainder (2.5 m - 788 K = 1.7 m) of the users are female. This would mean that (in London, at least) female users of Facebook outnumber male users two to one.

But when we add women into the mix, we see that women and men combined account for only 1.7 m Facebook accounts in London.

What gender are the remaining 900 k (2.6 m - 1.7 m) users?

Facebook can only tell you what its users have shared. If they have chosen not to share their age, gender, location, etc. you can't see it. Double check your numbers, and bear in mind that the more granular you get, the more room there is for error.

Caveat 2

It appears that there are around 140 people aged between 18 and 19 on Facebook who like peanut butter enough to tell their Facebook friends.

Breaking it down a little further, we see that 40 of these are aged 18.

And 140 of them are aged 19.

Adding those numbers together, that's 160 peanut butter lovers aged 18-19 , not the 140 peanut butter lovers we saw in the first run.

Running the exercise again confirms that twenty new peanut butter lovers haven't suddenly signed on in the past five minutes.

There's clearly some kind of rounding error. It seems that Facebook rounds to the nearest twenty. Bear this in mind that these estimates are intended for the purposes of estimating advertising audiences.

Comments

[Warren Whitlock]

not exactly groundbraking ideas, but a very good explanation of the demographic selection process in Facebook

[Margaret]

Do I have to get permission from google to do research with members of facebook?

[Mat Morrison]

@margaret - No. This is a tool that Facebook provides for potential advertisers; you can just dive in and get going.

If you're prepared to spend a little money (around $100) you can go a step further, and look at the Facebook Polls service, which allows you to poll a demographic or geographic segment of Facebook users. Excellent for quick & dirty research!

http://www.facebook.com/business/?polls