Originally Published on hostgator.com on May 7, 2018 By Syed Balkhi
How to Use Facebook Insights to Improve Your Blog
One of the most important steps to building a successful blog is creating content that your audience is truly interested in. Typically, this includes blog posts that solve problems and provide valuable information.
According to HubSpot, 47% consumers view 3 to 5 blog posts before getting started in the buying process.
As you can imagine, creating blog posts for your target audience that spark interest is the key to generating more conversions and sales. So, how do you come up with such blog topic ideas?
You can start by doing market research to properly analyze your target audience and understand their current interests and what kind of content they’re consuming the most. There’s no better place than Facebook to begin that research. Here’s why.
What is Facebook Audience Insights?
Hands down, Facebook is the best platform to perform market research. With over 1.4 billion daily active users, it’s guaranteed you can find your target customers on this massive social networking platform.
Not only that, but you can also learn a lot about your target audience through Facebook, thanks to Facebook Audience Insights, a tool that provides businesses with information related to their audience to create more targeted content.
Audience Insights allows you to explore the entire user base of Facebook to filter and carefully identify your target audience based on their interests, likes, age, education, job, location, income, and much more.
Step 1: Identify Your Target Audience
To create more targeted blog posts, first you need to identify your target audience. You can start that process by creating a buyer persona, a detailed profile of the ideal customer you want to target through your content. Then, using your buyer persona, you can narrow your search in Audience Insights using the right filters.
For example, if your ideal customer is a woman who’s planning a wedding, then you can use the Relationship Status filter in Audience Insights to find that target audience based on the period of time a person has been married.
Of course, it’s not the best way to find the right information about your audience since you’ll still be guessing your customer interests and demographics through that process.
That’s why you need to first grow an email marketing list to collect leads, or you can install a Facebook Pixel on your website. We’ll get into that in the next step.
Step 2: Create a Custom Audience
Facebook recommends that you use your email list to create a custom audience. That way, you can analyze an audience who has already shown interest in your business.
Simply download your email list as a CSV file and upload it to Facebook Audience Insights. Once you upload your email list, Facebook will compare the emails with its user base to find the Facebook profiles of your leads to create a custom audience.
You can also create a custom audience using a Facebook Pixel. This is a conversion tracking tool that you can integrate on your website to track your visitors. Then you can create a custom audience using the data gathered from your website visitors.
As you can imagine, using a Facebook Pixel takes a while to gather data. Using your email list is the easiest and the most effective way to create a custom audience.
Step 3: Gather Insights
Once you’ve created a custom audience, you can begin analyzing the audience through Audience Insights.
Go to Audience Insights and select your new custom audience from the Custom Audience tab on the left-hand side panel. Now, Facebook will show you all the information related to your custom audience.
Narrow the results using the various advanced filters. For example, you can narrow your audience based on interests like people who are interested in dating or weddings. Then you can further enhance the search based on job titles and lifestyles as well.
Let’s imagine that you’re a business promoting wedding catering services and you’re targeting women at the age of 25 who became recently engaged and are interested in weddings.
Once you’ve applied all the necessary filters, head over to the Page Likes tab to see what kind of pages your target audience most recently liked.
As you can see, in this example, your audience seems to be big fans of the Betty Crocker website, which specializes in food and recipes.
We now know that your target audience is interested in learning about food recipes, so that would be a good topic category for your blog posts.
Step 4: Find the Right Topics
The next step is to craft a blog post title using the topic you’ve discovered through Facebook Insights. You can do this using Quora, a platform filled with questions posted by many different types of people.
On Quora, search for your topic. Following the same example, let’s search for “food recipes.”
As you can see in the results, people are interested in healthy food recipes for babies and vegetarian food recipes. You can use these questions to craft an effective blog post title like “5 Healthy Vegetarian Food Recipes for Babies.”
Step 5: Test Your Titles
Optimizing your blog post title is an important part that helps determine how much traffic you can attract to your blog. People will use your blog post title to decide whether or not to visit your blog.
Use CoSchedule Headline Analyzer to test and analyze your blog post titles for effectiveness and SEO.
You can try changing the words of your title and using power words to improve its effectiveness. The tool will also show you how your title will appear in the Google search results as well.
Conclusion
There you go: all the reasons to add Facebook Insights to your blogging toolkit. Now you can start creating effective blog posts that your target audience will definitely be interested in.
One last tip: Once you identify the right topics to create targeted posts, remember to research for the right keywords to use in your blog posts and titles. Hop on to Google AdWords Keyword Planner and find keywords with low competition and enough search volume to further optimize your post title and subheads.
Syed Balkhi
Syed Balkhi is the founder of WPBeginner, the largest free WordPress resource site. With over 10 years of experience, he’s the leading WordPress expert in the industry. You can learn more about Syed and his portfolio of companies by following him on his social media networks.