In this post I want to cover how to do market research using Facebook.

Facebook currently has 1.6 billion monthly active users worldwide and they are busy gathering data on all their users.  You can access some of the data through Facebook Audience Insights.

Go to your Facebook account and search for ‘Audience Insights’.

Simply input the country or countries you are targeting and then input some primary keywords relating to your niche in the ‘Interests’ box – you can put more than one keyword in to gather data on related keywords.  For my niche I input ‘make money online’, ‘digital marketing’ and ‘internet marketing’.  (I discovered that a lot more people refer to themselves as interested in ‘digital marketing’ than ‘internet marketing’ – this is useful to know when creating my content.)

The data is gathered under tabs at the top of the page including the most important being ‘Demographics’,  ‘Household’ and ‘Purchase’.  I am copying and pasting the information from these 3 tabs below:

This information tells me the following about the internet marketing / digital marketing niche:

• there are 3 to 3.5 million active people on Facebook interested in this niche in both the US and the UK.
• 65% are women and 35% are men.
• 35 to 37% are in the 25 to 34 age group, 23/24% are in the 35 to 44 age group, and 13/14% are in the 45 to 54 age group
• Under ‘Relationship Status’ (which is cut off in this screenshot), 34% are single and 66% are either married, engaged or in a relationship.
• Under ‘Education Level’ (which is also cut off by the screen shot) 82% are university educated which indicates that the vast majority of my audience is highly educated.  This fits with the fact that that internet marketing can be technically challenging.
• Under ‘Job Titles’ on the Demographics tab (also cut-off) the main job titles are Management, Sales and Admin.
• If I then jump to the ‘Household’ tab, I find that the average income of 76% of my audience is said to be $50,000 or above, indicating that they are comparatively wealthy compared to other niches, and have the capacity to buy products and services.
• Under ‘Household Size’, 49% of my niche have no children in the household
• Under ‘Home Ownership’, 67% own their own home
• Under ‘Home Market Value’, 73% of homes are in the $100-500k price bracket.
• Under the ‘Purchases’ tab, 63% of my audience uses ‘Subscription Services’ which indicates that they may be willing to subscribe to something like a membership or newsletter.  Interestingly, only 5% say they make ‘business purchases’.  This suggests that whilst 100% of the audience are interested in internet and digital marketing, only 5% actually run an online business so there seems to be plenty of potential to convert some of this audience to online business entrepreneurs.

In order to sell products and services into a niche market, it is important to understand who your are in order to communicate effectively with them.  This includes understanding what they want and what challenges they face in getting what they want. I will address this in another post.

Suffice it to say, this market research using Facebook gives us a pretty accurate idea of the profile of the audience in the digital marketing / internet marketing niche or any other niche we choose to research.