How to Create Share-Worthy Content with This Hidden Facebook Hack

How do I create sharable content? How do I get my audience to become advocates for my brand?

Creating content that your audience loves, connects with and wants to share comes back to the key mantra we hear time and time again in marketing: know your audience. Creating content that speaks to your audience’s needs is the central pillar to all marketing, and is essential in social media too. Content that connects with your audience means they will be much more motivated to share your message.

So how do we create content that resonates with our audience? We need to get to know our audience.

Understanding your audiences needs, their pressure points, their drivers — and how your product or service solves at least one of these pressures is essential.

Traditionally, we’re encouraged to sit down and grab a coffee with a member of our target audience, or run surveys. Now, I’m a big fan of coffee, but this can be time intensive, or perhaps you’ve already researched your audience this way and are wanting to look at them through a new lens.

There is a tool on Facebook that helps you learn about the interests of your existing customers: it’s called the Facebook Audience Insights Tool. The Facebook Audience Insights tool helps you analyse a group of people (for example, Page Fans) and tell you their collective demographic information and interests. It’s designed to help you run ads, but there is no reason you can’t use it to learn more about your audience so you can better design social media content.

To access the tool, head to Business Manager, and click on Audience Insights from the main drop-down menu.

In the tool, enter the group you would like to analyse — for example, you Facebook Page audience. Let the Audience Insights tool analyse your audience: what kind of jobs do they have? Are they married? What Pages do they like?

But keep in mind that this tool requires an active audience of at least 1000 monthly active users in order to see results — and the data it returns is based on comparing your specific audience to the average Facebook Audience. This means that when you check out your results, make sure you consider the Relevance Score for the suggested interests — because some of the interests aren’t that specific just to your audience.

Related: How to Use Facebook Audience Insights: A Beginner’s Guide

Level it up

As a starting point, you can enter your Facebook Page into the Audience Insights tool will analyse the data you have. But you can also use this to analyse other audiences you have saved in your Facebook Ads Custom Audiences, if you’ve already been using these to run ads. If you have a newsletter database, or a Facebook Pixel tracking traffic to your site, or a set of customer phone numbers — draw on a Custom Audience you’ve already built.

Put your Custom Audience into the Audience Insights tool and learn a bit more about your customers.

Related: The Surprising Way Your Analytics Can Inspire New Content Ideas

Using this for content inspiration

While this is a really useful tool for Ad Planning, we can also use this to give us insights into our audience for content planning.

I had thought my audience were into tech and social media. Lovers of TED talks, Social Media Examiner and HubSpot. But I didn’t expect them to be fans of Michelle Bridges, advocates of RUOK Day and IKEA fans.

I can now extrapolate these interests into where these might tie in with my business and toy with these interests to come up with content ideas.

I can see that my audience are busy professionals, in management, media and sales. I can then consider that my audience is time-poor, with demanding jobs, probably after quick, hands-on tips to help them be more effective at work, so they can get home and chill out. Creating short, bite-size tips might be just what this audience needs. Or, because I have so many people interested in sales, I should focus on more content around tracking sales conversions from social media.

But I also have a bit more insight into their personalities, too. Because I know they are interested in fitness and mental health, I could post content about breaking the 9-to-5 with some office exercises. Or Ikea hacks for the office (are standing desks still in vogue?). Or tips for work/life balance and unplugging from the digital world.

I can also see the websites they like to visit and celebrities they admire. Now I can consider adding these sites, or similar sites, into the mix of places I source content from. Perhaps I could share a weekly TED talk, or a motivational quote from Michelle Bridges.

What is the intersection between the topics my audience is interested in and my brand? I need to find it, and leverage it. Using this data to learn more about your audience means you can get a few new content ideas which you may not have considered before.

The takeaway

The Audience Insights tool is a nifty little feature which can be used to give you some new ideas and insights about your audience, and from there, into new content ideas.

But do take the data with a grain of salt. Due to it showing interests based on relevance and affinity, it means that more of your audience has a specific interest in that topic — it may not mean it’s the majority of your audience. However, you might find some gems there which give you a new perspective on your audience. Do keep in mind the relevance score when looking at your data.

It also can’t hurt to see if this data does match your other research: do these traits fit with your website and the pages that get the most traffic? Does this data correlate with research you’ve done in your offline surveys or coffee catch ups? And of course, the big one: testing. Post some content inspired by these interests and see if it resonates with your audience.

Let me know if you have a play with this tool and it’s inspired some new ideas!