Using Facebook To Research Your Target Audience

Part Two (read part one here)

So, in case you need a refresher, the pertinent questions being carried over from part one were:

1. What information does Facebook have that can help me to investigate my potential audience in different cities/countries, and

2. How can I find it?

Now as I mentioned earlier, most of my songs would have undoubtedly been #1 hits all around the world (if I hadn’t stupidly lost Jason Mraz’s mobile number…). On this premise, it should be a fairly safe assumption that fans of Jason Mraz will be pretty big into my stuff as well.

To get the information I am after, I will need to get into the Ads section of Facebook. I can do this by navigating to http://www.facebook.com/ads and setting up an account. Note that while you manage ads through your personal Facebook account, you will need to have a “Page” set up for your music before you can get access.

To get started, simply click on the big green “Create an ad” button and set yourself up.

Next we will start building a new ad, although we won’t actually be getting as far as placing an order for the ad (yep, that will cost you MONEY)

In the “Choose a Facebook destination…” field just put anything you like – your FB page, or any other URL will work fine.

In “Location” you can choose to add pretty much any country in the world. I have selected Australia for today. I want my research to be specific to the regions I would like to tour, so I have also selected “City” and entered Melbourne.

If you want to learn about a particular age group or sex, you can also choose this from the next few fields. I want to know about people who are old enough to get into the pub for my shows and young to stick around when things get loud (and LATE), so I have chosen 18-30.

Now comes the fun part! Using the “Precise Interests” field you can search for pretty much any artist, song, brand, venue, and so on. In this case I want to know approximately how many Jason Mraz fans are living in Melbourne. Obviously this will never be an exact figure, but it is certainly a very good indication nevertheless.

So according to my Facebook research, there are at least 18,000 people that live in Melbourne and like Jason Mraz. Pretty cool, huh!

By my calculations, if I manage to get just 1% of these Mraz-loving Melbournians down to my show, I will have sold 200 tickets – enough to pack out my Melbourne show quite comfortably. Woohoo!!

So I guess all that remains now is book my flights, pack my bags and shave my shoulders.

Get ready world, here I come!!

If you are wondering about the next piece in the puzzle – how to actually get in front of these people, make sure you subscribe below and you’ll be the first to know when we cover the next instalment!