MA Online Journalism — Online Enterprise and Innovation: Market research with Facebook (8/16)
This exercise follows the advice given in a blog by Azar Chatur.
Facebook Audience Insights
Azur Chatur suggests that the most powerful market research tool on Facebook is Audience Insights.
Every Facebook business page comes with this feature. It provides a range of information including post reach and the number of likes and shares.
This feature provides an assessment of audience response to new content, brand updates or any new marketing initiatives.
This helps gather market research on audience’s preferences based on the Facebook metrics. Also available is information about their demographics, location, buying behaviour and more.
The more customer insights there are, the easier it is to deliver meaningful messages to people.
Using Audience Insights, you can get aggregate and anonymous information such as:
- Demographics — Age and gender, lifestyle, education, relationship status, job role and household size
- Page likes — The top Pages people like in different categories, like women’s apparel or sports
- Location and language — Where do people live, and what languages do they speak
As you can see, my largest audience is from Cranfield. This is the village I have been promoting to the most. Basically as I live there. The odd ‘ones’ are Facebook friends I asked to like my page.
By doing this exercise I have discovered that a couple of friends have since unliked the page.
Also, the Insights spreadsheet also shows:
- Facebook usage — How frequently are people in your target audience logging onto Facebook and what device(s) they are using when they log on
- Purchases activity — Past purchase behaviour (i.e. heavy buyers of women’s apparel) and purchase methods (i.e., in-store, online)
And you can view this information for three different groups of people:
- People on Facebook (the general Facebook audience)
- People connected to your Page or event
- People in Custom Audiences you’ve already created (an audience made up of your current customers)
Your Own Social Connections
Chatur wrote that Friends and fans on Facebook can provide a lot of data. You can search your connections to learn what kinds of businesses they like, how they interact with them and more.
Most of my connections live in towns with a strong local newspaper. So I could look to see if they follow the local paper’s Facebook page.
MK Citizen is liked by 12 of my friends, which is only one more Milton Keynes follower than the Chronicle’s page.
Bedford Times and Citizen is liked by two of my friends. None of my Bedford friends follow the Chronicle.
What can I borrow?
Looking through the pages of competitors can also provide ideas. Such as how they interacting with their fans. You can see what posts have the most engagement.
Bedford Times and Citizen has very little interaction. Most posts in the last seven days were not shared, liked or commented on. The posts were mostly regional (from other sister publications) or national.
MK Citizen is similar to the Times and Citizen, well they are from the same stable. Mostly regional stories. Local posts that had interaction included child rape, child physical abuse and the royal wedding.
There is nothing I can borrow from these to increase the popularity of the Chronicle’s page.
Community pages are far more interactive. This is down to:
- Direct involvement (affects villagers, “this is what I think”)
- Useful information (road works, suspicious people)
- Humour
My own popular posts have been about the GP surgery and the local chemist. Oh, and the Coop reopening after a ram-raid. Not heavy news, but really important on a local level. This is being ignored by the two local papers.
Facebook Polls
This simple feature lets you construct polls for gathering information from your audience.
There are a variety of question types: multiple choice, ranking scale of 1 to 5, yes or no and text.
The finished poll has a share link which can be posted on your Facebook page or embed in your website.
What happened?
I did work on a Facebook market research poll. I was quite pleased with it. Until I tried to publish it. The monthly fee of £6 seemed ok, but it was a yearly payment.
The free version was limited to 40 responses. I probably wouldn’t get that many, but it wouldn’t be enough data.
A simple poll doesn’t have enough questions. So I tried a Survey Monkey version.
I first posted a request to complete on the Facebook group called Cranfield Community Group. It has 2,746 members. The response was limited to just 17.
Twenty-four hours later I posted the same message on Marston Moretaine Villagers (3,513) and Lidlington Villagers (574 members).
Between 28/11/17 and 10:00 30/11/17, I received 69 responses.
Survey Results
Age
Where do you get your local news from?
This question could have multiple answers.
What is missing from your local news providers?
This was a free-text, non-compulsory question.
How often would you like to be informed about a local news story?
This was to see how up-to-date the residents of Cranfield and Marston Moretaine Ward wanted to be.
How would you prefer to receive your local news?
Which topics would you like to see in local news?
This question allowed multiple answers.
What did I learn?
If I was to do this exercise again, I would add a question asking where the respondent lived. Every Cranfield response wanted to know about police matters. This was less important when Marston Moretaine and Lidlington villagers were asked what they wanted.
I wouldn’t have the free text option either.
Most importantly, I need to find out how I can deliver local news n Facebook in a way that can generate income.
Also, The Cranfield and Marston Vale Chronicle is already providing 5 of the topics the locals are after. The Council one does need more work though.
Facebook Ads
A higher response rate for my survey would have been possible if I promoted by Facebook ads to a wider audience.
The ads would have been sent to qualified members of my target audience.
Chatur advised that for increased click-through rates and engagement, the ad should appealing as well as relevant. Facebook has some tools to help design the ad.
Canvas
Facebook’s free software Canvas can create beautiful, full-page multimedia ads.
In a news feed, the ad looks like a typical ad. Once users click on it, they enter an interactive full-screen version where they can scroll, swipe, click links, view product galleries and more.
These ads are hosted on Facebook’s servers so they are faster to load than an external link.
Pixel
Pixel offers conversion tracking, optimisation and remarketing. Once your pixel has tracked 100 conversions, Facebook helps to create a “lookalike audience” of users. These are similar in demographic to the people who visit your website.
Facebook offers precise targeting options based on their “relevance scores” technology. This assigns tags to every user and every ad.
Search Tool
The search tool is one of the most basic features on Facebook. It can be used to check hashtag use, look for similar businesses nearby, see what your friends like and more.
I have used this to find local Facebook groups to follow for possible news ideas. Such as NHS, local newspapers and schools.
Summary
Originally, this post was going to focus on using Facebook to do some market research using Facebook’s polls.
Cost and limitations of the free version ruled this out and I used Survey Monkey instead.
Sixty-nine responses from an audience of over 6,800 isn’t much. But the survey did back up my own observations from following village Facebook groups — there is an audience for local news.
The established news providers are not providing the news that locals are after. Those that are close do not provide it in a timely manner.
Naturally, I was hoping that everyone wanted to get their news from a website (mine with display ads). Facebook is the preferred medium, however.
The Cranfield and Marston Vale Chronicle will have to find a way of putting headlines on Facebook and ensuring that the readers click through to the website.
Hopefully, this extra work by the reader will not put them off.
