How can I find out about people’s interests on Facebook?

The easiest way to see what people have put in their interests in their personal profiles, and therefore how many people could potentially be interested in your product or service, is to use the Facebook ads setup.

To get to the Facebook ads setup you can get there a few ways:

a) Go to your page and click on “promote my page with an ad” underneath your profile picture.
b) Go to www.Facebook.com/advertising.
c) Click on “ads & pages” in the left menu when you are looking at your personal newsfeed.

Once you are in the Facebook ads you need to click on the green box which says “create an ad”. Then scroll down the page until you are at section two on Targeting, as below:

Location – use this to select where you would like your audience to live, you can narrow it down to city if you want to, as you do this you will see the figure in the “estimated reach” box on the right change. The estimated reach is the number of people that Facebook estimate will see your ad based on the details that they have in their personal profile.

Demographics – This is about how old your audience are and what gender, again as you change this the estimated reach will change.

Likes & Interests – These are what people have written in their personal profiles that they like/are interested in, so not pages on Facebook, but genuine things that they are interested in. You can add as many as you want here and see the estimated reach change. Each time you add an interest a drop down box will appear with options to choose from, if what you want isn’t there it means that no one has that listed in their profile. As you add more interests the estimated reach will change, and you will end up with an idea of the size of the market.

Using Facebook ads in this way you are not actually creating an ad, nor is it costing you any money, but instead you are researching. It is important to do this before you start a Facebook page, as it gives you a good indication of whether your audience is using Facebook and if they are roughly how many you can target – remember that there may be more people interested in your product/service than you find on here, they just haven’t listed it in their profile.

If you need more help with Facebook pages for your business I am running a workshop on October 13 in Sydney.

Lara Solomon is the founder of Mocks, mobile phone socks www.MyMocks.com, founder of Social Rabbit – your guide in the world of social media www.Facebook.com/SocialRabbit and author of ‘Brand New Day – the Highs & Lows of Starting a Small Business’. Lara’s business LaRoo was the winner of the NSW Telstra Micro-Business Award in 2008.