January 2014 – Stay N Alive

Growth Hacking: How to Know Who Has Viewed Your Facebook Profile

I shared earlier a method I came up with that allows you to target the subscribers (now called just “followers”) of a public profile on Facebook (you know, the profiles with the “follow” button like mine at facebook.com/stay – not to be confused with a business page). It turns out that you can also use this to not just target ads to, but learn about the subscribers of those profiles as well. For instance, I can tell the approximate salary ranges of my followers on Facebook. Let me share how.

If you go to my previous article on the topic, I show you how to create a list of the subscribers of a profile. The same can be done for the friends of a profile, the attendees of an event, members of a group, and many more “groups” of people if you know what you’re doing – do some research of what data is available (I have a book that can help), if you want to dive deeper. Go ahead and create this list, and then go to Facebook’s Power Editor where you would have created your ad targeting these people.

Previously I only talked about targeting ads to these people. You can actually get very specific in targeting only sub-groups of these followers, allowing for much more targeted ads in the process. But you can also use Facebook’s Power Editor to just learn more about your audience. This can be a great way to know what types of things the audiences of individual profiles in your brand are interested in.

For instance, if I go the Partner Categories (under “Audience” when creating or editing a new ad in Power Editor), and select “Acxiom”, then “Personal Finance”, and then “Income”, I can select any income range. If I select the $100,000-$125,000 range, in the right column it tells me an approximate number of people amongst my followers that are in that range. As you can see, the majority of my audience makes less than $100,000! If I were representing a brand, this would tell me how to price any products I sell to my audience of followers.

You can segment it any way you want at this point, just as you would a typical Facebook Page. Find out how many of a public profile’s followers/friends buy baby products. Find out how many of a public profile’s followers/friends are Republican/Democrat/Independent/etc. Then if you follow the advice in my previous article you can target ads to these individuals!

Okay, I fooled you a bit with the title and you can’t really tell who’s viewed the profile, but you can tell at least anonymously those viewers that have clicked the “subscribe” button on your profile, or learn more information about the friends of any profile on Facebook. For brands with influencers representing them as public Facebook profiles, this can be a very useful way for those brands to allow those influencers to keep a personal profile without having to have a duplicate Facebook Page.

Previously, I showed you how to create ads using this method. The cool thing with Facebook ads is you don’t have to create ads to get benefit. The ads interface itself, and in particular Facebook’s Power Editor, is a great learning tool to get approximations of an audience, and to learn more about who you should be targeting and how to target better – use this to your advantage as a brand as you engage your employees to use Facebook more as ambassadors for your company (through tools such as EveryoneSocial). Then use ads, and your own products to prove those theories.

Have another good use of this? Share in the comments!

Let me help your brand! These little “Growth Hacks” are the core of our business, and how we excel against other marketers and firms in this space. If you want to get an advantage against your competition that other marketers can’t touch, send an email to jesse@staynalive.com!

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