Complements to Facebook Audience Insights That Every Marketer Needs

Facebook Audience Insights was once the go-to tool for digging into your social media target audience, uncovering demographics, interests, and behaviors that fueled smarter campaigns. 

But as Facebook quietly limited or retired features, many brands found themselves scrambling for better ways to run social media audience analysis.

The truth? You don’t need to rely on outdated Facebook analytics dashboards anymore. 

In here, I've put together a couple of fresh tools, creative workarounds, and proven methods that give you the kind of audience insights Facebook no longer delivers, so you can keep targeting sharp, data-driven, and effective.

General Facebook audience demographics data

With 2.28B global users and over 3B monthly active users worldwide, Facebook remains one of the most important platforms for understanding social media consumer behavior.

In the U.S. alone, usage spans every age group. 

According to Statista, 25–34 year-olds make up the largest segment (24.2%), followed by 35–44 (19%) and 18–24 (18.6%). 

Older audiences are far from absent, with over 12% of users aged 65+.

This breakdown highlights why using audience insights matters: your social media community isn’t unitary. 

Different age groups interact with brands, ads, and content in very different ways. 

Understanding what audience insights are in this context helps marketers tailor strategies that actually resonate.

Why are audience insights more critical than ever?

So why are Facebook Insights and audience research so important, you might ask?

Because guessing doesn’t cut it anymore. 

With endless competition for attention, brands need data-driven marketing to make smart decisions instead of relying on assumptions.

Audience research fuels a stronger social media content strategy, from knowing which formats grab attention to understanding when and where your community engages most. 

By going beyond surface numbers and tapping into deeper insights, businesses can stay relevant, personalize at scale, and make every post work harder.

Where can you see audience data in your native Facebook analytics dashboard?

If you’re doing social media analysis, the first stop is always your native tools. 

Meta offers a few built-in dashboards under Facebook Audience Analytics, but they’re far more limited than the old Facebook Audience Insights tool. 

Still, let me show you where you can find them and what they actually show:

Meta Business Suite

How to access:

• Long into Facebook

Click on Meta Business Suite from the left-sided menu

• Then click on Insights > Audience

• And here’s the type of data you’ll see:

Data display: surface-level demographic data only

Here, you’ll see basic breakdowns like age, gender, top cities, and top countries. It’s helpful for a high-level snapshot, but not much more.

Limitations:

• No psychographic insights (interests, behaviors, motivations)
• No cross-platform correlation (Instagram, TikTok, etc.)
• Primarily descriptive, not actionable

Facebook Page Insights

How to access:

• Log into Facebook
• Go to your Professional Dashboard from the left-sided menu
• Click on Insights > Audience

Data display: restricted to page followers only

You’ll get insights into who already follows your page: demographics, cities, and countries.

Limitations:

• No visibility into broader market or potential audience
• Lacks detailed targeting insights you can apply outside your current followers

Facebook Ads Manager

How to access:

From your main Facebook dashboard, select Ads Manager in the left menu.

Data display: only shows data for your ads (no market insights)

The data here is campaign-specific. 

You’ll see who your ads reached, engagement, and conversion metrics.

Limitations:

• Doesn’t reveal anything about the wider Facebook user base
• Lacks actionable insights for targeting beyond your ad audience

How to correlate your Facebook audience insights with your other metrics?

Your Facebook audience size may show how many people you’ve reached, but numbers alone don’t tell the whole story. 

My take? The real value comes when you connect target audience insights with performance data, blending who they are with what they actually do. That’s how you move from raw Facebook metrics to actionable strategy.

To make this less abstract, I've taken GoPro as an example and moving forward I'll walk you through how different audience insights tie together to shape decisions.

Top-performing content types

Using Socialinsider, I could see that video and Reels dominate engagement while static images underperform. 

For GoPro, that signals an audience hungry for dynamic, immersive storytelling.

My takeaway? The brand should invest more in high-impact formats like Reels and cut back on what doesn’t spark interaction.

Most engaging content pillars

The next breakdown shows which themes sustain attention. 

As I discovered, for GoPro, artistic and lifestyle-driven posts consistently outperform utility-heavy ones. 

This analysis revealed not just a content preference but the narrative backbone of the brand, the themes that create long-term resonance and recognition.

Engagement patterns

My findings? That GoPro’s engagement evolution highlights spikes around launches and dips in off-campaign weeks.

Tracking these patterns is critical because they reveal causal levers: what actually sparks momentum. 

Is it a new product drop, UGC reposts, or behind-the-scenes teasers? 

Once you identify triggers, you can engineer repeatable waves instead of relying on lucky virality.

Optimal posting times

Timing shapes reach. 

Facebook rewards posts that gain traction fast, and GoPro’s heatmap highlights Sunday evenings as a sweet spot. 

Posting then means engagement accelerates early, pushing content further organically, essentially free amplification hidden in your own data.

Content consumption needs

Finally, I strongly advise you to not measure against only yourself, but against the market as well. 

If you ask me, audience insights become even more meaningful when you compare them against industry-wide content consumption benchmarks. 

The chart here shows how frequently brands post across platforms, with Instagram averaging around five posts per week. 

This context matters: if your posting volume is far below or above these norms, your engagement results may reflect effort imbalance rather than true content performance.

I'll leave you with our global benchmarks study below, to help you easily evaluate whether your strategy is competitive or falling behind.

How does Socialinsider help with audience insights and intelligence gathering?

To truly understand your audience, you need clarity on where growth happens, why it slows down, and how each platform contributes to the bigger picture. 

That’s where social media data collection and smart reporting come in.

And, I may be subjective, but I think Socialinsider might just be the best Facebook analytics tool for you, thanks to its comprehensive metrics and cross-platform solutions for turning scattered data into actionable insights. 

Whether you’re doing a social media audit or preparing executive reporting for stakeholders, the platform helps you see both the fine details and the broader trends that matter.

Let me show you how:

Audience increase or decrease trends identification

Growth doesn’t always mean a straight upward line. 

Audiences shift. They grow when content resonates and shrink when messages miss the mark. With Socialinsider, you can track both increases and decreases in fan count over time.

The fan growth dashboard makes it simple to:

• Spot sudden spikes that might be tied to a campaign, a viral post, or an influencer collaboration;
• Identify drops that may require a change in content or posting strategy;
• Understand long-term patterns and seasonal fluctuations in audience engagement;

Nonetheless, the fan growth metric is particularly powerful when benchmarking against competitors, helping a social media analyst instantly see if performance trends are unique to their brand or if they mirror wider industry shifts.

 Cross-platform audience intelligence

Your audience isn’t confined to a single platform. And trust me, neither should your insights be. 

Socialinsider’s cross-platform audience intelligence gives you a complete picture of where your community lives and how big it can become.

Here’s what you can use the app for:

Audience platform segmentation

See the distribution of your followers across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and more. 

This breakdown helps you identify which platforms deserve more attention, where growth is accelerating, and where your efforts may be underperforming.

Market size prediction for social media

By combining impressions, engagement, and video views with growth trends, Socialinsider helps you estimate your true potential audience size. 

This makes it easier to forecast ROI, set realistic targets, and allocate resources where they’ll have the most impact.

How to use your Facebook audience data to generate higher social media marketing results?

Your Facebook audience isn’t just sitting there passively scrolling. 

Eevery like, comment, and click tells you something about who they are and what they want. 

So instead of treating that data as noise, use Facebook audience insights to uncover patterns, shape smarter content, and ultimately push your social media KPIs in the right direction. 

Here are some of the social media best practices to consider:

Turn audience data into personas

Numbers alone don’t inspire action, but people do. 

That’s why the first step is turning raw data into relatable personas. 

Demographics, interests, and browsing habits suddenly become “The Trendsetter,” who never misses a launch, or “The Researcher,” who reads reviews before buying. 

When you map out these personas, you’re not just segmenting your audience on Facebook. You’re making it easier to step into their shoes. 

And when you do that, everything changes: you know which pain points to address, which formats grab attention, and what tone of voice feels natural.

Spot platform-specific behavior patterns

This is where I've seen many brands slip: assuming what works on TikTok will work on Facebook. It won’t. 

Facebook has its own rhythm. And your audience behaves differently here than anywhere else. 

Some communities engage heavily with polls, others with video tutorials or shareable graphics.

By studying engagement patterns, you’ll know not just what your audience interacts with, but when they’re most likely to act. 

Thus, digging into Facebook audience insights can help you identify:

• Peak times when your community is most active;
• Which post types spark the strongest reactions;
• Actions that often follow engagement, such as link clicks, shares, or sign-ups.

Aligning your social media content with these rhythms means you’re meeting them exactly where they’re already paying attention.

Connect insights to your KPIs

As I mentioned before, data only matters if it moves the needle. 

That’s why the last step is connecting your insights to the social media KPIs that define success for your brand. 

If you know your “Trendsetters” react fastest to product drops, build campaigns around urgency to lift click-through rates. If your “Researchers” need reassurance, invest in content that highlights reviews and quality to lower cost per conversion. 

The beauty of personas and behavior analysis is that they give you a roadmap—not just for better engagement, but for retention, loyalty, and measurable ROI.

Final thoughts

To wrap it up, mastering how to use audience insights is your secret weapon for transforming data into dynamic social media success. 

By turning cold numbers into relatable personas, uncovering those platform-specific behaviors, and tying everything back to your KPIs, you unlock the power to create campaigns that hit the mark every time.