Good morning, Social Rabbit here with your guide to the world of social media.

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 ad’s setup.

To get to the Facebook ad’s 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 ad’s you need to click on the green box which says “create an ad”.   Then scroll down the page until you are at section 2 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 ad’s 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 get stuck you can post a question on the Social Rabbit Facebook wall, or check out the workshops we are running just on Facebook!