Demographic Targeting on Facebook + Instagram

Understanding the difference in your audience demographics across your social platforms is crucial to optimizing your use of each. Your audience on Facebook is going to look slightly different than the audience you reach on Instagram.

In today’s blog, we dive a little deeper into discussing each platform’s audience demographics and where you can access related analytics. While both platforms are essential parts of your social media strategy you will want to consider your desired target audience and what tactics to take in order to reach and engage that audience.

Facebook Demographics

A helpful place to know what your audience looks like is located on your Facebook Business Page under “Insights.” There’s a lot of information here to tackle but for the purpose of today’s blog, we will focus on the “People” section.

This section is broken down into three categories, as follows:

Your Fans
Your Followers
People Reached

Each category tells you about your audience— factors include age, gender, and location. Let’s say, for example, your audience is about 70% women in the 35-44 age bracket. Knowing this information can provide content and ad ideas that hone in on this audience very specifically.

In general, Facebook tends to have a larger audience of people aged 35 and up.

Instagram Demographics

With Instagram, you will engage with a younger audience. Younger people tend to be more active on Instagram over Facebook and vice versa. It’s still important to target your set demographic but it’s also important to appeal to a younger audience since they are either current or potential patients.

To engage with your audience actively on Instagram a best-practice is to post frequently and use the stories feature (we’ve written a helpful blog post about Instagram Stories it here).

Like Facebook, you can also check your audience demographics under “Audience” in the Insights section. You can track your follow rate, locations, age range, gender, and the hours and days of the week your followers engage with you the most.

Understanding your audience and how to reach them is just one part of a strong social media strategy. Remember, your Sesame Social Team is always here to help!

—Jennie Rogers, Social Media Specialist 2, Sesame Communications