Show notes: Niche research for Facebook Ads is the focus of today’s podcast.  We will be covering research using Facebook for Business, Amazon, Clickbank and a number of other areas.

Alvern: Hello ladies, Alvern here. Today we are going to be looking at niche, niche, or niche research. Like I mentioned in the last podcast, where we discussed the things that you need to do before creating a Facebook page or should I say, creating a Facebook business page. All right, so for niche research, I believe you’re going to break down the presentation, or the topic into two parts. This is going to cover part one. I didn’t actually realise how much can be covered, based on I would say, my past experience and what I’ve learned in the space over the last 10 years.

Today we’re going to be looking at niche research using Facebook, Amazon, Clickbank, and a few others that I’m going to mention. Then next week, we’ll be looking at five other places that you want to do your niche research, in order for you to make the final decision as to whether to go down the roads between two or three niches, or even sub-niches. You’re really going to niche down like I said last time, you can have a very broad niche, but you want to make sure you narrow focus on that specific niche.

Why Niche Research

All right, so before we lose where we are, why you would want to do niche research, that’s one thing I probably didn’t mention last week or the week before. One of the reasons why you want to do a niche research, or well, actually a few reasons why you want to do niche research. Number one, you want to validate the reason why you wanted to go into that niche. Get validation from what’s happening in the marketplace at the moment.

Number two, you want to get a better understanding of the lingo used in that space, because in order for you to create the ads on Facebook, or maybe another social platform, you want to be able to know what lingo to use, so that you can actually speak to your audience. Number three, apart from the lingo, you want to be able to understand what are the popular items that people are interested in, in the particular niche.

For example, if it is you want to get into cycling, but not just the broad area of cycling, because you have mountain bikes, you’ve got road bikes, you’ve got dirt bikes. You want to, say you want to niche down into road bikes. You want to find out all about the different types of care that are being used in that particular niche. For example, you’ve got winter cycling gloves, summer cycling gloves. You’ve got winner socks, summer socks. You’ve got all different types of pedals. Using that particular niche, you’ve got different gears, 8 gear, 16 gear, et cetera. But you get what I mean. Then you have all the different trips, the different events that happen every year. Some people take part in just the regular road races. Then some of them get involved in triathlons.

You want to be able to understand what’s happening in that niche, in a much deeper sense. Number one to see what’s happening, so you can sell products in that niche, if that’s what you plan to do, and engage your audience. Or if for example, you wanted to write a book about something that’s happening in that niche. Whatever that main goal is, you want to do the niche research. Make sure you can actually talk about this topic for a very long time to come, in say 5 to 10 years. You can keep going on and on because it’s something you’re passionate. You understand how your audience feel, what they react to, what they’re passionate about, et cetera.

All right, so that’s ‘the big why’ about the niche research. Now you sort of know the reasons why you want to do niche research. What we’re going to do is look at where you go to do your niche research. One of the first places, because you’re focusing on Facebook, one of the first places you want to do that is on Facebook. Like I mentioned last week … Well, it’s actually not one of the first places you want to do it. It’s one of the places you should be doing it. There are nine other places that I thought of you can do niche research. The other eight places apart from Facebook will help you get an understanding of what’s happening on other platforms within that niche.

Facebook for Business

All right, so without further ado, let’s look at Facebook. Say, for example, you want to some research on niche, or interest, or audience engagement on Facebook. If you don’t have a Facebook account, you need to get a Facebook account first, because it’s all built around your profile on Facebook. Once you’ve got that, and your favourites ready and tagged, and if you’ve never run an advert on Facebook before, you can do it in one of two ways. You can just click ‘create ad’ from your profile, but I wouldn’t advise you to do that. Or even from your Facebook page, which … Yeah, I wouldn’t advise you to do that.

One of the better ways to do it to go to business.Facebook.com and log in, using obviously your own personal profile, unless obviously, you have a business profile, say with a company or something like that. Anyway, you log in to that, and you are brought to the page called business manager. I know that in different parts of the world, the business side of Facebook can appear differently. If when you log in, you see something different, do not panic. It’s more or less than same in terms of what you can access, the kind of ads you can run, et cetera.

When I log in, based on my location, I see the business manager. The business manager allows you to obviously, like me, if you are me, and you have run ads before in the past, and you have an account set up, you’ll be brought into a view where you see all of your accounts. As well as all of the pages that you manage. As well as all the information on payments, any sort of users you have assigned to that account. You can have different say, not necessarily admin users, but editors that you want to assign, who would be people who sort of … Or even ads managers that you want to run campaigns for you on specific pages.

If it is, for example, you have a business, and you have five different Facebook pages, and you log in there, you would be able to claim those pages, and put them into your business manager. Now the other thing about … This has nothing to do with niche research but it’s one thing to note. When you assign your Facebook business page to your business manager account, you’ll be able to access it on the personal side of Facebook. Anyway, there are lots of things happening in the background there. I will go into much more detail on that, but let’s just leave that there for now.

The most important thing to do your niche research is you would see on the top left-hand corner, what we call a hamburger menu. If you click on that, you would see options if you’re like, and used it before. You’d see your frequently used objects, for want of a better word, like your audience insights, your business manager, and other items in there. But let’s just stick, because we’re looking at niche research, and I don’t want to get you confused.

When you click on audience insights, you’re given the option to see everyone on Facebook more or less and choose a country. By default, I have set up here is the United States. Then I see all of the people who are active. The most important thing here, they are active monthly on Facebook. You have can people who are inactive, and they wouldn’t show up here, but who are active. They log in at least once a month I guess. You would see them here. All right, so once you are in the audience insights, you would see … Right now I’m seeing there are 150 to 200 million people active on Facebook. You’d see on the left-hand corner, you have the ability to create an audience, change location. You see you can filter by age and gender. You can filter by interests, by connections, pages, et cetera, down the left-hand side.

Then more or less front and centre, you would things like demographics of those 150 to 200 million monthly active people. Their page likes, location, that kind of information. What you want to do is, in order to do your niche research, is to pick a specific interest, because that’s what it’s called here, in the interest section on the left-hand side. If I go into there, and for example, I decide I wanted to look at a generic niche. Let’s just try DIY. Okay. Once I type in the words DIY, you see I have the option to choose different options there. I have Do-It-Yourself, I have a DIY magazine, et cetera. Let’s just try, just Do It Yourself. There are 30 to 35 million monthly active people on Facebook in that DIY interest. If I click on page likes, I’ll be able to see the top 10 or so pages that relate to that specific niche.

The goal here is you’re gonna need to pull out an Excel sheet. One by one go through each of those pages and have a look at if it’s still an active page, because sometimes a page will come up, and you see the last update, the latest post could be from two, three, four years ago. You know, okay, that’s not a page that you want to necessarily target because more or less it’s an abandoned page. It’s no longer active. You want to make sure you pick out the active pages. Those that have recent posts, you want to compare a number of people who like the page, to all of the people who are actually engaging with the posts.

Say, for example, a page has one million likes, and you just go through each post individually and say for the last five posts. What was the engagement like? Is it 10 people? Is it 1,000? Is it 10,000? You want to have nice, rich ratio of engagements to a number of people who are active on the page. If you have one million page likes and only 10 people engaging, you see 10 or 20 people e