Audience demographics

Audience demographics · Help

If you do not know who you are writing for, you cannot decide what to write. The Audience sections at the bottom of the Insights overview show the age, gender, city and country of your followers and of the people who engage with you. This article explains exactly what those bars measure and why they sometimes do not appear at all.

⚠️ Note: Demographics are a lifetime distribution: the period picker above does not affect this section. Select "Last 7 days" and the bars stay the same.

Two audiences

The section is drawn under two separate headings, and they describe different people:

Followers — The distribution of the accounts following you. Its description says "the largest buckets Meta returns".
Engaged audience — The distribution of people who engaged with your account recently. They may not be following you at all.

When the two distributions diverge sharply, that is valuable information: your content is reaching a different group from your follower base.

Four breakdowns

Each audience is drawn with up to four breakdowns. The breakdown headings are set in small, widely spaced capitals:

Age — Meta's age brackets (13-17, 18-24, 25-34 and so on).
City — The city name, usually with a country suffix.
Country — A two-letter country code or a country name; whatever Meta returns is printed.
Gender — Three values: Male, Female, Unspecified.

A breakdown with no data is not drawn at all. If neither audience has any data, the whole section collapses to a single sentence (see below).

Reading the bars

Each row carries three parts:

The bucket's name on the left (for example "25-34" or "Istanbul").
The percentage and the headcount on the right: "34.2% · 1,248".
A filled bar underneath whose width grows with the percentage.

Rows are ordered from the largest bucket down to the smallest.

How many buckets are shown

Each breakdown shows the ten largest buckets. City and country lists can be very long, and past the tenth row the bars stopped being readable, so the list is cut.

Why the percentages do not add up to 100%

A percentage is the bucket's count divided by the whole breakdown — not by the ten buckets on screen. So when ten of forty cities are shown, those ten percentages add up to less than 100%. That is not a calculation error: the remaining share sits in the buckets that were not listed.

A bucket whose count is zero never enters the list.

A concrete example

A gym writes its content for men aged 30 to 45. Looking at the audience section it finds:

Followers / Age: the largest bucket is 25-34 (41%), the second is 18-24 (27%).
Followers / Gender: Female 58%, Male 40%, Unspecified 2%.
Engaged audience / City: two of the top three cities are in other provinces.

Three decisions follow: the language and imagery should speak to a younger audience, there is no content aimed at women, and shipping information should be moved up for the out-of-town audience. All three can be taken from this section alone.

Turning the audience data into decisions

Looking at the bars is not enough; each breakdown feeds a different decision.

Age — It sets your content's language, its visual tone and your price range. The two largest buckets tell you who your copy is actually speaking to.
Gender — It affects your product selection and your campaign calendar. If the split is the opposite of what you expected, test a revised content plan for a month.
City — It tells you how prominent your shipping, delivery time and store address information needs to be. If the out-of-town share is high, move that information into your greeting message.
Country — It tells you whether your account's language and currency need a review. If your automation copy is single-language, the second country here is an opportunity.

Read the gap between Followers and Engaged audience separately: if the engaged audience is younger or based elsewhere, your content is travelling beyond your follower base. That is the most direct signal of which content wins you new followers.

To carry a decision from the audience data into your automation copy, see Variables and placeholders.

What the section says when empty, and why

When no data arrives the section prints one sentence:

"Audience breakdown has not arrived yet. Meta only provides it for accounts with at least 100 followers."

There are three possible reasons:

The account has fewer than 100 followers. Meta never returns demographics below that threshold. This is a restriction on Meta's side and it applies to every tool that uses their interface.
The insights permission has not been approved yet. You will also see a yellow banner at the top of the screen.
The demographics run has not happened yet. Demographics are refreshed once a day; if the account was just connected, wait a day.

Meta may also hide a bucket when its headcount is very small — that is why age and gender breakdowns arrive incomplete on small accounts.

Limitations and known issues

The period picker does not affect this section. The distribution is a lifetime figure; Meta's own window is the last 30 days.
At most ten buckets are shown per breakdown. The rest never enter the list.
Meta returns at most 45 values per breakdown. On accounts spread across many countries the long tail never arrives.
The 100-follower threshold is Meta's rule. It cannot be switched off from the panel.
Gender is limited to three values. Meta returns single-letter codes (M/F/U); the panel writes them as Male, Female and Unspecified.
City and country names arrive with Meta's own spelling. The panel does not rewrite them, so local and English spellings can appear mixed.
Demographics refresh once a day. Pressing Refresh does not re-fetch them every time; if their turn has not come, only the daily metrics are updated.

As your audience grows these bars sharpen, and they remain the fastest way to see which content is reaching whom.