Your Guide to Facebook Insights
October 19, 2011
As a page administrator on Facebook you have access to some pretty valuable information regarding the activity on your Facebook Page. Facebook Insights uses data about your fans and the interaction they have with your page to produce easy-to-understand charts and graphs. Why does this matter to you? Paying attention to your fans’ responses to the content you publish and the activity on your page can be extremely helpful in maintaining or increasing your fan engagement on Facebook. Although Facebook is currently in the process of re-vamping their insights feature, here is a quick tutorial of the existing Facebook Insights.
When you’re logged in as a page administrator, the link to Insights is located either under the list of administrators on the right side of your profile, or below your profile picture from the home screen. Insights is broken into two sections, User Insights and Interaction Insights.
User Insights
I often hear social media marketers say that it’s not about the number of “Likes” your page has. Well that may be true, but it’s awfully hard not to pay attention to these metrics. And you should! User Insights shows you where you stand with your fans on Facebook.
Frequency
The first graph in Insights shows you the number of daily, weekly, and monthly users of your page. In the course of a day, week, or month, this graph shows you how many people are viewing your status update or you page. To me, this graph is motivation to keep up with my Facebook activity. As you start to slack off on your Facebook activity, the number of users goes down. I hate to see the drop-off in users so I’m constantly working to make sure that graph doesn’t plummet.
As you can see from this graph, the number of users has spiked at the end of the time fram shown. There could be several reasons for this: Maybe you tagged a high-profile page in a status update and all of their fans viewed the post. Perhaps you posted something that received an abnormally high number of “shares.” Either way, there was clearly something different about the content posted that day to get that kind of spike in activity. Pay attention to these spikes and try to learn what you can from them.
User Activity
The next graph is a breakdown of your daily active users. It shows you the amount of interaction you had with your fans on each day. When I go back and review my Insights, I look at peeks and dips in the graph. I look for days that generated the most unique page views, comments, or likes, and then I go back to that day to see what I posted to generate the flurry of activity. Try to figure out what it was about that particular post(s) that sparked your fans’ interest, and give them more of it.
Interaction Insights
Interaction Insights goes into more detail regarding the activity on your fan page. You can view the data in graph format, or a more detailed summary in a table format like the one below. The table summarizes each status update you posted over the past month with the corresponding number of impressions and feedback for each post.
People Talking About This
People Talking About This is a new metric Facebook is offering that is not only visible to page administrators, but also anyone who visits your fan page. This new feature is located right below the number of people who like your page. It encompasses the total number if interactions on your fan page, including likes, wall comments, mentions, shares, and check-ins. It’s meant to give your fans an idea of how interactive your page is and essentially, how influential you are on Facebook.
Use Facebook Insights to stay in tune with your fans and find out what type of content they want to see from you. It’s also a great way to know where you stand and gauge your performance in the social media environment. Stay tuned for more information when the newest additions to Facebook Insights come out soon!
