Having a Facebook Page for your business can be fun and exciting, especially when you watch your number of ‘Likes' grow and fan base interacting with your individual posts. But how do you determine if your Page is really a success, who is actually engaging with you, and if the content you're posting is effective or not? Using the stats and engagement metrics from Facebook Insights can help answer many of these questions.
What Are "Facebook Insights"?
So exactly what is Insights? According to Facebook's own words, “Facebook Insights provides Facebook Page owners and Facebook Platform developers with metrics around their content. By understanding and analyzing trends within user growth, demographics of people, consumption of content, analytics, and creation of content, Page owners and Platform developers are better equipped to improve their business with Facebook.”
If you are an admin for a Facebook Page, you can access this data rather easily. Unfortunately, there's a lot of data available, and not all of it will be useful to every business. In this blog, we'll guide you through some of the most important features and options of this tool to help you meet your marketing goals.
Step 1
On your Facebook Page, click on Insights on the left side of your screen.
Step 2
The Facebook Insights summary page allows you to monitor the most important metrics, including “Likes” (total number of people who have liked your Page), “Friends of Fans” (number of people you can potentially reach if everyone you are connected to talks about your Page to their friends), “People Talking About This” (number of unique people who have created content about your Page on Facebook in the past week) and “Weekly Total Reach” (number of people who have seen your message).
See also Facebook EdgeRank Explained.
Note: You can scroll over the “?” symbols behind each metric to get a reminder about their function.
The first graph shows how your Page's published posts influence the number of people talking about you, and how it impacts your overall reach. If the graph shows your number falling, you need to reevaluate your types of posts and post more engaging content to your wall.
Below the graph lists your most recent posts and charts their effectiveness. You can view each of your posts in more detail by clicking on the blue text.
The percentage to the far right is the Virality. It measures how likely a person is to share something about your posts with their friends. This is a useful number to measure what type of posts your audience responds to most, in other words, your post engagement and post with reactions.
Step 3
Underneath Insights are several tabs that go deeper into analyzing your metrics. Likes, Reach, Talking About This & Check-Ins (depending on your type of business). Knowing these metrics can greatly help any marketer formulate a successful social media marketing strategy as well as make strategic marketing decisions.
The first one is “Likes”. This page breaks down the people who like your page into male/female and their age group. It also shows where your likes came from.
This graph will also show your unlikes. While you will always have some unlikes, watch for a spike in numbers and try to find a reason for it. Usually, it will correspond to a specific Page activity.
Step 4
The next category is “Reach”. The first graph shows who your posts reached and what countries and cities they are from and their language.
The second graph shows how your posts reached those people. You can view the metrics by All Page Content, Your Posts, and Stories by Others.
The graph on the left shows whether that reach came from Organic, Paid, or Viral methods, plus a Total graph line. You can check or uncheck any of these lines to make them appear or disappear.
The chart on the right shows the unique users by Frequency.
Step 5
The next graph depicts Visits to Your Page by Page Views. The blue line represents the number of times your page was viewed on each day from a certain period of time. The gold line represents the number of unique visitors who viewed your page each day from a certain time period.
Step 6
The next metric category is “Talking About This”. This shows you who is talking about your page. You can also see demographics about the people who like your Page and the people you reach.
Note: Demographic data for People Talking About This is only available when more than 30 people were talking about this Page in the seven days preceding the last day of your selected date range.
The bottom two graphs represent how people are talking about your Page by story type. The Mentions and Tags drop-down menu allows you to choose from All Stories, Page Likes, Stories From Your Posts, Mentions, and Photo Tags and Posts by Others.
The blue-lined graph is Talking About This (the number of unique who created a story about your page from a certain period of time) and the gold-lined graph is Viral Reach (the number of people who saw a story published by your friend about your Page from a certain period of time)
Step 7
The last category is “Check-Ins”. This is only used if you have a brick & mortar building. This charts the people who have checked in at your place of business.
Note: The demographic data for Check-Ins is only available when more than 30 people checked in at your Place in the seven days preceding the last day of your selected date range.
The bottom graph on the Check-Ins page shows whether people checked in via a mobile device or from the Facebook website.
You're now ready to start using Insights. You can export your Insights data directly to Excel (.xls) or comma-separated text format (.csv). You can select Page-level data or Page post-level data and any date range.
You can also access resources under the action button.
Questions? Contact Us!
Has the Facebook Insights data helped you become aware of how your content and marketing efforts affect your Page's success? What data is most useful to you? Please let us know. We want to hear from you!
