Learn How to Use Facebook’s Insights to Make Your Business Page More Effective
If you want to understand how your audience is interacting with your business’s Facebook Page, then you need to keep a watch on your Page’s Insights data. Facebook provides users with a large amount of data surrounding their business Page, all with the download of a spreadsheet or a peek at their main Insights page. The sheer amount of data offered can be overwhelming, and business owners don’t need to be concerned with every data point.
Learn how to comb through the numbers to focus your analysis on the most useful data, so that you can effortlessly assess the progress of your social media efforts.
Getting started with Facebook Insights
Step number one: make sure at least 30 people like your Page. Until then you won’t be able to access your data. Once you’ve breached that milestone you can find your Insights on your company’s Facebook Page. Simply click “Insights” at the top of the Page.
This will bring you to an Overview page, where you have two main options:
- Download your Insights by clicking “Export” in the top-right corner of your Page. You can view data for the Page and data for individual Posts, and you can specify which date ranges you’d like to review. Once you’ve opened the file you’ll see tons of metrics about your Page’s performance.
- Skip the download and review the data from the various tabs, right from your Facebook Page’s account. This relatively new feature provides tabs for Overview, Likes, Reach, Visits, Posts, and People. Business owners who are just diving into measuring their social media efforts can learn a lot from these datasets, negating the need to pick and choose information from the large spreadsheet download.
Understanding your Page’s Facebook Insights
Once you click on the link that brings you to your Insights data, these are the metrics that you’ll see:
The Overview page is a great place to start. You’ll see several graphs that show data for how many people like your Page, how engaged people were with the content you’ve been posting, data from your five most recent posts, and even a “Pages to Watch” section at the bottom that compares your Page’s performance to that of similar pages (you’ll have to add the Pages of your competitors, as Facebook doesn’t do that for you). Keep in mind that an Engaged person is anyone who likes, comments on, or shares a post from your Page.
You can then click on each graph to gain access to more in-depth data.
The Likes section dives deeper into how many people liked your page, and how many have unliked it. Net Likes are important to pay attention to—this metric shows the number of new likes versus the number of unlikes. If you notice a surge in unlikes around a certain dates, for example, you can go back to check what you were posting from your Page. Did the content drive people away? The last graph shows you where your Page likes came from, which can show you which traffic sources are driving your Page’s growth.
Next, you’ll review the Reach section. This shows you how many users saw your posts, how many likes/comments/shares each post netted, and it even measures how many people hid your posts, reported them as spam, or unliked your page. The total reach portion at the end aggregates the number of people who saw any activity from your Page.
Visits is another important data point. Use this tab to see how people interact with your Page. See how many people views your Timeline tab, Photos tab, and any other tabs that you have set up. It also shows how many people came to your Page from outside of Facebook, which is useful if you link to your social media accounts from your business’s website, or from other sources.
The Posts tab also contains tons of helpful information about the performance of all of your posts. The first tab within this tab shows you when your fans are online so that you can post during the best times. From the “All Posts Published” section at the bottom of the page you can sort through a variety of metrics. Click the downward-facing arrow next to the “Reach” and “Likes, Comments & Shares” categories for even more options, like organic reach versus paid reach. For even more data, return to the top of this section and click “Post Types” to see how different types of posts performed.
Finally, explore the People tab. Similar to the Posts tab, this section contains sub-sections for Your Fans, People Reached, and People Engaged. On the Your Fans section you can see the demographics of your fans, including their gender and where they live. The People Reached and People Engaged sections are equally simple to analyze. These sections break your audience down by age, gender, location, and language so that you can see who is viewing your Page’s content to determine whether you’re reaching your business’s target audience.
Using benchmarks on Facebook Insights
To the right of the Likes, Reach, and Visits tabs you’ll see a section for “Benchmarks.” These help you compare your average performance over time, allowing you to determine whether your marketing efforts are resulting in more likes, engagement, and more.
Of course, you could also download the massive spreadsheet that features all of the data you could ever need about your business’s Page. However, the improved Insights data that you can access right from your Page contains plenty of information to help you reach your social media goals.
