You’re already using Facebook to market your business, but are you harnessing your Facebook Page Insights to bring your social media marketing to new heights?
With the power of Insights, your business can understand the performance of its Page, optimize what you publish and more completely comprehend who makes up your Facebook audience.
Access your Insights by either clicking the Insights tab on the left hand side of your Page, or by going to https://www.facebook.com/insights/.
Once there, you’ll encounter an Overview with four important metrics. They are:
- Total Likes – This is an easy one! It’s the number of unique people who like your page.
- Friends of Fans – This is the number of unique people who are friends with people who have liked your age. This number represents the people you could potentially reach if all your fans were talking about your business. Remember, word of mouth spreads quickly online.
- People Talking About This - This is the number of people creating stories about your page. What’s a story? A story happens when someone likes your page; posts to your wall; likes, comments or shares one of your Page’s posts; mentions your Page; tags your Page in a photo; checks in at your Place or recommends your Place.
- Weekly Total Reach - This is the number of unique people who have seen any content associated with your Page. This includes Ads and Sponsored Stories that point back to your Facebook Page.
Within the Overview, you’re able to view performance of particular posts, an especially useful feature for seeing what resonates with your audience.
The default view of your posts is set chronologically, with the most recent posts appearing first. However, to see which posts actually worked to engage users, sort by Engaged Users, Talking About This or Virality.
What do these numbers mean?
- Reach – This is the number of unique people who have seen your post. By now you likely understand that only a portion of your Facebook fans see your status updates. Facebook’s EdgeRank determines which posts show in user’s news feed with various factors, including the amount of likes and comments on the post.
- Engaged Users – This is the number of unique people who have clicked on your post within 28 days of your post’s publication.
- Talking About This – This is the number of unique people who have created a story from your Page post by interacting with it within 28 days of your post’s publication.
- Virality - This is the percentage of people who created a story from your post out of the total number of unique people who saw it, or Talking About This divided by Reach. This is a great way to measure which posts engaged the highest % of people who actually saw the post.
By viewing which posts gave you the most Engaged Users or highest Virality, you can start to hone in on which posts your audience appreciates the most, and publish more items that are in same vein. You should be constantly testing and trying to write a more engaging, viral post that captivates your audience.
Now, onto insights you can glean from Likes.
The Likes tab helps you understand who your fans are and how you acquired them.
The first thing you’ll see is a demographic chart of your users, breaking your audience down by sex, age group, country, city and language.
Understanding the demographics of your Facebook fans can let you see if your Facebook Page has attracted your target market. If an important target is under-represented, like Female 18-24 year olds, create a targeted Facebook ad to grow your selected market.
Want to know where your Likes are coming from? Scroll down to view the sources of your Likes over time and see which method is most effective.
Don’t forget to check out your Unlikes too. Tracking the when and why of your Unlikes can help refine your posting strategy – the #1 reason why people Unlike a Page is that the brand publishes too many posts.
Understand your Reach to learn who you’re reaching and how you’re reaching them.
Your Reach gives the same demographic information on the people your content reaches as your Likes does. More importantly, you can view how many users have viewed your content over time and how you have reached those users.
- Organic - This is the number of unique people who saw any content about your Page in their News Feed or on your Page.
- Paid - This is the number of unique people who saw an ad or sponsored story that pointed to your Page.
- Viral - This is the number of unique people who saw content about your Page from a story published by a friend.
The Talking About This tab shows who is talking about your business on Facebook and what type of stories they are telling about you.
Make sure to sort by different types of stories to see the type of information that’s being shared by your fans on Facebook.
To dig into your data further, Export it to Excel. Once you have it in Excel, you can manipulate the data and gain more insights into your Facebook marketing.
Export your data either by Page or Post level, and select any time frame, as long as it’s after July 19, 2011. Page level data provides aggregated data about your Page, while Post level data provides data on each of your individual posts.
Finally, don’t forget to measure how your social traffic performs when it comes to your website using Google Analytics Social Reports.
Use your Facebook insights data to understand your audience, measure the performance of your posts and improve your social media marketing.
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About Mary Chevalier
Mary is Co-Founder of SalesBlend and works closely with clients to help them use digital marketing to achieve measurable business results. Follow Mary on Twitter @MaryVChevalier.