In many ways, Facebook has become the most important advertising platform in the world. As the world’s most successful social networking platform, Facebook can provide businesses with a direct line to over a billion people. Moreover, as search engines continue to try and provide the best possible search results, having a well-established presence on Facebook is only getting more important by the day. That’s why millions of businesses from around the globe have flocked to Facebook to help build their brand. Of course, this also means that marketing on Facebook is becoming highly competitive. If you want to stand out from your competition, you need to know how to hone your social media content strategy. Thankfully, Facebook’s Page Insights feature has absolutely everything you need to do just that. With the wealth of information provided by Facebook Insights, it’s easy to learn exactly what you need to do in order to engage existing readers while reaching out to new ones.
What is Facebook Insights?
The Insights feature is Facebook’s way of preparing data about your Facebook page and its readers to help inform strategic marketing decisions. It’s part of a broader effort by Facebook to streamline its advertising services and make it as easy as possible for businesses to thrive on Facebook. Insights is available from the administration panel, which presents you with comprehensive information about your page’s likes, reach, visits, posts, and of course your readers. While this data can be invaluable for those who know how to use it, some of these metrics are more difficult to understand than others. Below we’ll take a look at the most important metrics that Insights can provide, and how they can be applied to building your business and attracting new clients.
Likes
The most fundamental metric on Facebook is the like. Using likes, you can monitor the growth and popularity your page. They’re principally used to ensure that whatever marketing tactics you’re using are actually producing results, with increases in popularity that you can actually measure on a daily basis. Paying attention to any spikes in your like data is one of the most reliable ways to determine what types of posts are contributing the most to the success of your page.
Reach
The next metric the Insights page offers is called reach, which is the total number of users who see your content. Reach can be either organic, meaning occurring naturally through user searches, or paid, meaning the result of paid Facebook advertising. Generally speaking, reach can help you learn how many people you’re actually connecting with on Facebook, and how strongly those users are engaged with your page. Reach is also connected to a tab called external references, which shows you the sites that people use to find your page, and can be used to help redirect the way that people find your content online.
Visits
The visits metric is somewhat self-explanatory. Visits are essentially a hit counter for the number of times any given tab on your Facebook page was visited by a user. Visits can be used in conjunction with the viewed tabs page in order to give you a vivid picture of what people are viewing on your page. This allows you to figure out what people are actually doing on your page, and if they’re getting all the information you want them to connect with. This also enables you to find out where your fans are spending most of their time, and adjust how to deliver information to accommodate usage patterns.
Posts
Like visits, the posts section of Insights is also somewhat self-explanatory. Posts helps you catalogue the content you’ve posted and measure user engagement with specific entries. These metrics are useful for comparing one post to another to determine what kind of content is getting the most traction with your readership, and which types of posts aren’t well received. Using this data, you can analyze which of your posts are earning the highest engagement with your readers. This is particularly valuable for determining how well different types of content are performing, whether its photos, videos, or your status updates. You can also sort by post type, which is useful if you want to compare the success of certain types of posts. For example, by sorting through video posts alone, Insights provides you with the data necessary to determine if your videos are outperforming your infographics, if your longer videos are beating out your shorter videos, and even what type of content is doing the most for expanding the reach of your page. Furthermore, if you combine this information with available data regarding loss of subscriptions to your page, you can look for correlations between posts you’ve made and losses to your following. Just keep in mind that followers will always come and go, so generally it’s not worth dwelling on these statistics unless the loss is substantial.
People
Last but certainly not least, there’s the “people” metric, which is an overview of your readership demographic. This includes a lot of essential information, like where your readers are from and how old they are. Every serious marketing effort critically relies on understanding your demographics. While you can make broad assumptions about the type of people that should in theory be engaged with your page, understanding what kind of demographics you actually have is another matter altogether. The people metric is also useful for determining if you’re actually reaching your target demographic. If you’re looking to reach women between 18 and 35, this metric can help you figure out how well you’re actually reaching that goal. This allows you to gain insight into the actual personas of your readers, and that information enables you to craft content that’s optimally tailored for your specific readership.
Success with Insights
Like with any marketing campaign, what you should track and measure ultimately depends on what you want to achieve. But regardless of your ultimate objective, a few minutes with Insights can prepare you to make informed decisions about your users, and ultimately create the kind of effective and engaging user interactions that convert to sales.
