Social media is a strong tool to connect your business or brand with your audience. However, posting without knowing who your audience is or what kind of content they want is like driving in the dark without headlights—unnecessary and downright dangerous.
Fortunately, Facebook has a strong and free analytics tool—Facebook Insights—that permits you to easily measure the performance of your business’s page. Insights tracks likes, page views, reach, and more. It doesn’t matter what your purposes are on Facebook— building brand awareness, communicating with clients, or gaining followers to take an action—Facebook insights will help you understand who your most engaged audience is and the way they are interacting with your page.
Why use Facebook Insights?
With over 1.4 billion active users daily, Facebook is a social media platform that has incredible reach. However, thanks to a number of large changes to its algorithm, Facebook prioritizes content from friend and family. Meaning it’s harder than ever to get your audience’s attention on the platform.
That is where Facebook Insights comes in. Understanding your Facebook page’s metrics provides you with the information you should ensure you’re putting the right content in front of the right audience. It helps you work with Fb’s algorithm instead of just sending content into the void and hoping somebody will see it.
To discover each of the key areas Facebook insights measures, we put together a guide to Facebook Insights which will help you understand how and why each metric is necessary to your overall social media strategy.
Use Facebook Insights
To get started, go to your brand’s page and click on “Insights.”
From there, you will end up on your dashboard, which is split into sections.
Overview
The overview section offers you a big image view of everything that’s occurred on your page in the last week. Particularly it tracks 3 necessary measurements:
- Page likes: How many people liked your page over the last 7 days.
- Post reach: How many people saw all of the content you posted over the last 7 days.
- Engagement: How many people liked, shared, or commented on your posts over the last 7 days.
Tip: in case your social media purpose is to develop your following as rapidly as possible, you could view how your page likes and reach have changed over the last seven days. Then when you see a pattern growing or want to learn more, you could dig deeper into other sections.
Page Likes
This part of your Insights page breaks down the total number of likes your page has received. It looks at 3 key metrics:
- Total Likes: The total number of page likes over a 28 day period.
- Net Likes: The total number of new likes (that means new likes minus unlikes).
- Where Those Likes Happened: Where each of your new likes came from, like from visiting your page directly, or from a page suggestion, or from desktop or mobile.
Tip: The Page Likes section is a superb place both to monitor the overall growth of your followers and understand the source of those likes, like organic posts on your page or a Fb advert campaign. You could narrow your focus to particular time periods by clicking or dragging to choose a date range on any of the graphs. This could help you isolate the effects of a specific advert campaign or series of posts.
Post Reach
The Post Reach section provides you with an overview of how many people saw content material from your page and the way they interacted with it. This info is broken down into 4 key metrics:
- Post Reach: The total number of people who were shown a particular post. This part is also broken down into organic and paid reach.
- Likes, Comments, and Shares: How much positive engagement your page got. The higher this number is, the more people shall be shown your posts in the future.
- Hide, Report as Spam, and Unlikes: How many people engaged negatively with your page. High levels of negative engagement will cut down the number of people that see your posts in the future.
- Total Reach: The total number of people who saw any type of activity from your page.
The info in this section allows you to tie the content of your posts to different trends in your graph. If you want to track a particular time period, just click on any of the charts. A pop-up will appear to let you know which posts people saw during the chosen time period.
Tip: When you see a spike in activity, you could click on or drag to choose that section of the graph to find out what posts were active during that time. It will help you hone in on what sort of content is most popular with your audience (or which sorts of posts could be hurting your performance).
Visits
This section helps you to see how many people are coming to your page and the place they are coming from. It’s broken down into two key metrics:
- Page and Tab Visits: The total number of times each of your pages or tabs was seen.
- External Referrers: The total number of times visitors came to your page from a site other than Fb.
Tip: The External Referrers section also lists the highest non-Fb sites that send visitors to your page. If you want to see how those external referrers have performed over time, you could choose sections of the graph to compare time periods. Usually these sites will be familiar, however, when you see a new website it might be a great chance for a partnership.
Posts
This section is divided into three metrics:
- When Your Fans are Online: When the people who like your page are on Fb viewing content.
- Post Kind: How successful different kinds of posts were based on the average reach and audience engagement.
- Top Posts From Pages You Watch: Engagement stats of posts made by the pages you are watching. It is a great method to keep track of how your competitors are approaching similar audiences or content material.
Tip: The Posts section provides you with a strong range of metrics that permit you to review and reply to the kind of content resonates most with your viewers. Do they like links to articles? Pictures? Or something else? This knowledge could help you get more likes or even create great Facebook ads.
You could also learn what the best time of day and day of the week to post is. Engaging with the right content at the right time is one of the greatest methods to get more likes on Facebook.
Video
This section uses 3 different metrics to provide you with a sense of what sort of video content is most successful on your page:
- Video Views: The total number of times your page’s videos were seen for at least 3 seconds.
- 30-Second Views: The number of times your page’s videos were seen for at least 30 seconds (in case your video is lower than 30 seconds, it will measure how many times people saw 97 % of that video).
- Top Videos: The most-viewed videos on your page that were seen for 3 seconds or more.
As of 2016, over 8 billion videos a day are seen on Fb. And 4 years from now, video content is poised to account for 80% of all consumer internet traffic. So understanding which videos are popular with your viewers and the way video content works for your brand is vital to your business’s success.
People
The final tab on your dashboard will help you get to know your audience better by looking at 3 different metrics:
- Your Fans: Who’s liking your page with stats like their age, gender, language, and location.
- People Reached: Stats on the people Fb served your page to over the last 28 days.
- People Engaged: Who interacted positively with your page over the last 28 days, either via liking, commenting, or sharing your posts.
When you get to know who your most engaged audience is, you could decide what sort of content to make or increase to particular audiences. This is the first step to making a comprehensive Facebook marketing strategy and running a Facebook ad campaign.
Facebook analytics tips & tricks
When you have a great understanding of the data provided by your Facebook page analytics, those tips and tricks will assist you to get even more out of Insights:
- Check back often. Your Fb analytics page is constantly updating so you will want to take note of any patterns you see growing.
- Download the free Fb Pages Manager App so you could communicate with your viewers on the go and keep track of everything happening on your Fb page, even when you are away from your laptop.
- Target your posts to particular audiences and connect with the people who matter to your brand.
- Update relevant information. Ensure that people could contact you by making certain that your site, phone number, and any other necessary info are up-to-date.
- Request an easy-to-find Fb page URL by going to your General Account Settings. We suggest facebook.com/yourbusinessname.
- Schedule your posts for when your viewers will be online.
- Download data about your page from the past 180 days by clicking Export Data on the upper right of the overview tab. Just select the particular date range and field.