Facebook Insights can help you improve your social media marketing efforts.
We all know how important Facebook business pages can be for connecting with consumers and establishing a relationship with the people who follow your brand. Through creative status updates, personal photos and informative links, Facebook can truly be the ultimate content-sharing platform for your business… if you know how to successfully measure all of the hard work you are putting in.
Facebook Insights had always notorious for being a complete mess. Sure, there was a ton of valuable data hidden within graphs, charts and spread sheets, but it had always been a complicated maze of clicks and downloads trying to separate the helpful information from the useless data.
Luckily, in early 2012, Facebook rolled out some new metrics that help to give businesses better insight into how to improve their results and how to create better experiences on their brand pages. At the very basics, these metrics allow to you see how many people have liked, commented on or shared your posts, and with the new Facebook Insight updates, more comprehensive data and metrics are now available through the Insights API.
So, where can you find these metrics? They are available for Facebook business pages under the drop-down Admin Panel section at the top of the page. There, under the section Insights, you can select ‘See All’ to get a sneak peak at your data. However, to view the full scope of your social media marketing efforts, simply click the ‘Export Data’ button to download a full spread sheet of your metrics.
However, while the export option allows you to access endless amounts of data about your Facebook page, the never ending sheets and columns can be overwhelming. To help you get a better idea of what you should be looking for, we have put together a basic list of Facebook Insight data that you should be paying attention to in order to improve your social media marketing efforts:
Friends of Fans
You can always look at how many people are fans of your business profile, and what percentage of your fans are viewing your Facebook posts. However, Friends of Fans allows you to see the entire number of people who could be seeing your content. That is not just the total amount of fans that your page has, but also the amount of friends of each of these people who may notice your post when they like or comment on it.
Average Organic Reach Per Post
Unfortunately, not every post that you upload to Facebook will be visible to 100% of your fans through their timeline. In fact, it is very rare for many brand pages to reach their fans organically. To see how often your individual posts are reaching your fans organically, look at the “28 Days Organic Reach” metric located under the Key Metrics tab in the Excel sheet. Once you have this number, you can also divide it by the total number of times you posted within that time period to get a rough estimate of the average amount of organic reach you get per post.
Page Consumption
With all of the content that you are posting, how much of it do you think is actually being clicked and consumed? This data doesn’t focus on the number of people who are consuming your content, but rather the number of total page consumption by each individual. For instance, one fan can click on multiple posts on your page, so you need a metric that counts these two clicks as two, rather than just one. Page consumption allows you to truly understand how many times each post is being clicked, no matter how many individuals may have done the clicking.
Average Engagement Per Post
With the new Facebook Insights interface, you are able to see the number of engaged users that you receive for each individual post―i.e. how many comments, likes, shares or mentions were generated. To calculate the average engagement for each post on your page, simple divide the metric “28 days page stories” by the total number of posts in the time period.
Are there any other metrics within Facebook Insights that you find to be a useful tool for growing your social media marketing campaign? Be sure to share your thoughts with us in the comments below.
