Measuring and analyzing your Page with Facebook Insights
Facebook is a goldmine of information about who Likes you, what their interests are, and what works. When you log into your Page, you’ll see the Insights link on the left hand side. Insights is Facebook’s analysis tool which profiles your Page fans, their age, gender, where they’re from, what they’ve viewed, and so on.
There are numerous analysis tools available from third parties, too, so if you’re a data junkie, you’ll be well served but Facebook’s free stats are a great resource. It’s not entirely altruistic on Facebook’s part. From Insight, you’re just a click away to creating and running a Facebook ad campaign to give your Page a lift.
To access your Page’s Insights data:
- Login to your Facebook Page
- If the Insights summary box is visible in the Admin panel, select the See all link on its title bar
- If the Insights summary box is not visible, click on Edit Page from the Admin panel
- Select Update Info
- Select Insights from the menu on the left hand side
You’ll be taken to your Page’s Insights which looks like this:
Click to enlarge
You’ll notice there are three key numbers that are tracked and charted, both overall and for each post on your Page.
- Likes: The number of people who Like your Page.
- People Talking About This: The number of unique users interacting with a post or Page in some way, eg commenting, liking, mentioning, answering a question, recommending.
- Reach: The number of unique people who have seen your content over the period.
If your efforts are successful, your reach should be greater than your actual number of fans: you ought to be seeing people talking about you and this extending well beyond your own fan network.
Of course, if things aren’t going as well as you’d like, Facebook has an answer to that too: Advertise. You can do that from within the Insights tab.
Third party analytics tools for Facebook
Facebook Insights provides good analytic reporting but there are several third party tools that can dig deep into Facebook data — your own and the pages of other companies you’d like to track. Some of them provide a limited free service but to get anything substantial, you’ll have to pay a few dollars.
Some examples:
- PageLever (http://pagelever.com)
- Quintly: (http://www.quintly.com)
- Simply Measured: (http://simplymeasured.com)
These services can provide historical as well as current data, giving you the opportunity to track trends review Pages from competitors to see what has worked in terms of fan engagement, growth in Likes, etc.
Google Analytics includes social media tracking statistics relating to your own website, providing detailed analysis of traffic that originates from social media sites.
Resources
Find out more about this topic on our Digital Publishing 101 useful resources site.
