There are a plethora of paid and free Facebook tools out there dabbling in Facebook metrics; Hootsuite, Klout and Conversocial are getting in on the game but Facebook has made a significant investment in optimising their own Facebook Insights and they are really useful for anyone managing a Facebook page or pages.
What are Facebook Insights for?
Facebook Insights have a threefold purpose:
- Understand how your page is performing overall
- Optimise how you publish to and manage your Facebook page
- Find out more about your audience/community
Which metrics matter?
Friends of Fans
Why does Facebook show this? As we’ve covered several times since our Facebook event, 85. Given that if a user likes, comments or engages with that content their friends can see the interaction – and the content itself – this is where your potential comes from for distribution. So, Frends of Fans is showing you your entire possible network.
People talking about this
People talking about this is just a fancy way of saying everyone who has Liked your Page, commented, answered a question, tagged your page etc. Note this is number of unique users, so doesn’t equal total number of engagements. So someone may have Liked your page, left several comments, tagged a photo and checked themselves in over the period of a week and that would be counted as 1. It gives you an indication of how many individuals you reached in a week.
*Note: Total Likes and People talking about this are visible to anyone visiting the page so users, and even competitors, can see how popular your Page is.
How Insights helps you optimise how you publish and manage your page
Your overall goal with running your Facebook page is to engage with an audience. As mentioned above, Facebook’s opportunity is the ‘viral’ distribution of content via interaction with content either being actively distributed to friends of friends or seen via friends’ interaction with content.
Facebook Insights now gives more granular detail in to each peice of content to help you find answers to questions like; Do fans respond better to video or pictures? Do they engage more with certain topics? Do they like answering questions or doing a quiz?
Reach
The new Reach graph is really useful to tell you which channel (paid, organic or ‘viral’) reaches the audience.
Understand your audience
The final part of Facebook Insights is understanding your community. This is often overlooked as brands focus on straight acquisition but if you are going to justify your activity on Facebook, and aim for a high level of engagements, it’s imperative you understand just who is the audience you’ve managed to attract.
A classic Insight I’ve seen time and time again is pages which have grown via promotions and claim high levels of engagement but are in reality doing lame tactics like asking generic questions (A favourite of mine was seeing “Comment on this post if you’re happy it’s Friday” to which a gleeful, and might I suggest zombie-like, community started leaving comments saying “me!”).
Your Facebook demographics should reflect your core customer demographics. For example if your customer base is predominantly female, offering software as prize, may attract more men than women to Like your page (please don’t lynch me for the gender stereotyping). Likewise posting a video of a celebrity in a bikini, even if it the content is aimed towards women, may also attract the wrong kind of audience (I’m going to go ahead and guess young males).
You should aim to profile your Facebook demographic and aim to create & post content which is most likely to attract, retain, and engage them and their friends. Having a target audience in mind will help you better refine your content strategy and you can use your Facebook Audience Insights to check you’re on track.
[Image: Gigaom]
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