Why you should be using Facebook Insights

Did you know that if you have a Facebook page, you can find out how successful it is by using Facebook’s free Insights tool? Most people who start up a Facebook page have no idea that Facebook provide free stats for you to use to track the progress of your Facebook page. In fact, most people might not even know why they would want to use Facebook stats for their page. There are a number of great benefits to using Insights and I’ve outlined a few below to help you get started.

What is Facebook Insights

Facebook Insights is basically Facebook’s own stats measurement package that comes with Facebook pages. If you have a Facebook page, you can use Insights to measure your page’s growth, demographics, popular content and more. The really great thing about using Facebook Insights is that it allows you to benchmark your page from day one and look at how you have grown, or identify the areas you need to work on to grow. Insights is totally free to use also and it gives you lots of great information that is worthy of some of the paid for options you can get elsewhere.

What type of things can Insights teach me?

Facebook Insights is really useful if you want to know how to improve the interactions on your page and increase your Facebook page traffic. Insights tracks everything, from daily active users to referring sites and tapping into this intelligence can help you shape your Facebook content. Often people with Facebook pages will simply put up content as it comes to them, with no real strategy or plan behind what they’re doing. Using Insights can show you what content is working and what isn’t, making it easier to write content that is suitable. If you’re interested in learning about the type of people who are looking at your page, Insights can help with this also. It will show you demographics, locations, language and more about the users who find your page and this is key marketing information.

Is Insights difficult to use?

Not at all. Insights is a very user-friendly application. You can get to it by clicking on ‘View Insights’ on the right hand side of your Facebook page. From here you’ll get taken to the ‘page overview’ section, which is like a dashboard with all your top level information on it. This dashboard will tell you how many new likes you’ve had, how many post views you’ve had and how many interactions have occurred on your page. It presents this in a really nice graph format, so it’s easy to read and understand. If you start to delve further into this top level data, you’ll be able to gain more usable intelligence from your Facebook page, helping you understand what you need to do to get more ‘likes’.

What else can Insights do?

Insights can delve much deeper into your Facebook page stats than most people even need. By clicking on the ‘users’ section, it shows you in graph format your daily, weekly and monthly active users. This is an important metric to consider, as you want to always ensure you have active, engaged fans. If this number is low, or drops off, then it could mean that you need to rethink your content to keep people interested. The ‘users’ section also shows you all your main demographics. Here you can see what sex and age-range your content appeals to. It’s presented in an easy to use format also, so you can see whether your content is attracting your target audience. If you’re promoting your Facebook page through other websites, you may want to know which referring sites are sending people to your page. Facebook Insights lets you see this easily, counting to the exact number where people are coming from to you page. The ‘interactions’ section let’s you see which posts have had the most feedback or have the highest impressions. Feedback is classed as when someone likes, comments or shares your post. Impressions is how many times your post has shown up on your wall and the wall of others. This is great if you are trying out new content and want to know what engages your audience most. Always check this out and see what content people enjoy seeing from you on your Facebook page.

Can I create reports from Facebook Insights?

Yes, definitely. Facebook Insights has a handy export function which allows you to export detailed information about your Facebook page. It exports to Excel, making it really easy to use and to get detailed figures from. You can then turn these into graphs if needed or simply use them on a weekly or monthly basis to track your growth.

What else do I need to know about Facebook Insights?

There are lots of tips and tricks for using Facebook Insights, but this should be enough to get you started at the moment. The best thing to do is go in and have a look to see what the information says about your page, you might be surprised. Facebook Insights is an essential tool for anyone serious about using their Facebook page in a meaningful way. It will help you understand your audience, improve your content and ultimately grow your Facebook page.