Congratulations on creating a Facebook page. The fun doesn’t stop there, though. Now it’s time to monitor, measure and analyze by using Facebook’s handy Insights Dashboard. Sound scary? Don’t sweat it. Here’s a quick guide to get you well on your way to mastering all that Insights has to offer.
What is the Facebook Insights Dashboard?
Think of the Insights Dashboard as your page’s progress report. You can track user growth, demographics and interactions with your posts and page. By understanding this information, you can target your content to best suit your audience and identify the best times of day and days of the week to post.
What kinds of information will I be able to see?
The Insights Dashboard will provide you with two types of information:
- Interaction insights: Daily story feedback (post Likes, post comments, per post impressions), daily page activity (mentions, discussions, reviews, wall posts, video posts).
- User insights: Total page Likes, or number of fans, daily active users, new Likes/Unlikes. Like sources, demographics, page views and unique page views, tab views, external referrers, media consumption.
What should I pay the most attention to?
Here at Eckel & Vaughan we send monthly reports to our partners that highlight key info and updates from each social media account. Here are the metrics we pay the most attention to:
- Simply put, this shows you how many new fans your page earned. This is a great way to track growth and to quantify your efforts. Of course, Likes alone do not make a page successful.
- Take Likes to a whole new level. More than just tracking the number of people who like your page as a whole, “Interactions” allow you to actually see how people are interacting with content on your page. Post views track how many times your posts were viewed in a given time period. Interactions track how many times people interacted with your posts by either liking or commenting on them. As the saying goes, content is king, so you want to make sure you’re posting top-shelf content on your page. By monitoring post views and interactions you can troubleshoot different kinds of posts and see which ones get the most (or fewest) interactions and views.
User Demographics — Gender and Age:
- The demographics feature provides you with information about your fans. We focus on a graph that breaks down users by gender and age group like this:
Getting to know your audience can enable you to better cater your posts to them. In the example above, we see that the majority of fans for this particular page are women, spread fairly evenly across a wide age range.
To conclude:
Simply creating a Facebook page and posting away is not going to get you the best results. Social media tools such as Facebook are about forming relationships, and as in any relationship, listening is as (if not more) important as talking. To best listen to your fans, you have to see what they are reading and responding to, and you have to know who they are. Facebook Insights allows you to do this … so go do it!
Interested in learning more about the role social media could play in your business? Give Matt Ferraguto, our Digital Division Director, a call at 919-858-6914 or shoot us an email. We’d love to have a conversation with you.