Curious if your marketing efforts on your Facebook page are paying off? Get to know your Insights and take the guesswork out of it!
Use Facebook Insights to:
• Discover the best time of day to post based on when your audience is on Facebook.
• Determine the types of content that your audience is engaging with (likes, comments, shares).
• Compare your page vs. your competitors and industry leaders.
Overview
Page Summary
Your page summary offers a snapshot of your page and how it’s doing.
• Sort by Today, Yesterday, Last 7 days, Last 28 days to get a short term and long term feel for how your page is doing.
• Look at analytics for both paid (ads and boosted posts) and organic traffic (page and posts views that you didn’t pay for).
Your Summary Includes:
• Actions on Page: How many clicks the specifics (website, phone number, etc.) in the About tab of your page are receiving.
• Page Previews: When someone hovers over the profile picture of your Page to preview the basics of your profile.
• Page Likes: Number of new people to like your page (paid and non-paid).
• Reach: The number of people who had one of your posts enter their screen (newsfeed, profile, etc.). This number includes organic and paid (for this breakdown click on the Reach tab).
• Recommendations: The number of people who have recommended your page.
• Post Engagement: The number of people who have engaged with your page through likes, comments and shares.
• Videos: The number of times your videos have been viewed for more than 3 seconds.
• Page Followers: Number of new people to follow your page (paid and organic).
To dive into additional details, you can click on the Insights Tabs. I will provide more information on this later in this article.
Your 5 Most Recent Posts
Quickly look at your most recent posts and how they did in terms of reach (how many people saw the post) and engagement (how many people commented, liked or shared the post).
You can look at more of your posts by clicking on the arrow in the top righthand corner (highlighted by the red circle).
Sort your posts based on:
- Reach: Organic / Paid
- Impressions: Organic / Paid
- Reach: Fans / Non-Fans
- Post Clicks / Reactions, Comments & Shares
- Reactions / Comments / Shares
- Post Hides, Hides of All Posts, Reports of Spam, Unlikes of Page
- Engagement
Pages to Watch
See how your page stacks up against your competitors, industry leaders, etc.
Not sure who to follow? Facebook will make recommendations for you. (And you can always delete and add pages.)
Insights Tabs
Now that we’ve covered what you will see in the Overview dashboard, let’s dive into the Insights Tabs. For this article, I am going to cover the most useful insights. I’ll cover some of the others (events, stories, messages, etc.) at a later date.
Followers: Number of new people to follow your page (paid and organic).
Study what days of the month, week or quarter you saw a spike in new followers (if you do this on a weekly basis it will be easier to gauge) and replicate that. For example, perhaps you plugged the link to your page on LinkedIn or hosted a giveaway. Do it again and see if you have a similar response.
Likes: Number of new people to like your page (paid and organic).
Treat your Likes tab the same way that you treat your Followers tab. Study where your page likes have happened and see if there is a trend over time. (Tip: Place the Facebook icon with a link to your page on your website and plug your page on your other Social Media sites from time to time to help increase your likes.)
Reach: The number of people who had one of your posts enter their screen (newsfeed, profile, etc.).
Look to see what days your page had the highest reach (organic and paid). What did you post on those days? Did you pay to boost your post or have an ad running?
When did you receive a lot of reactions, comments and shares? (Again, this is easier to gauge if you analyze this information over the course of a week.)
You can also look to see if people are clicking like, love, wow, haha, sad or angry and if your audience is hiding your post(s), reporting it as spam and unliking your page.
Page Views: Discover extremely useful information including demographics of your audience and top referral sources.
Get to know your audience based on age, gender, country, city and device (computer vs. mobile).
Find out who your top referral sources are (what websites people are on when they click on your Facebook page link) and consider ways you can continue getting exposure on their sites.
Posts: Look to see the time of day and days of the week your audience is on Facebook.
Based on this screenshot, this page should post daily and spend equal time and effort on every post. If the numbers were higher on the weekend, or during the week, then the page should adjust their posting schedule accordingly.
You can see that people are consistently on Facebook between 9am-10am, with 9pm being the best time to post (or to schedule your posts).
Videos: Monitor how many minutes your audience is viewing your videos, which videos performed best and how many 3+ second video views (AKA: virtual high five – you kept their attention!).
Select a specific timeframe to search.
And of course, check out your most popular videos and replicate them!
People: Check out your audience demographics and filter them based on Your Fans, Your Followers, People Reached and People Engaged.
Create posts that will likely appeal to your audience based on their gender and age. If this is not your ideal audience (customer avatar) create a plan to shift this towards your ideal customer avatar and closely monitor your progress.
Get the Most Out of Your Insights
- Research your competitors and industry leaders and add them to Pages to Watch (Overview). Monitor how your page compares to theirs. Also, go to their pages to see the types of content they are posting and how they are engaging their audience.
- Create posts based on your audience demographics of age, gender, location, etc. (Actions on Page and People).
- Schedule posts based on when your audience is most likely to be on Facebook (Posts).
- Study your posts and determine the types of content that generate comments, likes and shares. Do more of that (Reach and Posts).
- Incorporate video into your Facebook strategy by using Facebook Live and/or uploading your videos directly to your page. See the types of videos that people are watching for more than 3 seconds and create more videos like that (Videos).
Get to know your Facebook Insights and schedule time on a weekly, biweekly or monthly basis to monitor your progress and make the necessary changes to move your marketing efforts forward on Facebook.
