Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Navigating Your Way Through Facebook Insights

Insights is a Facebook application for Pages that provides metrics about your user demographics and their interactions. Knowing your demographic is extremely important when targeting your messages. By having a clear idea of who your target audience is, you have a better chance of providing interactive content.  

Facebook Insights are located on the left hand side bar of your Facebook Page. To note, only admins have access to Insights.
When you click on  Insights you get an overall view of your Page complete with Total Likes, Friends of Fans (how many potential people you can reach through those who have already liked your page), People Talking About This, and Weekly Total Reach. The overview also provides you with a graph of the aforementioned categories displayed over the course of the given month.

Also, in the overview of your Page, you have Page Posts. Page Posts take your individual posts and breaks it down into the following categories: Reach, Engaged Users, Talking about this, and Virility. Reach explains the number of unique people who have seen your post. Engaged Users are the number of people who have clicked on your post. Talking About provides you with the number of unique people who have created a story from your Page post. Stories are “created” when someone likes, comments, or shares your posts. Also, a story is “created” when a user answers a question you posted or responds to your event. Finally, Virality, one of the most important categories, gives you the percentage of the people who have created a story from your Page post out of the total number of unique people who have seen it.
With all of these categories you can sort from greatest percentage to least.  

Under Insights you are given three individual tabs: Likes, Reach, and Talking About This. When you click each individual tab, Insights provides you with the demographics that correlate to Likes, Reach, and Talking About This. Demographics include Gender, Age, Countries, Cities, Languages, and even provides you where your Likes come from. This includes mobile, on page, search results (very important when considering SEO), and third party apps.

This information can be very beneficial if you are managing a client’s social media. But where this information can really benefit is designing an ad for your client. With the Insights demographics, you can get the most money out of an ad. For example, when posting an ad through Facebook, you are asked which demographic you would like to advertise to, which you now know through Insights. By knowing which demographic you can advertise to you have a better chance of your advertisement being seen.
Comments, questions, or concerns? I want to hear them!

No comments: