The New Facebook Insights and What They Mean for YOU

Posted at Jul 9, 2013 10:44:38 AM by THAT Agency | Share

One of my biggest pet peeves with Facebook is the fact that their insights weren’t great. Many frequently asked client questions weren’t covered by Facebook Insights and a 3^rd party tool was needed. To my delight, I received a prompt to check out the new Facebook Insights and so far I am very happy. The new dashboard is broken up into four main sections: Overview, Page, Posts and People. Lets take a deeper look at each of these.

Overview

This section gives you a 7 day snapshot of your page’s performance. Similar to the old Insights you can see overall page Likes, Reach and Engagement. Here you can also check out the performance of your 5 most recent posts detailed with stats about Reach, Post Clicks, Likes, Comments and Shares. The Overview section is pretty straight forward and features a more visually attractive layout.

Overview Tab

Page

The Page section is filled with information about how your fan base has grown and how people are connecting with your Page. There is a ton of great information that is divided into 3 parts: Page Likes, Post Reach and Page Visits.

Page Likes – Here you will find information about your Page’s Likes including total Likes, Net Likes and Where Your Likes Came From. This information is great for when you need to really get down to the nitty gritty about how your community grows and where the growth comes from.
Post Reach – The Post Reach section digs deeper into your content’s reach and the actions that influence it. Here you will find Overall Reach, Engagement Actions that Influence Reach and Negative Engagements such as Hide, Report as Spam and Unlikes. I am so happy they included these items as many clients ask why their reach may have dropped. Now there is no speculation. I wrote a blog about how Negative Engagements will impact EdgeRank some time ago and now I predict the conversations around them will begin to grow. If you notice youre reach increasing or decreasing, now you can learn more about why.
Page Visits – This section shows you information about what sections of your page get viewed the most including includes Page Tabs. There is also very useful information included here such as Other Page activity which outlines Mentions, Posts by Other People on Your Page and Checkins. Finally, a nice little graph outlines the number of times that people came to your Page from outside of Facebook. This is all great information for when you are trying to understand where your Facebook Traffic is coming from.

Posts

I am a BIG content nerd, so this section of the new Insights really excites me. Facebook provides you with information about All Posts, When Your Fans Are Online and Best Post Types. This section is a MAJOR improvement and provides a ton of great data.

All Posts – Here you will find the basic breakdown of all of your Page’s posts. The data points include Reach, Post Clicks, and Engagements.
When Your Fans Are Online – I ABSOLUTELY LOVE THIS! This graph shows you when your fans are online. This answers that magical question about when is the best time to post. This proves that there is no magic standard and optimal posting times are unique to each page.
Best Post Types - Want to know the success of the different post types? Now you know! This section shows data based on average reach and engagement.

People

This section allows you to compare the demographics of people who have Liked your Page with the overall demographics of Facebook’s total population. The data here is split up into 3 parts: Your Fans, People Reached and People Engaged.

Your Fans – Here you will find basic demographic data including Age, Gender, Location and Language.
People Reached – This part shows you the demographics of the people who saw your content compared against the rest of all your Fans.
People Engaged – Here you will find information about the demographics of the people who engaged with your posts compared with the overall demographics of your Fans.