New Facebook Insights

We Social Media Marketers are always looking for new, better and more efficient ways to measure our campaigns that we launch through platforms like Twitter, Youtube or Facebook to name a few.

Recently Facebook introduced a new version of Insights (Facebook’s own analytics package for fan pages). These are great news for us social marketers and just recently I attended a webinar hosted by Wildfireapp to get a better idea of what to expect from the new Insight.

The main goals with this update are to understand the performance of your page and learn what type of content really works.
The new dashboard is availible for all page admins, however if you’re more than one admin the one who accepted the first “test” may be the only one seing it. In my case I was the lucky one 

In the graph to the right you can first see the“Total number of fans” which is nothing new. But right next to this you will likely smile. “Friends of fans” represents the potential reach of your fan page. It’s the number of fans of the page AND the friends of your fans. In our case we have a potential reach of more than 2 million people.

Obviously it’s going to be hard to reach all of them unless you know the perfect formula to end up in the news feed for each one of your fans AND create such compelling content that all of them decide to interact with your page.

We move further to the right and see “People Talking About This” and this is a true engagement metric. This gives you the number of people who have interacted with your page, liked, commented, shared, checked in e.t.c in the last 7 days.
Last we see “Weekly total reach” which means the number of unique people who have seen any content associated with the page in the last 7 days.

If we scroll down a bit we´ll come to my favourite part. Here is the place to really see what resonates with your audience. Does a post that ends with a question generate more engagement than a post with a statement? Does your audience prefer videos or pictures?

The first metric I have highlighted here is “Reach”. It’s the number of unique people who’ve seen the post. So even if we have 10.000 fans it doesn’t mean that all of them are going to see our posts.
Secondly is the one I would pick as my absolute personal favourite, “Engaged users”. It’s the number of unique people who’ve engaged (clicked) on your post.
At the end of the day, this is what we should try increase as much as possible.
The number of fans means nothing if they just ignore our posts!

“Virality” is also interesting. Here we see the number of unique people who’ve created a story about the post as a percentage of the number of unique people who’ve seen it. This is a great place to compare different posts.

Let’s craft better posts!

My opinion is that this should help marketers to know better what works and what doesn’t work with their fans. This will help us craft more relevant and engaging content that will spark more activity and at the end hopefully we will manage to turn that activity into real business.

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