3 Cool Things Facebook Insights Can Tell You

Facebook Insights is an excellent tool to help you understand how people are interacting with your Page. Using Insights, you can view important metrics regarding the performance of your Page, discover which posts foster the most engagement (via likes, shares and comments) and learn more about the time frames in which audience participation is at its highest. In short, Facebook Insights gives you a good picture of what aspects of your Page are performing well, and what areas need improvement.

Any time you work with an analytics tool such as Facebook Insights, it can be easy to get overwhelmed by all of the different data points and reports available to you, but what are some of the most useful things to pay attention to? Below are three highly useful (and just plain cool) things Facebook Insights can tell you about your Page.

1. Posts Ranked by Engagement Level

We’re all fans of our own content, but what does our audience actually think about it? The Posts report can give you some key insights to help you answer that question. Just click the “Posts” tab on the main Insights page, and you’ll see the following sections:

• When Your Fans Are Online – This gives you a picture of when your fans/followers are logged in and active on Facebook.
• Posts Type – This will show you how each of your different post types (e.g., link, text, photo, video) perform in terms of engagement.
• Top Posts from Pages You Watch – This gives you the most popular posts from Pages that you’re monitoring, ranked by engagement.
• All Posts Published – This provides you with a list of all the posts you’ve published so far, with detailed stats for each post including reach, clicks, likes, comments and shares.

To find out which posts garnered the most engagement, look under the “All Posts Published” section and click on the “Engagement” column header, then select the “Likes, Comments and Shares” option. This will sort your posts by engagement level in descending order, putting the most engaging posts at the top. You’ll quickly be able to see which posts have been home runs versus which ones haven’t produced any significant response.

Use this data to help you discover the types of posts that resonate with your audience, so you can continue publishing similar content. One caveat: Only the last 90 days’ worth of posts are displayed, so it’s a good idea to keep a running tally of all your posts as the days roll on. You can do this by exporting the entire report (via the “Export” link) to an Excel sheet on a periodic basis.

2. Post Reach as a Response Monitoring Tool

This section of Facebook Insights can be found by clicking on the “Reach” tab. While there’s been some debate as far as how important Reach is as a standalone stat, it can definitely come in handy as a tool to measure your audience’s responses to strategy changes. Under the “Post Reach” section, you’ll see an area graph that shows you the total number of people your posts were served to (i.e., how many people have viewed your Page content).

If you decide to make a change to your posting strategy (e.g., increasing post frequency, posting video rather than text, etc.), you can use the “Post Reach” graph to set a benchmark date range so you can gauge the impact of your strategy adjustments. You’ll be able to compare your current Reach stats to a previous period to find out whether or not your strategy is working.

3. The “People Engaged” Report as an Audience Targeting Tool

Under the “People” tab, you can click on the “People Engaged” tab to see a demographic breakdown of the people who have liked, commented on or shared your Page content within the past 28 days.

Using this important information regarding the age, gender and location of your audience can give you a leg up when you’re looking to target a particular demographic with your Boosted (i.e., paid) Posts. By narrowing down these demographic factors in your audience criteria, you can be assured that you’re targeting your Facebook Ads to people proven to be candidates for high engagement with your content.

Facebook Insights is a treasure trove of information, so spend some time looking through the different analytics information available through this powerful tool, and then use them to help you create effective and engaging Page content that will move you further towards your marketing goals.