How to Use Facebook’s New Page Insights

If you’ve gotten a prompt from Facebook about the new Page Insights, but aren’t sure what that means, then this post is for you. But first, some info if you aren’t even sure what Facebook Page Insights are: Facebook uses insights to track a Facebook page’s activity. You get tons of details about the online activity (i.e. page likes, comments, views) of your fans. This information is vital when it comes to analyzing your page and social media strategy for what’s working and what’s not for your target audiences. 

Recently Facebook made a number of improvements to their Page Insights – organization and reporting are more actionable, simple and focused on people. Currently people who use the new Page Insights have the option to revert back to the old version, but this is subject to change at any time. Keep in mind that if you try it and then switch back to the old version, the new version is no longer available to your business until Facebook unrolls the new Page Insights to all of its users.

Here’s a brief explanation of some of the new features and what kind of information you can glean from them.

• People Talking About. People Talking About is the unique number of individuals who have generated a story about a specific page during the last week. They have generated stories by liking a page, tagging a page in a post, sharing or commenting on a post, writing on a page wall or checking in to a location. The new Page Insights fleshes this figure out, breaking down the number of unique people who have liked, commented on, clicked on or shared a post or posts or engaged in other activity on a page such as mentioning or checking in with a page or engaging in another Facebook user’s post on a page.
• Engagement Rate. There used to be a Page Insights stat called Virality, which was the percentage of people who generated a story directly from a page post divided by the total number of people who reviewed the story. The new Page Insights replaced this stat with Engagement Rate, which is the percentage of people who viewed a post and then liked, click on, shared or commented on it.
• Viral Reach. Viral Reach is the number of people who viewed a post from a story that one of their Facebook friends published. The new Page Insights includes Viral Reach as part of Organic Reach. The total reach is divided into Organic Reach and Paid Reach.

If you haven’t used Facebook’s new Page Insights yet, check it out! Your company can definitely benefit from these features, and you’ll get the analytics you need to create a more effective social media strategy that delights and engages your followers.