April 04, 2013
Like Google Analytics, Facebook Insights is a useful stats measurement tool to help you gauge the success of your page. It answers the questions: How many people are viewing your Facebook business page? How many fans are your posts reaching? What type of content is getting the best response? By measuring these returns on your Facebook efforts you can capitalize on what works and do away with what doesn't. So you can grow fans and interactions, improve your Facebook presence and get better marketing results. Emeric Ernoult recently shared in Social Media Examiner six Facebook Insights metrics page administrators* should monitor. (SME is the world’s largest on line social media magazine).
- Fan Reach is the number of fans who have seen your post. It tells you how much of your content actually reaches your fans (content appeal) and is a key indicator of the health of your Facebook page. For example, your page may have 10,000 likes, but if only 500 fans regularly see your content, your actual communication base is much smaller than your “like” total indicates.
- Organic Reach is the fans and non-fans who have seen a post by directly accessing your page or seen its content in a widget (e.g., a “like box” on your site or blog). As with fan reach, organic reach only records views that are not the result of a friend of a fan’s action (counted in the viral reach).
- Engagement is the unique people who have clicked on your post from anywhere. This includes liking, commenting, sharing and people who viewed a video or clicked on a link. Someone who liked a comment from a fan or gave negative feedback is also considered ‘engagement’. While reach tells you how many people have potentially seen your content, engagement is the number of people who have interacted with your content. By keeping tabs on popular posts and less popular posts you take the guesswork out of content your fans will respond to.
- People Talking About This (PTAT) is part of the engagement metric and a critical indicator of how well you are resonating with your fans. But unlike engagement, PTAT measures only three types of actions: likes, comments or shares. What makes this metric different is that it highlights those of your fans who did something to show engagement to their friends. That is, they engaged with your Page in a way that it created a “Story” that went out into the Newsfeed. If this metric is steadily increasing, keep up the good work. If not, it’s time to consider Plan B.
- Click Through Rate tells you how many people clicked on a link in your content, watched your video or viewed a larger version of your photo. This metric lets you know how many people were interested enough to pay attention to your content.
- Negative Feedback measures those people who give negative feedback to your post, including users who blocks your page content, who report you content as spam and who unlike your page from a post. Monitor this number closely and keep negative feedback numbers as low as possible. Recently, Facebook has given more weight to the negative feedback metric. Posts with a high negative feedback number will have much less exposure through EdgeRank, and Pages with an average negative feedback that remains high will have less and less reach over time.
* Facebook Insights are located in the sidebar on your Facebook Page and they can only be seen by the admins of your Facebook Pages. Click “See All” to view the stats.