Whether you’re growing the online presence of your business or taking advantage of their advertising campaigns, when it comes to social media Facebook is a great avenue for self promotion.
In a recent article we gave you an introduction to Facebook Analytics, briefing key elements such as the Overview Dashboard as well as the low down on Likes. Here in part two of the series, we will delve further into the depths of Facebook Insights to get you and your business fluent in all things Facebook. We’ll take up right where we left off, making our way down the Facebook Insight Navigation, starting with Reach.
Reach
Reach can be split into two categories, Organic and Paid. Facebook defines “Organic reach” as: The number of unique people who saw your post in News Feed or on your Page, including people who saw it from a story shared by a friend when they liked, commented on or shared your post, answered a question or responded to an event. Paid reach is defined as: The number of unique people who saw your post through an ad.
The Reach tab allows you to see how many people are seeing your posts and whether they are seeing them organically or from paid advertising you’ve been running.
It also allows you to see the number of Likes, Comments and Shares you’ve received on a given day. The more Likes, Comments or Shares your page and posts receive, the greater your reach will be.
The Reach tab also gives you insight into the user actions that can decrease reach. For example, a user could “Hide” a post; report it as spam or unlike your page.
Total Reach allows you to see the number of people who saw any activity from your page, whether it is your own page posts, posts by other people about your page, Page like adverts, mentions or check-ins. This is also broken down by Organic and Paid.
Visits
The Visits section gives you insight into which parts of your Facebook page are being visited the most. For example, you can see whether visitors are looking at your Timeline, photo tabs or any other custom tabs that you may have on your page.
You can also view the Other Page Activity report, which shows the number of actions people took that involved your page. This could be a mention, or a post by someone on your page, or a check-in.
The last report is extremely important, showing the external referrers that sent traffic to your Facebook page. External referrers could be your website, someone else’s website, a search engine or an email campaign. If you find you are getting the majority of visitors from a specific referrer you can increase your presence there in order to maximize the number of visits to your Facebook page.
Posts
The Posts tab allows you to see what days of the week your fans are online and at what time of the day. This information can help you plan your posting times in order to reach the maximum number of fans and for maximum engagement.
In-depth data on individual posts is given in the next section. This lets you see which posts had the most reach and engagement, what time they were posted, the post type, the audience targeted, and ad budget spent promoting the post.
Reach can be broken down by Organic and Paid, or alternatively by Fans and Non-Fans.
Engagement can be split out by positive actions such as Post Clicks and Likes, Comments and Shares, or alternatively by negative actions such as Post Hides, Hides of all Posts, Reports of Spam and Unlikes.
People
The last section is the People tab, which helps you to understand who your audience is. It provides you with demographic information such as male/female ratio, their age range, the countries and cities they are located in and what language they speak.
You can toggle between the demographic information of your Fans, the people your page has reached, and the people you have engaged.
This is generally interesting and useful information to know, however it can come in particularly useful if you plan to promote posts on your page via Facebook Ads. Having a better understanding of who is interested in your page will mean you can target your ads better, helping you to improve the effectiveness of your campaigns and reduce spending. If you already know who your target audience is and this information is inconsistent with you data, you can make tweaks to your promotional strategy in order to target your desired audience better.
With all of the Facebook Insights data, the default date range displayed is 7 days. This timeframe can be easily changed at the top of the page. The data displayed can also be exported as an excel or csv file if you would to analyze it further offline.
Have you checked out the Facebook Insights for your business page? How has it helped you promote your business?