Are facebook pages (what used to be known as fan pages) really useful for a business? Well, I would say yes and in more ways than you might think.
Take a peek into facebook’s Insights, a valuable feature I’m guessing you didn’t even know was there!
What are Facebook Insights?
Insights is a collection of data about the people who “like” your page. This includes demographics like age and location as well as info about how they interact with your page.
Insights only apply to Facebook pages, not your personal profile. To find your insights, log into facebook then click “ads and pages” on the left side. From there click “view insights” which you should see listed underneath your page title. You’ll find details about the “users” of your page but also which messages brought out the most audience interaction.
Spend a little time exploring all the different charts and graphs and see what surprises you can discover about your audience!
Here’s a peek into my Zero to Facebook training where I show you how to access your insights and what surprising data you can find!
Read the Transcript ▼
Facebook provides really, really cool data about the people viewing your page, and this is another reason you want to use a page to promote your business. They do not make this available for groups or for personal profiles.
So you can look through your insights. You can play around with this. Basically, it tells you your active users, your new likes, your total likes. It shows you a little graph of how you’ve grown over time, your interactions, meaning the people that are liking things on your wall and posting things on your wall.
What’s even cooler is it shows you demographic data about your users. So right here I have the breakdown of the gender and age of the people who like my page. So if you’ve ever wondered how old Dashers are, they’re primarily 35 through 44 is the biggest group, 25 through 54 overall. Look, a pretty good chunk 55+ too. If you’re in the 55+ you’re certainly not alone, and slightly more males than females.
I can see the cities that people are in, the countries that they’re in, the languages that they speak. This is actually a really cool demographic data and I can see the different pages that they’re looking at and the different places they are coming from.
So again, this is the reason why you don’t really need go nuts with apps. You can see that not many people are even looking at the other tabs. They are almost all looking at the wall and not so much the other pages.
You can also the video plays, the audio plays, and the photo views, lots of cool data, some data about the interactions as well, and this is something you can dig through on your own. So you go to that by going to Insights on the left-hand side of your page.
Jan 03, 2011
I have been looking at Facebook insights for a while, and it’s awesome. But there’s one thing I don’t know much about and that’s the post insights and the number of impressions each post on the wall receives. Do you know how they calculate the number? Is it total impressions (not unique)? And if I visit the page 10 times, will it count as I have “watched” the post 10 times?
Thanks a lot.
Nov 23, 2011
Love it or hate it, but Facebook has definitely changed how we do things online, maybe even offline. There are so many great things about it and with the addition of Facebook insights, it’s just icing on the already delicious cake. It’s like the Google analytics of Facebook, it helps a lot when it comes to tracking Facebook related stuff.
Mar 07, 2012
Change isn’t always the easiest thing to deal with, but Insights on Facebook is critical to learn the know-hows to help cultivate your page. Thanks for posting this!