Over the Summer you may have spotted a little message from Facebook in the admin panel of your business page, inviting you to try out the new page insights…. or perhaps today you logged into your business page and were faced with a whole new look to the insights section of your page.
Either way, new-look Facebook insights are here, and I love them!
So should you.
Not only do they look prettier with lots of colourful graphs and charts, but they also give way more data than before. You can now see better what’s working on your page, where your likes and engagement are coming from, and even which sections of your page most people visit.
Here is a quick guide to how to get the most out of the new feature.
To get started, click ‘Check out the new page insights’ within your admin panel, and you will see six headings:
- Overview
- Likes
- Reach
- Visits
- Posts
- People
(You have the option to ‘Start tour‘ which is well worth taking if you have five minutes).
In case you don’t want to take the tour, or if you want it explained further, let’s look at each tab in turn.
Overview tab
This is the first page you will see when you visit the new insights, and it gives you a general indication of how your page has done over the last week.
It shows likes (still an important measure for many pages), post reach and engagement (the number of people who click anywhere in your post). It also shows your last five posts, along with s snapshot of reach and engagement.
Likes tab
Here you can see whether the numbers liking your page are increasing or decreasing, and can understand more about the source of your new likes.
Previously, it was a fairly laborious process of selecting from different drop down boxes to view likes within a particular week, but with the new look Insights you can simply click and drag within any of the graphs to see a breakdown of the data for that time period.
Another welcome addition is the ability to see where your new likes came from – either on your page, page suggestions, mobile, your posts, or others). This tab is particularly useful for seeing how well your page is performing overall, and also what is causing it.
Reach tab
This page shows you:
- Post reach
- Likes, comment & shares
- Unlikes, hides and spam reports
- Total reach of your page
This is far more useful than previously when it was much harder to dig down into the data to understand what your reach actually meant. Now you can clearly see whether your engagement is coming from likes, comments or shares, which gives you an indication where you need to improve, and what you need to maintain.
Visits tab
Ever wondered whether anyone ever reads your ‘About’ section? Well, wonder no more! In the ‘Visits’ tab you can see exactly which parts of your page are most visited.
This is BRILLIANT! You would expect people to come to your Timeline, but how many are looking at your photos tab, or your enewsletter tab? Perhaps you have a Twitter tab at the top of your page – now you can see how many times it is clicked. If it’s not being clicked, replace it!
Another real gem within the Visits tab is the ability to see where your visits have come from.
How much traffic does Twitter send through to your Facebook page? Does your page show up on the first page of Google search results? Now you can see exactly which websites your Facebook visitors are coming from.
Posts tab
One of the questions I get asked the most is when is it best to publish posts to Facebook (and other social networks). Until now, I’ve suggested using Google analytics to get an idea of when your customers are online, but now Facebook shows absolutely when it’s best to post to reach your audience.
This is another beauty of a graph. Look at it right now and use the data to inform when you post!
This only shows the most recent week so don’t make any dramatic changes based on just one week but monitor it for a few weeks to look for trends.
Post data is one of the most useful parts of the new insights – the lower half of this tab shows you data similar to what was available before, giving an indication of reach and engagement per post, only with slightly more colour, but here you can sort the data by column (eg. by reach or engagement by clicking the heading of that column – shown below in red):
You can also drill down a little deeper into the data by hovering over the orange bars of data in the Reach column to see whether those who saw your post were fans or non-fans.
People tab
This is where you can get to know your audience – see who is liking your page and who is commenting, sharing and liking your posts. Much of this was available through the old insights, only now it looks nicer and is easier to understand.
As well as seeing who your fans are, now you can also get an idea of who engages most with your content (age, gender and location).
Facebook master Jon Loomer shares his own walk through to the new insights in this short video:
What do you think of the new insights? Will you be making use of them?
Let us know and ask your questions in the comments below.