How Insightful is Facebook Insights?
As Facebook’s reach widens, with over 800 million registered users, it becomes like a mini-internet unto itself. And it didn’t take long for companies to realise the potential marketing power of having a presence on the number one social network. Over the past few years we’ve seen a proliferation of company brand pages on Facebook, but simply being on there and interacting isn’t enough, now it’s really important to be able to measure the level of engagement, to see what works and what doesn’t and tweak online marketing campaigns accordingly.
To this end there’s been a lot of social media metric tools being developed and advertised but can a company get enough useful data from Facebook’s own built in analytics package - Insights?
The overview is useful as it offers up the percentage increase or decrease of activity. So week on week, or month on month, administrators of the account can quickly see if their actions have bettered interactivity on the page, if the number of ‘Likes’ has gone up or down, whether more or less people have commented on the wall or specific posts. This is helpful for telling which posts, status updates, or uploaded media garners the most engagement. Video often accrues feedback, comments and ‘Likes’ as it’s a relatively rich and sticky medium, similarly photos uploaded are frequently successful in engaging customers and fans.
Insights provides accessible bar charts that display the gender and age of your company’s fans, so it’s easily discernible if you’ve been engaging with your target demographic, or whether there’s a surprise demographic that you’re engaging with but didn’t expect to. Similarly it also states the geographical location of your fans which can help you target them better with more localised content. Or again, help you identify locations you’re popular with but didn’t previously know.
A useful extension is the metric that allows you to see which of your content has been shared by others, so not only do you have pretty comprehensive data on your posts on the Facebook page but you can also see which have been so good that your fans have disseminated them further.
Often people mistake more data for more understanding, however this isn’t always the case. When bombarded with seemingly endless metrics about your social media reach any truth, any useful insight can be lost in the mounds of numbers and graphs. Sometimes a streamlined view can be a lot more beneficial, so although Facebook Insights isn’t an extensively deep analytics package this can work in your favour as it does provide enough data to get a good idea of how your business’s activity is being received and whether it’s having the desired affect for you and your customers.
"Insights" Summary
- Deeper than simply page views and unique users frequency, but not so deep you get lost in data
- Overview pages surmise information in helpful and accessible graphs, bar charts and percentages
- There are enough statistics to get useful feedback on every area of your campaign
- Easy to establish what’s connecting with your audience and what’s not
- Gender and geographical data makes it easy to post highly targeted content for specific markets
Zac Colbert
Zac is a freelance writer helping to build the Badoo brand in Canada.