Last week, we talked about Meltwater Buzz, and the ways it helps you gather huge amounts of data in a  understandable interface. This week we will switch from expensive to free! I present to you: Facebook Insights!

A page I manage, Insights marked for your convenience

Insights is one tool I have always used. When I created my first page and realized I could actually gather statistics from it, I understood that “this is something I will enjoy doing”. Finding insights is easy, just click your way to your page, and look to the top right.

Gathering data from Insights is almost as easy as finding it. It is obviously created to help anyone understand how many people are interested in their page. Well inside, you will find three tabs on the left hand side: Overview, Usage and Interactions.

• The Overview section provides the data that most people are interested in: How many people like your page, how many times your updates have been viewed, and how many comments and likes they’ve gotten.
• Moving on to the Usage section, things get a lot more nerdy interesting! Want to know exactly what your fans are actually doing on your page? Of course you do! A dedicated graph will tell you how many people watched your posts, commented, and liked them. Another one shows how many views your videos have gotten, if people clicked on your photos, etc.
  Last but not least there is demographic information, which is great use to decide whether your page’s updates should be in Swedish or English, for example:

67% male fans? What is this, a football magazine?

• Finally, we’ll have a look at the Interactions tab. This is probably one of the most valuable sections for page owners, wether commercial, non-profit or otherwise. The main part of this section is the Page Post list. All updates your page has done is in this list, and you can sort it for number of views, feedback percentage and date posted. Now why is this good? Well, most people working in Social Media, including Facebook itself agrees that engagement is king. You do not want fans that just mindlessly look at what you are doing (that’s what billboards are for!).

To succeed in Social Media, you want to speak WITH your fans not TO them.

Do you want to know more about how to engage your fans? Contact us!