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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!

On Thursdays, I will give you a review, a tip or just my thoughts on research and analysis, which is my main responsibility working at Awoque. If you have any questions about how it works, and why you should always keep track on your presence online, feel free to contact me!

Meltwater Buzz is one of the most powerful tools out there today, allowing you to search for keywords and/or hashtags in pretty much any media. Micro blogs (Twitter), regular blogs, videos, photos, it’s all covered! Setting up a campaign (a set of keywords) takes about five minutes, and feels like searching on Google, only more… powerful.

In the “Overview” tab, you will see the latest tweets, blog posts, pictures etc that follows your search criteria on the right hand side. To the left, you get stats and graphs, all customizable to your hearts delight.

Reporting your stats is obviously a key feature of any monitoring service. MBuzz does this through a simple-to-use report wizard. You choose what campaign you want a report on, decide which stats you want to show and, with the help of check-boxes, what kind of charts and graphs you want.

A downside to this tool is that it is sometimes too powerful, especially if you are only running a local campaign. You might get data that you don’t care about, for example from other countries (MBuzz actually translates content as well!). Luckily you can limit the search to only include certain countries and languages. Another downside is the price, which for a startup or small company might be too high. But as I mentioned earlier: this is a powerful service, created for big brands to keep track of everything that happens.

Have you used Meltwater Buzz? What do you think about it? Tell me in the comments, or on our Facebook page!