Over the past few weeks, we have highlighted the good, the bad and the ugly of many social media platforms in on our blog posts. We have touched on The Problem with Pinterest, The 5 Musts on the Path of a “YouTube Sensation”, and How to Rock Your Brand on Instagram. But today, I will be talking more on Social Media Behemoth, Facebook. And more so, on the Facebook Insights tool used when advertising.
With the amount of $$ going into Facebook advertising, it only makes sense that you want to get the most out of your hard earned dollar. Did you know that more than 70% of social media advertising spend is done through Facebook. Not surprising to me, actually.
And with this comes what Facebook Insights; an amazing tool that I use daily and absolutely LOVE, to help you understand how people are interacting with your Page and more importantly, your ads you are spending dollars on. Using Insights, you can view important metrics regarding the performance of your Page, discover which posts foster the most engagement (via likes, shares and comments) and learn more about the time frames in which audience participation is at its highest.
Any time you work with an analytics tool such as Facebook Insights, it can be easy to get overwhelmed by all of the different data available to you, but what are some of the most useful things to pay attention to? Below are three highly useful (and just plain cool) things Facebook Insights can tell you about your Page.
1. Posts Ranked by Engagement Level
We’re all fans of our own content, but what does our audience actually think about it? The Posts report can give you some key insights to help you answer that question.
- When Your Fans Are Online – This gives you a picture of when your fans/followers are logged in and active on Facebook.
- Posts Type – This will show you how each of your different post types (e.g., link, text, photo, and video) perform in terms of engagement.
- All Posts Published – This provides you with a list of all the posts you’ve published so far, with detailed stats for each post including reach, clicks, likes, comments and shares.
Use this data to help you discover the types of posts that resonate with your audience, so you can continue publishing similar content.
2. Post Reach as a Response Monitoring Tool
This section of Facebook Insights may not be the most fancy, and some don’t deem it as important, but how neat is it to see (literally see, as in, they show a fun graph) that shoes the total number of people that your post/ad was served too. Reach is a standalone stat, but it can definitely come in handy as a tool to measure your audience’s responses to strategy changes.
If you decide to make a change to your posting strategy (e.g., increasing post frequency, posting video rather than text, etc.), you can use the “Post Reach” graph to set a benchmark date range so you can gauge the impact of your strategy adjustments. You’ll be able to compare your current Reach stats to a previous period to find out whether or not your strategy is working.
3. The “People Engaged” Report as an Audience Targeting Tool
And now, one of my FAVORITE parts of Facebook Insights. The ability to see a demographic breakdown of the people who have liked, commented on or shared your Page content within the past month.
Using this important information regarding the age, gender and location of your audience can give you a leg up when you’re looking to target a particular demographic with your Boosted (i.e., paid) Posts. By narrowing down these demographic factors in your audience criteria, you can be assured that you’re targeting your Facebook Ads to people proven to be candidates for high engagement with your content.
Facebook Insights is an awesome tool with extremely useful information, so spend some time looking through the different analytics information available. Interested in learning more? FMDi can also help you construct a successful Facebook ad campaign and provide these analytics to you.
