Facebook insights

At O2, we use social media for lots of different marketing initiatives. In particular, we use Facebook a whole lot. Part of marketing on social media and Facebook is learning about your audience and understanding who is following you. So how do you do that?

Well, Facebook is making it a little easier to gain insight from your audience with the aptly named “Insights” tool. To use Facebook Insights, look for the Insights tab located on the top left of your profile page above your cover photo.

Clicking on the Insights tab prompts a wide collection of data and interactive graphs about your Facebook page. You’ll first be presented a quick overview of your page insights, including likes, reach, and engagement (more on the engagement metric later in this post).

In addition to the overview, there are several other tabs you can click to gain more specific info about your page. You can gather data about your page likes, including paid likes, organic likes, and unlikes. You can learn about the reach of your page, which is basically the total number of people your page “reached” over a certain time. The Visits tab shows you the number of times your timeline and each unique tab on your page was viewed. The Post tab gives you insight into each particular post on your page. The People tab offers demographic information about your audience – gender, age, location, and so on.

But the insight doesn’t end there. Facebook also offers the Export option, which you’ll see near the top right corner of the Insights tool. This feature allows you to export numerical data about your page and download it as a spreadsheet (e.g. an Excel file). These spreadsheets include an extensive collection of data about your page – likes, reach, engagement, etc.

We could go on and on about each metric, though for this post we’ll just briefly discuss one metric in particular: engagement. The engagement metric offers insight into the daily or weekly activity between your page’s posts and your audience based on several measures:

• Likes: the number of likes each of your posts get in a particular time frame
• Comments: the number of people actually commenting on posts. This is a great way to gain insight as a marketer, since you get to read precisely what your audience has to say about your page and posts
• Shares: the number of people who share your posts. This is also great for marketing, since your fans are helping you spread the word about your page. Shares can exponentially increase the overall exposure of an individual post as well as your page
• Clicks: this is every single click your page received in a particular time – clicks for a like, clicks for a comment, clicks for a share, clicks on a photo, clicks on a link, and so on

This is just a brief overview of the Insights feature on Facebook. Give it a try some time to learn more about your own page’s audience. Of course, if you have any questions, or would like to further discuss more about Facebook Insights, or about social media marketing in general, contact us today!

To contact O2 Creative, call 970-726-8021 or email [email protected].

Click here for our last blog: an ode to summer