With over 16 million local business pages created as of May 2013, Facebook has become an essential marketing channel for business owners across the US. With the changes to Facebook Insight dashboard and the rollout of new analytics tools, small business owners now have access to more page and audience analytics to digest and action on.
In this post, we’ll break down five Facebook Insight tools and show you how to take action on your page data to boost your page’s engagement. The article focuses on explaining the following tools in your Facebook Insights dashboard:
– Likes (Net Likes)
– When Your Fans Are Online
– Post Types
– People
– External Referrers
1. Likes- Net Likes
No matter how engaging your content is, there will always be a small number of people who unsubscribe to your page. The “Likes” here refer to page “Likes” or page subscriptions, not post “Likes”.
If you see any spikes in the number of “Unlikes” on your page, you want to know the reason that drove the action. Same with an increase in “Likes”. The “Net Likes” dashboard correlates a “Like” or “Dislike” to an interaction source so that you can understand what type of posts drive positive or negative interactions. To access your “Net Likes” dashboard, select the “Likes” Tab and scroll down to the to the second chart titled “Net Likes: What Changed”.
2. When Your Fans Are Online
“When Your Fans Are Online” can help you increase the reach of your posts. Page admins no longer have to go through a trial and error process to find the optimal posting time to reach their audience. The data is divided into “Days” and “Times” with a weeklong view of the average number of fans who saw any posts on an hour-to-hour breakdown. Go to the Posts tab and click on “When Your Fans Are Online”.
3. Post Types
After you get a sense of when your audience is online, the “Post Types” section tells you which types of posts result in the highest engagement rates, whether is it photos, statuses, or links. For each type of post, your dashboard gives you the average reach and average engagement.
Click on the “Posts” tab and then toggle over to the “Post Types” option. Although the rule of thumb generalizes that photo posts receive the most the most engagement, each business’s fan preference is different. It’s important to figure out what works for your business.
4. People
How well do you know your audience? The insights dashboard takes the guesswork out of knowing your fan base’s demographic and helps you market yourself to your customers. This data is extremely helpful if you’re running targeted Facebook ads. Knowing what demographics are engaging with your page organically can help you figure out what audience to advertise to and create more effective ads.
The data is broken down by age, gender, and geography. From the table, you can see whether you’re reaching the right audience or not and see what you need to work on.
Related: Facebook Marketing in 2015
5. External Referrers
Many businesses use social media platforms like Facebook and Pinterest to drive traffic to their own websites, but it is also important to understand how your Facebook page is getting found as well. Just like your website, figuring out where traffic to your page is coming from will allow you to optimize your marketing to increase traffic from websites that are already paying attention to your page.
Access the “Visits” tab from your Facebook Insights Dashboard and scroll to the bottom of the page to the “External Referrers” section.
The websites listed on the right hand “Benchmark” menu are the top webpages outside of Facebook that are bringing visitors to your site. Knowing which sites are bringing traffic to your Facebook page can be extremely helpful if you want to understand how to grow your Facebook audience.
If you’re paying for online advertisement that link to your Facebook page in local blogs or webzines, you can see which external ad has been more effective in sending people to your page. You can reallocate your marketing budget to the online ad that’s driving more traffic to your page.
If there’s a traffic source that’s driving your page “Likes”, there might be an opportunity to build a partnership. Is there someone promoting your business that you weren’t aware of?
It takes more than setting up a page for the platform for it to be an effective marketing channel. While the Insight dashboard gives business owners and marketers a lot of data to action on, focusing on a handful of insight to track and work on can be a better strategy for those with time and resource restrictions.
Looking for ways to increase your Facebook’s engagement? Learn strategies that real small business owners are using to rock Facebook.
1 Comment
Great Read! Way more understandable than the Facebook Help Area.
Likes:
The Likes for posts may not matter to the analytics directly , but they will engage the visitors to visit again when they receive the “Example Page Liked your Comment” and they will feel important to that page.
I see some page owners like every single thing that is posted or commented.
Possible Tip:
I read some where that in the case of promoting a site outside of facebook on a facebook page that using a url shortener such as bit.ly Can actually increase your sites SEO Credit because a bit.ly url can by-pass the facebook rule for Out Going URLs “No Follow Rule”.
Facebook Analytics:
Is it free to use? I am fresh new to promoting My Site on facebook business pages.
One of my fb pages say that I can Unlock insights at 100 likes. http://on.fb.me/1pQZ38Y
Additionally I was looking around to see if I can use statcounter code in my facebook page somewhere somehow. But I think that is pretty much locked up by facebook. It would be great for me to get all of my analytics in one place for the convenience.