As part of fMC yesterday, folks from Facebook discussed using Insights for Facebook to optimize your business success. You can view the entire 30 minute talk here:
But, to make things easier, I’ve summarized (and editorialized) the break out session for you.
Insights for Facebook
So, what are Insights for Facebook?
Insights for Facebook are similar to Google Analytics for your website — they provide insights about your Facebook page and how visitors are engaging with the page.
According to the Facebook team, they’re focused on creating analytics that are people focused, easy to understand, and provide actionable insights. Just looking at numbers of Fans really doesn’t give you this information.
Instead, the team created metrics that measure what organizations need to know to be successful on Facebook. Since optimizing your business success relies on creating value for your visitors, Facebook created a new metric it calls “people talking about this”.
To understand how this metric works and why it’s important, you need to understand a little bit about how the Facebook news feed works.
As a Facebook Business Page, you’re only successful if your posts show up in the news feed for your fans.
Did you ever notice that some posts from friends don’t show up in your news feed. That’s because Facebook doesn’t want your news feed clogged with stuff you don’t find interesting. Otherwise, you’ll get bored and go somewhere else. So, Facebook uses and algorithm so that only about 16% of the posts from your friends and brands you like show up in your news feed.
But, the more engagement a post gets, the more likely it is to show up in the news feed. Engagement is the magic elixir for success, then, not number of Fans.
And, engagement is what “People Talking About This” measures
When people like, comment, or share your posts, they’re telling Facebook the post has value. Facebook then decides more people should see this post and ensures it shows up in a higher percentage of your Fan’s news feeds.
Not only does engagement ensure you’re posts appear in the news feed of more fans, your message spreads to their friends.
In a case cited in their presentation, Facebook found a 20X amplification of the message when people were talking about the post. With 25,000 people talking about the post, they achieved 500,000 impressions of their message. Amplification is even greater when Fans share your message, as it travels to friends of friends.
Insights for Facebook prominently features this metric “people talking about this” so you can easily assess how your Facebook business marketing is working.
What does insights for Facebook look like?
See, you get both numeric and graphic depictions of your important metrics — total likes, people talking about this, and total reach (which is a function of friends of friends). Insights for Facebook also gives you metrics for each post uploaded to the site.
How to use Insights for Facebook?
Insights for Facebook should guide post creation, not just give insights to evaluate things you’ve already posted. Posts that create a lot of people talking about this create value for your Facebook Business Page and you should create more like them. Posts that don’t get many people talking, shouldn’t be replicated. Easy Peezy.
So, enough for today on using Insights for Facebook. Next post, I’ll talk about creating social media content that is more likely to get people talking about this — driving sharing, liking, and commenting. If you haven’t already, sign up for our newsletter so you never miss a piece of valuable information.
[…] posted some comments from the Facebook Marketing Conference on using Facebook Insights to manage your social media marketing campaign. Today, I want to expand on that post to discuss […]