Facebook Insights for business pages have recently enjoyed a makeover, and are now sporting a few new bells and whistles.
However, the changes that have taken place are not just cosmetic – it’s fair to say Facebook Insights has done a bit of growing up over the summer, and turned up for the new school year with some facial hair and a markedly deeper voice.
What Facebook is now showing more of is information about ‘reach’ – in fact, it’s created a page with this very name – and that topic of the moment, engagement.
When you next go into the page insights, you’ll see the total number of page ‘likes’, just like you could before – but you can now get an idea of the number of people you could be influencing in theory. That’s the total number of friends each of your fans has.
You can also discover how many people are talking about you, which Facebook calls creating a story. This means they have (deep breath) liked your page, posted something on your page wall, liked/commented/shared a page post of yours, answered a question, RSVPed about an event, mentioned your page name on their wall, tagged your page in a photo, checked in to you as a Facebook place or recommended you.
You can also see your page reach – that’s the number of unique people who have seen a piece of your content on Facebook – and data for each individual post, including a breakdown of how they saw it, how ‘viral’ it became, meaning how many people created a story out of it in relation to the total number of people who saw it and a further layer of detail around if the content was seen organically, because of its virility or because it was a paid ad.
So you can see the emphasis is firmly on the number of people who actually see your update, how they see it and what they do when they see it.
But if you have 500 likes on your page, why is your reach not 500 for every post? Well, basically speaking, if someone likes your page but rarely, if every, reads your updates or visits your page, there’s less chance your post will appear on their wall. That’s why the numbers here are different, and that’s reach.
This has been the case for a while, but the update to Facebook Insights has helped take away some of the mystique or guesswork around this.
It’s also possible now to look at statistics around not just everyone who has liked your page but also subsets of this – that’s the people you are reaching and the people talking about you.
Essentially, the like is just the beginning. If you want to grow a relationship with a user, they need to engage with you. And you can pour over even more numbers now to help make decisions on what type of content is working well and who your real fans really are.
So who is the typical Yell Business fan? Well, they are likely to be between 25-34 and living in London. Same goes for the page reach. However, those more inclined to engage are aged 35-44. Have you found out anything useful from your new page stats?
