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Facebook Insights: What Is It and How Do I Use It?

Facebook offers a free data analytics tool to all businesses that have a company profile on its platform. Called “Insights,” it can be found in the top white menu bar after you click to view your business page.

Why is Insights so valuable? Learning how to read the data in your Facebook Insights will help you build campaigns that generate qualified leads and create repeat customers.

You can already see that Facebook users are interacting with your content by looking at the number of likes, comments, and shares on each post. But Facebook Insights allow you to dig a bit deeper and put these metrics to good use.

Facebook Insight Data Options

Although Facebook Insights are easy to use, all that data can be a bit overwhelming at first. There are a few areas to make note of:

  • Accessing and navigating
  • Likes
  • Reach
  • Posts
  • People

We’ve simplified each area for you below.

Accessing and Navigating

Access Facebook Insights by going to your Facebook page and clicking on the Insights tab at the top of the page. Once you’re in the Insights tab, navigate the tool by using the links on the left side of the panel.

Likes

The Likes tab gives you information about the number of fans your Facebook page has.

By choosing a custom date range in the top of the panel, you can use the graphs to determine how many new fans you gained in the given time period, how many likes you lost and where the likes originated.

While you want to see the number of likes continuously increase, it is not the most important metric to track.

Having 100 engaged, active fans is far more valuable than having 1,000 fans outside of your target area who never engage with a single post.

Reach

The Reach tab shows the number of people who’ve had any posts from your page enter their screen.

The first graph compares paid reach to organic (unpaid) reach on each post. By examining the high points on this graph, you can draw conclusions about the types of posts that do well and what types of posts fall flat.

Use the Hide, Report as Spam, and Unlikes graph to compare these negative actions to the types of content run on those days.

If you notice that fans unlike your page when you post about a specific topic, you may want to consider staying away from that topic.

Keep track of the posts that don’t sit well with your audience so that you can avoid using them in paid advertising campaigns.

Posts

The Posts tab allows you to measure the success of each individual post. Facebook provides a table with every published post along with reach, click and engagement information.

This table gives you the ability to learn the following information:

  • Reach tells you the unique number of people each post was served to. It shows both organic and paid reach.
  • Engagement rate per post can be viewed by accessing the drop-down menu next to Reactions, Comments, and Shares. Looking at the engagement rate quickly tells you which posts spurred the most action.
  • Reactions, Comments, and Shares can be broken into individual graphs by again clicking on the drop-down menu to the far right. This breakdown is important because posts with multiple shares are more likely to go viral than posts with just likes or reactions.
  • Negative feedback can be viewed by using the same drop-down menu and choosing reports of Spam, Unlikes and Hides. Most posts will have very few negative actions against them. The ones with several should serve as red flags letting you know what type of content is not right for your page.


People

The People tab gets down to business telling you who your fans are.

These metrics will tell you if you are targeting the right people with your paid ads and content voice, or if you need to adjust your strategy.

Each one of the following demographics can be found in the People tab:

  • Gender
  • Age range
  • Geography
  • People engaged

With this information, you can begin to build a “core audience” for your paid advertising on Facebook.

In addition to gender, age and location, Facebook Advertising will let you target ads by interests, education, financial behavior and even marital status.

Targeting by these additional characteristics and reviewing your advertising results helps you create your ‘ideal” audience.

How can I work with Dream Local to take this off my plate? 

We love this question!

If you find yourself frustrated by the wealth of information in Facebook Insights, our team of #honeybadgers are ready to jump in and help you analyze your Insights; build content your audience wants to share, like and comment on; plus create ads that scream, “It’s a no-brainer to click here!”

Let’s work together to take your Facebook strategy to the next level. 

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