Does your organization have a Facebook fan page?  If you do, have you been utilizing one of the greatest tools Facebook has given you to measure your page?  

Facebook Insights for fan pages.  What is it and how can I use it?

Insights provide information about your page’s performance. With any marketing plan, measuring your efforts and learning about your audience and competition are important to monitor to be successful.  Facebook, unlike traditional advertising, has made it so easy for marketers to measure goals, audience, and competition by using Facebook’s Insights.

Located at the top of your fan page, click on the Insights tab. (You must have at least 30 people like your page to have this tab.)  I recommend viewing your Insights at least once a month. Select a date range and export your data each month so you can compare how your page is performing month to month. 

Measure Your Goals

What do you want to achieve with your fan page?  Have you set SMART goals?  Use the data in your Insights to measure if your are reaching those goals.  For example, say you want to increase your posts engagement by 8% next month or you want to increase your followers by 100 in the next 30 days.  The more specific the goal, the more likely you’ll focus on achieving it.

Learn About Your Audience

Learn the demographics about your followers:  age, gender, location, and language.  Remember who your audience is when creating posts.  Insights also tells you when your audience is on Facebook so you can publish posts when you’re likely to reach more people.

Measure posts to see which ones have the most engagement (likes, comments, and shares)

Under the Posts section, Insights tells you the number of people your posts have reached, number of people who have seen, clicked, liked, commented, or shared your post.  Engagement is the most important metric to measure. Which posts are getting the most engagement?  Continue to post similar content. If they don’t, what can you do to inspire people to act?  Is there a clear Call To Action that can help move audience members to more aggressively engage?

Follow competitor pages

Compare your page and posts with similar pages on Facebook.  Click the Overview tab and scroll to the bottom to select other Facebook pages to watch.  This is a great way to keep an eye on your competition without them knowing.  You can also view their top posts by clicking the Posts tab on the left then click Top Posts From Pages You Watch at the top. What’s working for them? Spin it and create your own posts.

Learn about the people near your business

A new Insights section Facebook recently added is Local.  It will tell you about the people on Facebook near your business.  This is a great opportunity to learn about your potential customers and get your page and/or posts in front of them.  Click on the Local tab, set your date range and radius, and see when the most people are nearby, view their demographic info, and create Facebook ads to reach people who are near your business.

So now what do you do with all this great data?  Put your winning monthly report together. 

Your Purpose:  List what your goals for the month were in context of the overall marketing business goals.
Your Value:  Show the value you drove and results you saw with social media.
Overall Progress:  Look at your top metrics that show progress and business impact (number of followers and engagement).  Remember, your social activities tie to larger business initiatives.  How did it create brand awareness? Get appointments scheduled? etc.  Show this off.  This will give you an idea of how your social program is improving over time, and also give you an opportunity to highlight misses and explain what you’re proactively doing to fix them.
Next Month:  List what you learned from the data and how you’re putting this knowledge to work next month.  

Don’t let Facebook’s Insights be overwhelming.  Get familiar with the data and use it to reach your goals and steer your social media action plan.  Have you adjusted your strategy based on your page’s Insights?