Facebook has many excellent features built into it as standard... and they're all free!
One of the best and most useful features for business use is Facebook's 'Insights' service which is automatically built into every business page.
You'll frequently hear me emphasising that businesses need to use business pages, not personal profiles for commercial use and this is yet another good reason why.
If you use your personal profile for business, you cannot access the wonderful Insights service... and that's like trying to run a business with a blindfold on!
Facebook Insights Whistle Stop Tour
In very simple terms, Facebook Insights provides detailed analytics for your business page.
This information is like gold dust for your business - it allows you to measure what's working and what is not - which means that you can target your efforts and if applicable, your advertising spend, in the right direction.
To get started, navigate to your business page and click on the 'View Insights' button in the top menu:
This will take you to an 'at a glance' overview page giving you details of Page Likes, Post Reach and Engagement for the past week:
Facebook leaves nothing to chance, giving you simple to understand graphs showing your latest data.
This data removes all 'finger in the wind' guesses about what's working on your page and what is not.
It can be pretty brutal is something falls a bit flat ... but if you can't measure it in your business, then you're using guesswork, and that's not a clever way to do things!
As you navigate through the Insights menus you will be able to access this vast array of data:
- Total Page Likes as of Today
- Net Likes: What Changed
- Where Your Page Likes Came From
- Post Reach: The number of people who saw your posts
- Likes, Comments, and Shares: These actions will help you reach more people
- Hide, Report as Spam, and Unlikes: These actions will decrease the number of people you reach
- Page and Tab Visits: The number of times each of your Page tabs was viewed
- Other Page Activity: The number of actions people took that involved your Page
- External Referrers: The number of times people came to your Page from a website off Facebook
Each set of data is presented in a clear, easy to understand format, so you don't need to be a data whizzkid to grasp what's going on:
One of the data sets that I always find particularly interesting is the age profile and gender split of my business page audience:
Why Use Insights?
Insights data gives you precise and accurate information about what's going well and what is not.
It is particularly useful for figuring out what works well with your audience and what does not.
This data will save you spending time and effort on wasted tasks, and ensure that your energy is directed to the right place.
Facebook gives plenty of support on how to use the Insights functionality and you can even export and store your page data:
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