An Introduction To Facebook Insights

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:

Pinning And Highlighting Your Facebook Content (And Why It's Important!)

There are many techniques that you can use to make your Facebook business page work harder for you.

For a free service, Facebook is pretty amazing, and it is constantly adding new and innovative ways to help you to find and engage your audience. Two simple but effective strategies for doing this are 'pinning' your business page posts and 'highlighting' them.

This is how it works... 

Facebook Feature 1: 'Pin To Top'

Step 1: Hover your cursor over the top right hand corner of your chosen post to reveal the grey, downwards arrow icon:

Step 2: This reveals the full menu.

Select the 'Pin To Top' option:

Step 3: This now moves your post to the number 1 position on your timeline and keeps it there until you remove it.

Even if you post new updates, this post will remain in that number 1 position (indicated to admins by a small orange 'flag'):

To remove from this position, navigate back to the menu for this post and select 'Unpin From Top':

Why Use It?

The 'Pin To Top' feature is best used when you have a key message that you need to communicate and you want to be sure that page visitors see it whenever they arrive on your business page.

This message may be:

• A sales promo
• A webinar announcement
• A voucher, offer or discount code
• An important software update
• An opening hours update
• Any other important information

Facebook Feature 2: 'Highlight'

Step 1: Hover your cursor over the top right hand corner of your chosen post to reveal the grey, downwards arrow icon:

Step 2: This reveals the full menu.

Select the 'Highlight' option:

Step 3: Your post will now run across the entire width of your Timeline/news feed, rather than being limited to just one side.

Step 4: To remove the highlight, navigate back to the menu for this post and select 'Remove from highlights':

Why Use It?

Using highlights is particularly effective with images, because this functionality allows you to display more of your pictures and increase visual engagement.

I actually use it for marketing purposes, deploying specially designed promo panels which look fabulous when spread across the entire width on my page:

I would encourage you to experiment with the visual possibilities of highlights as when deployed correctly and imaginatively, they can be a pretty effective strategy for your page.