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Inbound marketers of the world, today was a good day. Upon logging into your Facebook business page, you may have noticed a little box pop up that read, "Introducing New Insights for Pages." (This is the point where you realized today was a good day.) The revamped insights feature comes fully loaded with metrics that are truly insightful and can help you super-charge your Facebook marketing. Here's how.
1. Important Metrics
While we've always known how many total likes a page has, we can now clearly see the total reach our page has based off these likes. In other words, "Friends of Fans." This number is the number of people you can potentially reach if everyone you are connected to talks and/or shares your page on their account.
Facebook also included a "People Talking About This" and "Weekly Total Reach" metric. The first is the number of unique people who have created content about your page on Facebook in the past week, meaning they have never shared your content previously. The "Weekly Total Reach" is the actual number of people who have seen that content, which is aggregated by adding all the people ("friends") each shared post has reached. Pretty nifty stuff, huh?
Marketing Takeaway: A count of total reach is to a marketer what a count of total media impressions is to a PR specialist--except better. When a story is published in a magazine, we know how many people are subscribed to that publication, but we can never truly measure how many additional people have seen it. Facebook's new reach metrics allow you to see exactly how far beyond the initial fan that content went. The more the content is viewed, the more people get directed to your page, and the higher the chance of them clicking on an offer.
2. Overview of Activity
Facebook insights have always provided a graph highlighting "New Likes," "Lifetime Likes," and "Monthly Active Users." While the first two are intuitive, what the heck does "Monthly Active Users" really mean? This information does not direct our social media marketing efforts in any significant way. Thus, it is with great joy that we are introduced to an upgraded graph that shows how individual posts influence the number of people talking about you, as well as the impact it has on the overall reach. The size of the circle simply indicates how much you published that day (in the screenshot below, the small circle is 1 post and the bigger circle is 3 posts). The graph also provides a visual presentation of the aforementioned "People Talking About This" and "Weekly Total Reach."
Marketing Takeaway: Take the time to analyze the number of posts published per day compared to the number of people talking about those posts and the total reach for insights into your content strategy. In HubSpot's case, the graph hints that the number of posts published does not directly correlate with the total shares or reach. This tells us that regardless of whether we post once or thrice, it's the value of the content we're posting that is generating our reach.
3. Understanding Your Posts
Now this is truly why the updated Insights are so spectacular. Ever wondered the total reach for each individual post? How many users that specific update engaged? How many people are talking about it? And the virality of it?! Facebook has answered our deepest marketing wishes. As displayed in the screenshot below, we can now look at the metrics for each of these factors and know exactly how it played out. And if that wasn't enough, you can also filter the post type to specifically measure how photos, status updates, videos, etc., are stacking up.
Marketing Takeaway: This tool can you help you evaluate what types of offers are performing well on Facebook, giving you insight into what your fans actually want. You can then post offers catering to that to more efficiently earn social media leads. Additionally, seeing the virality, which measures how likely a person is to share that piece of content, is a fabulous way to gauge the type of content your fans will respond to.
4. Analyze Your Audience
While Facebook previously included a breakdown of the demographics, these statistics were subjected to those who have 'liked' your page. You can now further analyze the structure of two additional populations: people reached and people talking about this. Each set of metrics is organized the same way, but simply clicking on one of three populations can give you insights into the demographic of people beyond those who like your page.
Marketing Takeaway: Just because a user 'likes' your page does not mean he/she is sharing your content. So while demographic information is good to know about these people, it's even more valuable to know for people who are actually engaging and reposting your content, because it allows you to know what your real fans want. These metrics for reach are valuable for helping you target new customers by determining who is frequently seeing your content, therefore increasing the possibility of converting them into a fan.
5. Present Like a Boss
Just as before, Facebook allows you to export your Insights. With the addition of these new and improved features, you can now pull a report flooded with valuable data that will provide you and/or your marketing team with key insights into the boatload of topics discussed in the four points above.
Marketing Takeaway: Be sure to include these reports in presentations revolving around your social media efforts. Also, export and save them at various points in time to compare and contrast your inbound marketing efforts.
What do you think of the updated Facebook Insights? How else do you think these metrics can benefit your Facebook marketing efforts?
