Facebook Insights – A Powerful Social Analytics Tool

Sometimes, I wonder how Facebook has dominated the internet world with its unbeatable presence. For a successful online business implementation, social media marketing over platforms like Facebook has become a requisite need for all organizations. If you have experience of working in this digital era for years, you must have been aware of what these Facebook insights are and how their evaluation help in founding a brand value in this highly competitive marketplace.

In this internet-driven atmosphere, social media marketers have become an integral part of any business organization because they play the most considerable role in monitoring and tracking the metrics of social media platforms like Facebook and reporting those measures to the managers for further evaluation on daily basis.

Now, the first question that strikes your mind is how the measurement of FB insights helps in business branding. Another remarkable query is whether the experts are reporting only the likes to the managers or they are just filtering the data to report only that information which is vital for an effective business branding process. Customer-centric marketing strategies yield the best results. However, before discovering the right answers to these questions, it is equally crucial to know what metrics are used for measuring Facebook Insights and why you need to measure the performance of your Facebook page.

While evaluating the promotion of any business via Facebook, it is noteworthy to comprehend how many people reach your post, how many of those were able to engage with your post, and how many clicks the post has received from them.

On the other hand, if you want to evaluate Facebook metrics with better precision, it is important to extract the export files for scrutinizing useful statistics.

You can easily follow some simple steps to find out the export files. The steps are listed as follows:

• Login to your Facebook business page.
• Click on the “Insights” that can be sighted in-between ‘Activity’ and ‘Settings’ options on top of the page.
• Click the “Export Data” button located in the top right corner to view the documents, which are not displayed in the Web Insights window:

The Exports Insights Data dialog box will open asking you to tell Facebook what you want to export.

• Select the “New” radio button under the SELECT EXPORT option displayed on the Exports Insights Data dialog box.

Keep the data range as default.

• Select the “Excel” radio button under the SELECT FILE FORMAT option and the “Post level data” radio button under the SELECT DATA TYPE option to download the FB insights of your business page:

You can download both page-level data and post-level data to get a better accuracy of your FB page insights however, you will have to download both these data separately by selecting the options one by one.

Although there are various metrics used for measuring the FB insights for your business growth, we will discuss the most remarkable metrics in terms of their ratios, which are used for monitoring and tracking down the performance of FB pages. Let us know why these ratios are important and how we can measure them.

Consumers vs. Total Reach

Reach is the only metric that provides the gist of the performance of the post whereas Consumer is the metric that helps to evaluate the number of users who saw or click anywhere on your post in the form of like, share, comment, like click, video play expand comments, click the profile of commentator, etc. The ratio of consumers to the total reach reveals the influence of your content over the visitors of your Facebook page.

For evaluating this ratio, two statistical measures are taken into consideration:

• Lifetime consumers: It refers to the number of users who generated clicks on the FB page
• Lifetime total reach: It refers to the number of users who have visited the FB page without generating any click

This ratio signifies the number of users who have clicked over a post to the number of users who have just viewed the post.

Why this ratio is vital: Measuring this ratio is very vital for a Social Media marketer because it helps in evaluating how a specific post engrossed clicks by taking into account the total users who saw this particular post. In this ratio, the complete concentration is on the number of users reaching over the FB page instead of clicks only.

Consumptions vs. Impressions

The statistical measures used for calculating this ratio are:

• Lifetime consumption of a post: It refers to how many times a post was clicked by the users
• Lifetime impression of a post: It refers to how many times a post was seen by the users

This ratio signifies the percentage of time and not the users that was spend on clicking the post over the percentage of time it was seen by the users

Why this ratio is vital: This ratio plays a prominent role in evaluating the measurement to find out how many clicks a particular post has received regardless of the number of times people saw this post. You cannot decide the success and failure of your Facebook promotion based on the number of clicks only because we cannot ignore those factors, which significantly influence the impression as these impressions are responsible for generating effective clicks in a day or a week.

Apart from these two vital ratios, one more important ratio helps the social media marketers in getting a better interpretation of their Facebook page insight, which is Engaged fans vs. Likes. This ratio gives a better representation of the number of fans who have engaged with your post in terms of likes as well.

Engaged Fans vs. Page Likes

Engagement is the true measure of how your content communicates with your audience and an engaged fan will not necessarily click on your post but he or she might view your post or generate a story from your post.

The two important statistics used in measuring this ratio are:

• Lifetime people who have engaged with your post: It means the total number of people engaged with your posts or page.
• Lifetime total likes: Total number of likes received by your Facebook Page.

This ratio indicates the percentage of fans who clicked on your post without considering whether they view that post or not.  It has a direct influence on your EdgeRank and perceptibility.  Rather than just being a ratio, it is the barometer for reading the success of your content.

Like denotes that someone has clicked the like button on your post either through your FB page or through a website that prompts to your FB page.

Engaged fans are represented by the number of “Talking About This”, which is displayed next to the Like button on a Facebook page. It actually denotes the number of fans who are interacting with your Facebook page. This includes activities such as likes to a post, comments, shares, etc by the people who visited the page. Let us take the Fan Page of Lionel Messi to illustrate the actual meaning of this ratio in the figure given below:

The Engaged fan vs. Likes ratio for this Facebook page is 152,120/843,311, which is a great example because it clearly indicates that this page is successful in engaging people over it and has carved a successful niche for those fans who have liked this page.

Why this ratio is vital: The ratio offers a better idea of the percentage of your fans who holds interest in your posts whether they liked your posts or not. If you evaluate this ratio, you will know what to implement to make more people engaged with your posts because the engagement of fans is very important for the successful branding of your business.

Fan Stories vs. Fan Impressions

Fan stories are those stories, which are generated when a fan or a visitor likes, comments, shares your post, responds to an event or answers a particular question. You can evaluate the fan stories within Insights in the How People Are Talking About Your Page section, where you can see graphs displaying the likes, shares, and comments:

On the other hand, Fan impressions are those impressions, which denote the number of times a post is displayed to the fans without being clicked by them. Therefore, the two most important statistics used for evaluating this ratio are:

• Lifetime Post Stories: It denotes the number of times a post generates stories likes, comments, or shares from your fans
• Lifetime Post Impressions: It denotes the number of times a post is displayed to its fans.

This ratio represents the percentage of times a post is viewed by your fans resulting in stories.

Why this ratio is vital?

While a click shows the interest shown by people towards your post but clicks that result in stories make your post viral over social media platforms, which ultimately helps in popularizing your business brand among your fans. It also reflects the capability of your content to motivate a second action, which serves as the endorsement base for your business.

Conclusion:

If you have a Facebook business page for your brand, you must make sure to understand your Facebook Insights dashboard. It contains very critical data which supports you to learn about the performance of your page. It acts as the key factor in the growth of your page among huge audiences. 

Facebook Insights gives you a vision of the incoming data on your page which helps you to understand the customers’ behavior on your page and the kind of content that they are more inclined to. It also gives you an insight into how your page is held up against your competitors. 

The Facebook Insight dashboard has the most important information about the performance of your page and regarding your audience. If you use this data wisely, you can create better content for your brand and enhance your sales and conversions.

Measuring your Facebook Page performance to know the popularity and branding status of your business is of utmost priority for the success of any business. However, instead of performing the FB Insights metrics evaluation manually, you can use free tools like Simply Measured and Page Analyzer but it is important to choose paid tools for better results and enhanced accuracy.

Overall, it is very significant to make a wise decision regarding the choice of Facebook Insights metrics so that you can promote your business well over social media platforms thus taking your business productivity to new levels of success.