Updates To New Facebook Insights

These have still not rolled out in full (something Facebook is making a habit of lately: hello timeline), though they are expected to launch for all Facebook pages over the next couple of weeks.

Although Facebook are still cloudy on the details, they have claimed that these will launch ‘as early as next week’. Since we covered the changes, Facebook has made further updates to page insights. I’ve covered the latest changes here, to help you get to grips with the new insights when they’re rolled out in full.

View the level of Page posts

In the summary dashboard, Facebook have introduced a new metric to show the level of activity on your page by the number of posts you’ve made. This is represented by the purple bubbles at the bottom, that are larger depending on the amount of posts you’ve made. Before the changes to the newsfeed, this metric may not have been so useful as you would have been unlikely to make more than one update per day.

But now that pages have to produce more content in order to get noticed, this will enable you to see if there’s a direct correlation between the number of posts you make and increases/decreases in the ‘talking about this’ figure. As you can see from the graph below, taken from our Page, you can see a clear pattern emerging, where the larger the bubble, the more activity there is on the page overall:

Likes, Reach and Talking About

Facebook have now introduced three new tabs onto the Insights Page, that allow you to gather further breakdown of data by Likes, Reach, and Talking About This:

These three tabs aren’t working perfectly yet, with incredibly slow loading times, but Facebook have provided insight into the information available on these pages. These will essentially break down the information further, and expand on the overview data, depending on the particular metric.

Reach Demographics

One of the most interesting additions to the new Insights breakdown, is the availability of demographic data for the page reach. This pulls in the information for people that might not necessarily be fans, and where this information wouldn’t have previously been available. This will be shown in a demographic breakdown:

This is an excellent addition to page insights as it allows you to get an even broader view of the performance of your page and the type of people that you’re reaching. This figure is shown for anyone that has been exposed to your content, including through ads, sponsored stories, or being exposed to friends’ activity.

Here you can look for correlations between this data and the demographic breakdown of your page fans. If you’re reaching a large portion of young females for example – but this isn’t reflected in the fans – then you know you might need to adjust the content or offering to attract these people from becoming viewers to fans.

Breakdown of Sources

While Facebook has always given you a breakdown of sources, such as referral sites, Like boxes etc., now they are providing admins with a view of the sources specifically for Reach, that is broken down by Organic (reach through natural Facebook activity, such as wall post); Paid (Reach by sponsored stories or ads) and Viral (Reach that came specifically from someone viewing the activity produced by a friend).

This wil enable you to easily see if you have a good mix of activity that is driving interest in your page. If your paid activity for example, is producing much higher reach than any organic activity, you’ll know that you might need to improve the content strategy for your page, to make the ad spend work harder for you.

Frequency of exposure

While Facebook Insights currently gives you a good overview of how many individual people you’re reaching, it can’t really tell you how many times you’re reaching the same people. This is a metric that’s available in Ad Insights, where you can see how many times people have been exposed to your ad on average. Now that is being rolled out to new Insights, where you can the average number of times people have been exposed to your Page content over the past seven days :

This will help you to see how much exposure you’re gaining on Facebook overall, as this figure doesn’t just apply to how many times fans have seen your content, but the complete exposure to your content. This should be tracked over time to spot patterns emerging. If you see that there is a decrease in people being exposed to your content a higher number of times, you know that people are beginning to be less engaged, particularly if this occurs alongside a general increase in fans.