Social media can be a marketing powerhouse for most small to medium sized businesses. A business page on Facebook is essentially required for any business in this day and age. While setting up your business’s Facebook page and managing it may seem simple, there is a science and strategy to getting social media marketing to directly impact your business and achieve your sales goals.
Have you posted in the past without much engagement from your audience? You are not alone. Even if you have built up an audience for your page, they may not ever see the content that your are posting! Facebook offers a secret weapon to help inform your strategy and execute with precision: Insights.
Understanding Facebook Insights
Facebook Insights is a free tool available to all business page managers on Facebook. It can be found at the top of your business page, between the “notifications” and “publishing tools” tabs. You may have clicked on this section before, but not even realized the power behind this amazing tool. You will find a lot of useful information and data about your fans in your Insights. But it can be confusing or a bit overwhelming if you don’t know what to do with the data.
Within Facebook Insights there are 5 data and information segments or tabs to view: overview, likes, reach, people, and local. Each tab delivers powerful insights to your fans and the best ways to engage with them. In this article, we look at the most important features of Facebook Insights and how to use them to strengthen your Facebook presence and engage your audience.
Overview
The first thing you will see when you open the insights tab is an overview of your business page’s activity. Think of this page like your dashboard. If you need some quick information or just a brief overview of your page’s health, this is where you’ll want to look. It is important to note that near the top of the page, you can look at data in more detail from the past 7 days, 28 days, or the previous day.
Next you will see your page summary and any recent paid promotions you have run on your page (which saves you the hassle of navigating to the ad manager). It also highlights your 5 most recent posts and a “pages to watch”.
Another major part of your overview is your competitors. Facebook automatically loads similar businesses to give you an idea of how your business’s page is performing compared to others in your industry or area. We recommend that you populate this section yourself with competitors you keep a close eye on.
As a business owner or page admin, you know your competitors better than anyone. While you will not be able to see a ton of detailed analysis in this section, it’ll give you a good idea as to where you stand compared to other businesses you’re competing against. We recommend adding at least two of your biggest competitors to this section. Keeping an eye on their levels of engagement and number of posts can help inform your strategy and give you ideas on how to engage your audience.
Likes
As a page manager, you’re likely already tracking the amount of users following your page. This feature allows you to measure your growth over time, measure paid likes vs organic likes, and see exactly where your likes happened on your page.
Are your page likes happening organically, from paid ads, or from page suggestions? This is important information to keep in mind when determining your social media marketing strategy going forward. If you’re not getting a lot of organic likes, you’ll want to consider putting some money into an Facebook advertising strategy.
On the other hand, if you’re getting a lot of organic likes, you’ll want to analyze your organic posts more deeply so that you can duplicate successful posts and capitalize on this organic growth. Your posts can be seen in the “posts” tab of insights, and can be analyzed by reach and engagement. You can also duplicate select posts in this area.
Reach
Facebook posts do not get as much mileage as they used to. While Facebook is moving toward a pay-to-play platform, it is still possible to get healthy organic reach. This section of Insights allows you to compare your paid and organic reach, analyze your reactions, comments, and shares and see how many people are hiding your posts or un-liking your page.
This is important information to note. If you posted a video that caused 100 people to unlike your page or hide your posts, you will definitely want to be sure to avoid posting that video again.
From this section, you will want to determine which types of posts perform best on your page. It is recommended that you check this area regularly to optimize the engagement on your page. Get started by making a list and compare the success and failures of your most popular posts.
People
People are the reason we market on Facebook, right? We want to reach our target audience, form a relationship with them, and encourage brand loyalty. While you could be getting great engagement, it may be with the entirely wrong audience, and that is something we all need to work to avoid. This section of Facebook Insights allows you to know your audience more deeply than ever before.
In this section, you will be able to analyze the demographic information of your audience including location, language, gender, and age. Even better, you will be able to differentiate between the people engaged and the people reached. Knowing this information helps you create content that is targeted toward your engaged and intended audience.
Not reaching the right audience? Start crafting content that is engaging to your target audience, and develop a paid campaign to get your content strategy kickstarted. For example, if your target audience is millennial women, but you are reaching women in their 50s, you can identify what is wrong in your content development. Start researching what types of content millennial women like to engage with, and then start testing.
Also consider adding a competitor that successfully engages millennial women and create your own similar ideas. These new approaches will enable you to see, day-by-day, how your content is changing your engaged audience.
Local
Like the “people” section, this section can give you detailed information about the people around your business. That’s right! Facebook uses your business location to provide you demographic information about the people near your business. This include ages, gender, and busiest days and times of the week.
Understanding your local consumers and target market is essential for any brick and mortar store or business. Use this information to create targeted messages that are relevant. Relevant messaging often deliver higher conversions and improved fan engagement. For example, try targeting your local audience at the times they are most likely near your business and watch the foot traffic start to roll in.
Using Facebook Insights data and information to develop a targeted social campaign can produce powerful results affordably. A quick peek into what is working for your Facebook page and what is not is the first step to improving engagement and truly harnessing the power of social media advertising.