Facebook insights: 5 things to look for

Last month, I highlighted strategies for getting the most out of your Facebook Business Page.

The list started with Facebook Insights — a free tool for Business Page administrators to see how their page is performing, who’s following the Page, and how they’re responding to content. This month, I’m taking a deeper dive into Insights, focusing on the five most important things to look for — and why they matter in terms of making the most of Facebook. Here’s what deserves the most attention:

• Overview/Page Summary. When you start a car’s engine, you get a quick confirmation that everything is running as it should — or warning lights indicating something might need attention. In a similar way, the Overview tab is your “dashboard” for Facebook Insights. It tells you how you’re performing in a number of areas, including how your last five posts have performed (a preview of what’s available under the “Posts” tab — more on that below), how many times your page has been viewed, page likes and followers, how many people have seen your posts (post reach), and how many times people have liked, commented, or shared one of your posts (post engagement). It also shows you how responsive you are to messages in Messenger. If you’re looking for a gauge of your page’s overall health, this is it.
• Pages to watch. While it’s a subset of the Overview tab, Pages to Watch is worthy of additional comment. You can benchmark your page against competitors’ pages in terms of total page likes, quantity of posts in the past week, and engagement generated by these posts. From here, you can click on a competitor’s page and see its top posts for the week, which can provide you with a little inspiration.
• Followers and likes. Since not every one of your followers likes your page and vice versa, these are two separate menu items — but they’re very similar. They show your total page followers and likes over time (you can customize the start and end dates) as well as your paid follows/likes (those prompted by advertising), organic follows/likes (those unprompted by advertising) and unfollows/unlikes. These metrics are ultimately important because you need a growing audience, or at least a stable one, in order to maintain momentum on Facebook. When you see follows or likes increase or decrease, ask yourself what may have prompted that activity — and how you replicate it when it’s positive or mitigate it when it’s negative.
• People. One of the most important aspects of social media strategy is knowing whether your actual audience aligns with your intended audience. This tab shows you who, collectively, likes and follows your page by gender, age, country, city, language, and other factors. If you’re reaching the right audience, you should stay the course, but if you’re not, this tab helps you understand how you need to adjust and where you may need to target your advertising dollars in order to influence those numbers.
• Posts. This is one of the best aspects of Insights — the ability to see when your fans are online and how each post performs in terms of post clicks (photo views, video plays, and expanding to read a post) and engagement (likes, comments, and shares).

Armed with this information, you can learn what posts perform best with your audience and when to schedule them.

A quick word of caution: Facebook makes Insights free in order to encourage page administrators to invest more in advertising, so be wary of prompts about how to improve your performance. But even if you don’t spend a dime on Facebook, time spent on Insights is invaluable to generating better content and making it more likely to connect with the right audience.