Facebook Insights – Which Stats Matter More?
Social media managers are usually tasked with a very specific Facebook-related job: monitoring and analyzing Facebook insights for their respective corporate Facebook accounts. However, Facebook insights is, quite simply, drowning with data. Which ones matter for your page? Which ones should you use when compiling and creating reports? Here are the Facebook insights stats that matter more than others.
New Likes Per Week
The “New Likes Per Week” section of Facebook Insights is easy to access; just click the ‘Likes’ icon on your managed page. How effective your content plan is can sometimes be determined by how interesting it is for your given target market. With this insight, you want the graph to be going up. It does not need to be a steep growth – a gradual but continuous ascent shows that your Facebook page is gaining fans, either via piqued interest or awesome content. Drops in the graph are alright, provided they don’t happen too often and the average graph line is still ascending.
Friends of Fans
This represents your potential fans – but not yet. The trick is to get them to be direct fans, and not just friends of these fans. Some of these will undoubtedly represent a few of your New Likes Per Week Facebook insights stat, and the way to get them will, of course, be interesting content. This pool of potential fans can be ‘hooked in’ by encouraging your current fans to Like and Share your content. This number (which will be massive) should be your conversion target as you have a powerful asset at your disposal – their friends (who are fans of your Facebook page).
Demographics
Your Facebook fans must be located somewhere, and ideally, you would want them to be located where your company’s businesses are. For local brands, say one located in the Philippines, it would do little in increasing actual sales figures if the majority of your fans are international. While this can be seen as ‘good exposure’, as a social media manager, you should use this Facebook insight to help you create content that’s custom-tailored for your local target market (if necessary) and the appropriate age and gender group, for maximum content effectiveness.
Device
Under Like Sources (see below) is a little category called Mobile. This tells you how many of your New Likes originated from a mobile device, most commonly a web-enabled mobile phone. This piece of information from Facebook insights is a rough diamond: it’s a great way to see how many of your community members are logging on Facebook and checking your page using a mobile device. A significant number or percentage (in my opinion, even 10-15 percent of your New Likes is already ‘significant’) coming from mobile should tell you to create and plan content that would be suitable for mobile devices. Offhand, these could be simple but relevant and interesting images, as well as quick and brief status updates that are easy to Like and Share.
Like Sources
A high number of new Likes can cause a spike in the Reach figure in your page’s Facebook insights. This can be seen as engagement but be wary: not all Likes are created the same. Check out your managed Facebook page and take a look at the Like Sources. A high Reach figure could have been caused by timed Ads and Sponsored stories – in essence, your Reach figure was ‘bought’. Far more valuable would be Like Sources from the following: Friend Referrals (thus tapping into your pool of potential fans), Timeline (your quality content was seen from a fan’s page), and Search Results (good SEO from your content or your company’s content, leading to the Facebook page).
Found this article useful? Share it and Follow! Thanks.