If you haven’t gotten past the “Overview” tab on your Facebook page’s insights…
…you’re missing out on a world of information about your users.
While reading the entire Facebook insights guide is worthwhile for serious page managers (because that’s where I’m curating this post from), I’m going to break down just one aspect I think you’ll find useful.
A quick note: if your page is brand new or you don’t have a large number of fans (kind of like my page, which you are more than welcome to visit), then this won’t be of much use – yet – but you’ll want to know about it by the time your brand takes off.
The first thing you’ll need to do is download an Excel file of your statistics. Here are the steps:
1. Go to your page’s Admin Panel, click “See All” under Insights.
2. Click the “Likes” tab, then “Export Data” (top right of screen shot below).
3. Set data type to “Page Level Data”, file format to Excel and date range to at least two months back. Click download and you should be able to open the file in Excel. (If the first download fails, reload the page and try again.)
Page Level Data vs. Post Level Data
- Page Level Data: Aggregated data about your page
- Post Level Data: Data on each of your page posts
4. The first sheet alone in the Excel file – “Key metrics” – will have 89 different statistical categories. A lot of the categories are repeats, but broken into unique visitors, daily feedback, weekly feedback and “28 Days” feedback, so it’s not as overwhelming as it sounds. Here are my three favorite column groupings and what they can tell you. (Descriptions taken from the insights guide.)
- People Talking About This (Column B-D): The number of people sharing stories about your page. These stories include liking your Page, posting to your Page’s Wall, liking, commenting on or sharing one of your Page posts, answering a Question you posted, RSVPing to one of your events, mentioning your Page, phototagging your Page or checking in at your Place. (Unique Users) In other words, who is “aggregating” content from your page onto their profile for friends to see.
- Viral Reach (Columns X-Z): The number of people who saw your Page or one of its posts from a story published by a friend. These stories include liking your Page, posting to your Page’s Wall, liking, commenting on or sharing one of your Page posts, answering a Question you posted, RSVPing to one of your events, mentioning your Page, phototagging your Page or checking in at your Place. (Unique Users) This is a great way to gauge the “shareability” of your posts.
- Organic Reach of Page Posts (Columns AT-AV): The number of people who saw your Page posts in News Feed or ticker, or on your Page’s Wall. In other words, people who like your page and found your content on Facebook the most natural way possible, without any bells or whistles.
5. What should you do with all this data? Have a calendar handy and check strong statistical post days with days of the week, then do the same for weak statistical days. For example, if there is a lot of positive activity for your page on Thursdays, but lack of user activity on Mondays, ask yourself if there is a pattern to your posts on that day. It could be that you just post more on Thursdays and have neglected Mondays.
If that’s not the case, it may mean your users are more active on Thursday than Monday, and you should focus additional energy on posting content and engaging with them on Thursdays. Of course you should still be engaging on all days, but know which ones work best. When in doubt, experiment.
There are other tabs in the Excel spreadsheet download you can explore, too. It’s easy to get caught up in the wealth of data available (you can even tell what language people had Facebook set to when they found your page), so determine what’s most helpful to you and stick to those reports a majority of the time.
Do you have any useful tips for analyzing Facebook page insights? Share them in the comments.
Social Meditation 