How to Navigate Facebook Insights: A Beginners Guide [Part 1]

You’ve crafted catchy copy, sourced perfect photos, and planned what links you want to share with the world. But how do you know what’s working and what’s lost in your fans’ timeline next to Aunt Suzie’s lunchtime update?

In order to best understand what content is benefiting your business and driving your business goals, you need to analyze your Facebook Insights. This post will give you an overview of the metrics within the Facebook Insights platform, which metrics to pay attention to, and how they inform your content strategy.

An Overview of Facebook Insights

To access Facebook Insights, you need to be logged into Facebook for Business. Click the Insights tab at the top of your page, and you’ll be brought to the Overview tab.

This section gives a general overview of your page including your audience and post activity. You can view data from today, yesterday, the last seven days, and the last 28 days. While this is a nice overview that gives you a high-level view of your page’s performance, the good data is more granular and found in the other tabs.

The Overview tab does provide you with the ability to set up Pages to Watch. Keep an eye on your competition with their Total Page Likes, how many posts they’re putting out, and their engagement compared to your page.

Likes

This section gives you a breakdown of your Total Page Likes. Set the time frame to what date range you want to view your data. You can choose from a pre-set one week, one month, or per quarter range, or you can select a specific date range. You’ll then be able to view how page Likes increased over time and where they are coming from.

Key metrics to look at

Net Likes: Based on the date range set, you’ll be able to view Net Likes, Organic Likes, Paid Likes, and Unlikes. This gives you insight into the distribution of your Likes and is especially helpful if you’re running a Page Likes campaign.

Where Your Page Likes Happened: This is similar to the Net Likes graph, but you’ll be able to see exactly where your Likes are coming from. If you’re running a Page Likes campaign, but you notice the distribution of Likes coming from ads is decreasing, you need to consider altering your ad’s spend or targeting.

Reach

This is one of the most useful tabs for informing your content strategy. You can view post engagement over time and identify what content performs best. From this data, you’ll be able to see what content succeeded and what was a flop, allowing you to create future content that drives high engagement.

Key metrics to look at

Reactions, Comments, and Shares: This is arguably the most useful data for creating your content strategy. You can define the date range and identify engagement spikes.

Within the platform, you can hover over data points, and it will show the exact day and the total number of Reactions, Comments, or Shares. This allows you to identify exactly which posts are driving various forms of engagement, enabling you to replicate successful strategies and content themes.

Hide, Report as Spam, and Unlikes: This graph can be helpful in identifying content that your audience didn’t respond well to. Focus on the Hide Post data points, and identify any major spikes. On March 15, you can see there was a large spike in the number of people that hid a post. Take this information, look back at the content, and adjust future content if necessary.

Page Views

The Page Views tab gives insight into what sections of your page people are viewing: home, about, photos, etc. It also shows you where the traffic to your Facebook page is coming from. This is useful if you’re trying to drive traffic to your page from a particular source and want to identify the success of your tactics.

Posts

The Posts tab is the other most useful tab, along with Reach. It allows you to see how many fans viewed your page each day and what time of day most of your fans are online. It also gives you a breakdown of all the posts published in the last three months.

Key metrics to look at

When Your Fans Are Online: This gives you a one-week breakdown of how many fans are online and when they’re online. By clicking on a specific day of the week, it will show that particular day’s most active times for online fans. If you hover over the graph, it will show you exactly how many fans are online at various times during the day.

This tool helps you identify the most optimal time to schedule posts to get the most engagement.

All Posts Published: This section provides a complete breakdown of every post published over the last three months. It shows the publish date, the post itself, what type of post it was (photo or text), organic reach, paid reach, post clicks, and engagement. It also includes a column for promotion. This is definitely a way for Facebook to encourage you to promote posts, but it’s also helpful to see which posts were promoted, by how much, and the outcome.

People

This gives you a breakdown of your fans’ demographics, including what geographic locations are most common, the percentage of men and women who are fans of your page, and what language they speak. You can also view this information based on the fans engaging with your content by clicking the People tab and then on People Engaged.

Facebook Insights provides detailed native metrics that can inform your business’s content strategy and overall social media marketing strategy. Pay close attention to the data in the Reach and Posts tabs, and remember to check your metrics frequently, keep track of progress, and make adjustments to your strategy based on the results.