Articles on Facebook: Facebook Upgrades Insights Analytics Tool

FROM: http://www.business2community.com/facebook/facebook-upgrades-insights-analytics-tool-0116738

By Allison Russo, Published January 15, 2012

Marketers should be adept at demonstrating the value of online marketing efforts to their client or company. Tools like Google Analytics and Compete.com provide excellent ways to measure and report, in-depth, on company website traffic and the effectiveness of an online strategy. However, tools for measuring social media marketing success have only had capacity to report on very basic statistics (# of likes, shares, comments, etc.)…until now.

Last month, Facebook rolled out an upgraded version of their Insights analytics tool for business pages, providing a comprehensive look into your pages’ reach and many additional metrics to support your Facebook marketing efforts. Below is a summary of some key elements of the Insights revamp:

1. Measuring Facebook Reach: In addition to “Total Likes,” which has always been available, Insights now also reports three additional statistics to define your pages overall reach on Facebook:

Friends of Fans: This metric identifies the total number of people your page could be exposed to, if each of your fans shares content from your page on their own account.

People Talking about This: This metric identifies the number of unique people who have shared content from your page on their account in the past week.

Weekly Total Reach: This metric identifies the number of people that have seen the content that your fans have shared on their own pages.

2. Influence of Post Frequency: This graph is an excellent way to analyze correlations between the frequency of posts and how that influences fans. The purple dots below represent posts to your page; the bigger the dot, the higher frequency of posts that day. If you look at the graph, you will notice that on January 4th (with an average sized purple dot), the “People Talking about This” and “Weekly Total Reach” numbers went up. Conversely, in late December (a larger purple dot, meaning more posts), the “People Talking about This” and “Weekly Total Reach” metrics aren’t as high. Based on this information, marketers can deduce that frequency in content is not what influences their fans. It is more likely, in this case, that their fans are influenced by the subject matter of the content.

3. Engagement and “Virality” of Posts: The graph below displays every post made on your page, alongside a few important new metrics:

Reach: This metric identifies the number of people who have seen the post.

Engaged Users: This metric identifies the number of people who have clicked on the post.

Talking about This: See #1.

Virality: This metric identifies the percentage of people who have shared your post, out of the total number of unique people who have seen it.

By reviewing these metrics for each individual post, a marketer can learn what types of posts are resonating with their audiences and make decisions about future posts, based on that knowledge.