How To Conquer Facebook Insights For Small Business

Wondering how to use Facebook Insights for your small business?

Or just frustrated with poor results from your Facebook Page?

Whether you’re hoping to go viral with Facebook photos or Facebook videos, there’s only one way to know what’s resonating with your followers.

Facebook Insights!

My readers have said the top social media platform they want to learn in is Facebook. And the first step is knowing what’s working on your Page.

So study this Small Business Guide to Facebook Insights and learn!

What are Facebook Insights?

Facebook Insights is the dedicated place on each business Page that lets you see analytics and in-depth information about your Page. It’s a one-stop spot for information on your posts, demographics, and even where you can study your competitors to see what they’re up to.

If you have a business Facebook Page, you’ll be able to access Insights by clicking the option along the top menu when you are on the Page. This opens up onto the Overview and there’s a whole range of additional options down the left-hand side menu to easily access a specific metric.

Let’s take a look at what these are and how they help you.

The first section is the Page Summary (see screenshot above) which is made up of twelve boxes containing the following information:

1. Actions on Page
2. Page Views
3. Page Previews
4. Page Likes
5. Post Reach
6. Story Reach
7. Recommendations
8. Post Engagement
9. Responsiveness
10. Videos
11. Page Followers
12. Orders

Some of the metrics may be a little different depending on what you’ve told Facebook that your business does.

These metrics will default to showing for the last seven days but you can change this with the drop-down box beside Page Summary if you want to see a different period.

Ad results

Ad results used to show the most recent ads on your account. But as part of the new Business Manager and the Ads Manager inside it, this has moved to that part of your account.

However, there’s a handy button to click to jump straight to the ads section.

If you need tips to improve your ads, you’ll want to read how to make the best Facebook ads.

Most recent 5 posts

This is a great way to see your five most recent posts and how they performed. Facebook shows this as a grid with the time and dates the post was published, what it was, and the type of post such as a Facebook link post or a video.

Next, it shows any targeting (which is global unless you have paid for an ad) then the reach and engagements for the post.

There’s also a simple ‘Boost Post’ button if you want to put some money into a post that is performing well organically and push it out to more people.

Pages to Watch

The final section on the Overview is Pages to Watch. This is where you can do some spying on competitors!

You can choose the Pages you watch here and see a comparison of their data to yours.

You will see:

• Total page likes
• Change up or down from last week
• Posts this week
• Engagement this week

At the bottom of the list is your own Page so you can easily compare the figures.

Followers

Followers are people who have opted to follow your Page. Sometimes they like it as well – but not always. This section of Insights tells you about them.

There’s the date range setting along the top to select a specific range, the last week, month, or quarter.

Net followers are how many people you have gained and lost including paid followers.

Where your Page follows happen tells you how people find your Page.

Facebook Insights on Page Likes

Likes are a key indicator of your Page’s successes and failures!

Monitoring how many people like your Page is just one step in understanding your audience. Insights offer a little more information on this to help you see how things are changing.

Along the top is the date range which can select a specific date or look at the last week, month or quarter.

Next is the Total Pages Likes as of Today and this shows the last month to see how this has changed.

Page Likes covers unlikes, organic likes, and paid likes (from ads) so you can see where your likes are coming from.

Where Your Page Likes Happened is the final section and breaks down where the page was liked from. For example, did they like the Page after reading a post on it?

Understanding Page Reach

Page Reach is an important metric that gives you an idea about how many people are seeing your posts. Insights have a range of data on the Reach page to help.

Post Reach is a simple chart of how many people have seen your posts. It shows both paid and organic, if you have been running ads.

Recommendations are where people have recommended your Page by tagging it somewhere on Facebook.

Likes, Comments, Shares, and more, help you to see the main engagements with your content. It is great to judge what’s working and what didn’t.

Hide, report as spam and unlikes are the negative side of things. Hopefully, there’s no data here but if there is, it is worth investigating, especially report as spam.

Hiding your page simply means people don’t want to see the content but still like the page.

Unlikes are people removing their like of the page.

Total reach covers organic and paid total reach for your post. It is an estimated number based on who saw your content or your Page.

Page Views

Page Views shows you how many people saw your Page in the chosen time period, but also has a few options to fine-tune the data.

Under ‘Total People who Viewed’ you can also choose to look at:

• By section
• By age and gender
• By country
• By city
• By device

The final chart shows top sources which will include Facebook but also other websites that led to a view of your Page.

Page Previews

This section is similar to Page views but focuses on people who have previewed your page.

There isn’t as much targeting, but you can change the date period or view by age and gender.

Actions on Page

Actions on Page is often based on the type of actions you choose to show. Options include things like website clicks, action button clicks or even get directions clicks.

The first chart shows how many of these have been taken.

There are four more charts that all let you select by the same demographics as above. These are:

• People who clicked the action button
• People who clicked Get Directions
• People who clicked the phone number
• People who clicked the website

Which one of these shows any data depends on what buttons you have on your Page.

Posts

Posts are the Insight section where you learn more about your Page posts and how people are reacting to them.

The first section offers three sets of data – when your fans are online, post types, and top posts from pages you watch.

Under this is shown the days of the week and the hours of the day to see when fans are most active.

The Post Types option shows average reach and engagement by type of post.

The top watched pages show the most recent posts from those pages and their engagements.

Under this is a list of all of the posts published with the type of post, any targeting, reach and engagement. It shows the image, the time and date published and the actual post text. So, if you want to see how a specific post did, this will tell you.

To improve your posts, learn how to optimize photos for Facebook.

Videos

If you add videos to your Page, this is where you see Insights for video content. If you have paid for video ads, there is a dedicated section for this.

Then you can see the performance of your videos including minutes views and 3-second video views. There is also a section for top videos.

Stories

For Facebook Stories Insights, this is the section you need. It shows you information about Stories created within the last 28 days, even though they vanish after 24 hours.

Groups

If you have a Facebook Group and have linked your Page to it, you can get some basic Insights on the Groups tab.

The first graph shows:

• Members
• Posts
• Comments
• Reactions

The second graph sets you see a breakdown of members by age and gender, city, and country. You can change the time period and even create a post for the Group straight from the section.

Understand your Fans in the People Insights

People is a great section to get an idea of who your audience is and a little more information about them. It breaks down into three options – your fans, your followers, and people reached.

For each, you can see the breakdown of women to men as well as the age groups of your fans or followers. You can also see the country, city, and language they have shown on their profile.

Messages

Messages sent to your Page have their own Insights section and you can select the time frame to view this data.

You can see messaging connections and block rate as well as your responsibleness and new connections you have made.

Orders

For e-commerce businesses who have the facility to buy through their Facebook Page, the final section on Insights tells you the number of orders.

You can select different time periods to see how many sales have been made via your Page.

How to Use Facebook Insights

There’s no doubt that there’s a lot of information on Facebook Insights, but how do you use this to help improve your strategy?

Here are a few examples to help you see how useful Facebook Insights can be.

Use Reach to study spikes

When you try a new type of post, a new strategy or even just a quick video, you want to know if this had an impact on the reach of your page and that’s where to look.

Check the Reach Insights for spikes, for changes in patterns and also to see if people unlike or unfollowed your page.

Study which posts do well

It is always a good idea to more of what works and studying the Post Insights section is a good way to make data-based decisions on what these are.

You can see posts by reach, engagement rate or even negative reactions to see what people didn’t like.

Download data to store for later

While having all the data inside Facebook Insights is great, you can also download it to study it and add it to different tools such as a spreadsheet.

You can download page, post, or video data in different time periods and also in different file formats.

Sources

Infographics used with permission of The Business Backer under CC4 license and edited as allowed to make more manageable portions.

Buffer. (2017) How to Use Facebook Insights and Analytics to Boost Your Social Media Marketing Strategy 
AdEspresso. (2017) Beginner’s Guide to A/B Testing Facebook Ads 
Social Media Examiner. (2014) How to Use the Facebook Pages to Watch to Track Competitors 
Megalytic. (2016) Understanding Facebook Page Insights: Likes, Reach, and Page Views 
Fortune. (2018) Everything to Know About Facebook’s Big News Feed Change 
VentureBeat (2016) Facebook rolls out recommendation feature that lets your friends tell you what to do 
Social Media Examiner. (2016) Facebook Reactions: What Marketers Need to Know 
HubSpot. (2017) 4 Ways to Keep Facebook Fans From ‘Unliking’ Your Page 
CPC Strategy. (2017) What Does Facebook Reach Mean? 
Megalytic. (2016) Analyzing the Demographics of Your Facebook Users 
Unmetric. (2016) Ultimate Facebook Analytics Guide 

Conclusion

Facebook Insights is a free tool within every business Page and provides a wide range of information that’s well worth studying. So, get to know those Insights and use them to make data-driven decisions about your strategy going forward.

Pin the infographics to your Business Tips Pinterest board!

There are no magic formulas that work for every business. Use these tips to be a pro at Facebook Insights for your small business!