A step by step guide on How to Use Facebook Insights for Business

I have had a few clients recently ask me to show them A step by step guide on How to Use Facebook Insights for Business. So this post will dig into Facebook and show you what insights on Facebook are all about. Now, before you hit the ‘stop’ button, I just want to talk about why insights and metrics are extremely important, especially for your Facebook page and your small business.

Now, many people don’t like looking at numbers, many people don’t like getting stuck in that stuff because it scares them. But the truth is if you know what’s working you can do more of it. And if you know what’s not working, you can stop it, save yourself some money and some, probably, a lot of time as well.

So, Facebook obviously has changed a lot in the last 10 years. Facebook pages have lost a lot of organic traffic, as you’ve probably seen in some of my other posts. And in fact, they’re almost down to zero organic traffic. That’s how bad it is. However, there are still some things that are working on Facebook pages, and it’s probably worth your effort to see what you’re doing on Facebook to see if it’s actually worth pursuing.

These metrics will also show you a whole bunch of other stuff about your clientele, your potential market that could be good for your other marketing services. So, let’s dig in and check it out.

A step by step guide on How to Use Facebook Insights for Business

When you’re on your Facebook business page, look on the left-hand side, I want you to find where it says,  ‘Insights’.

This is the section that we’re tackling here. So, when I click on ‘Insights’, you’ll see that the left-hand side has changed. There’s a menu on the left.

 

 

 

So, what I want to do is I’m going to go through a few of these menu items in the next couple of videos. I’m not going to go through every one of them because some of them are probably not as relevant as others.  A lot of them are just numbers and data and, if you see too many numbers you’re going to fry your brains, your eyes will roll back and you won’t be interested in what’s going on. 🙂

So, I’m going to show you and pick the best ones for you so that you can use your time wisely looking at the right metrics for you.

The Overview Page of Facebook Insights

So, this is the Overview page and it gives us a couple of options.

Firstly, it tells us about the summary. So, you can see here, the ‘Page Summary’. And if I click on this ‘seven days’, I can pick four different options: ‘Today’, ‘Yesterday’, ‘Last seven days’, and then the ‘Last 28 days’. I’m going to pick the ‘Last 28 days’ just to give you a bit of reference and some vision of what it is.

It tells you the dates that the report is for and also It tells you the actions on the page. (Fig 1 above) Now, if you look at these and you’re not sure exactly what is an action, you can hover over the ‘i’ button here, and in this case, it says ‘The number of clicks on your Page’s contact info and call-to-action button’. So, that’s the little button on the homepage of your business page on Facebook.

So, ‘Actions on Page’, (fig 1 above) you can see this particular page had three actions in the last month that had 334 views. Once again, hover over the top of the ‘i’, it’ll give you exactly what that means.

You can look at Page Previews. I really don’t use this at all, but the previews are the number of times people hovered over your page name when they might’ve seen it in a post somewhere. So, as they’ve seen your page name they hovered over the top to see what the page looks like. Some basic information from the ‘About’ section pops up, and people can see that. So, that’s the Page Previews.

Then, you can see where people liked your page, how many people liked your page, how much reach your posts got during that period. Story Reach is shown as well.  You’ve got to turn on those Story Insights which I’ll show you a little later.

Recommendations are the number of times people recommended your page. This used to be the reviews part of the page, but Facebook has renamed it recommendations.

You will also see any engagements from those particular posts. I’m going to show you the videos and page followers a little later. I’m going to dig into it a little bit more in depth. But you can see that’s some quick interesting information.

 

You can also export this data so that it can be served up as a CSV file. (Fig 2 above) And in that CSV file you can manipulate your data as much as you want. It shows you on a daily basis every day where things are happening so you can really get granular and find out exactly what’s going on on a daily basis.

You may want to look at this point here, why was there so much traffic on this particular day?

You can look at the granular data from your export and you can see exactly what’s been going on.

If I scroll down a little further it also shows you your five most recent posts.

This is pretty cool. It shows you the date that the post was( Fig 1). It shows you which post they are referring to (fig 2)

It shows you the type of post ( Fig 3). So, if you hover over the top you can see that these are all just photos. It’s shared with the entire world and the entire public ( fig 4) on Facebook, and it tells you the reach (Fig 5).

So, the reach here is 102 in the first post, 89 for the 2nd post, 117 on the third one etc. If you click on the title of the post it’ll actually open up the post and it will show you the post and some more details.

So, you can see here it gives you some feedback on the post although they haven’t got much information about this because nobody liked it, nobody commented on it, nobody shared it. So, you can see that this post here almost a day ago has really had no traction.

What do the numbers mean?

Now, as a business owner, you don’t want to be paying somebody to be doing your Facebook posting for you when you’re not getting any results. The post above is showing no results. So, this was posted a day ago. Not one person has liked, commented, or shared it. I’m guessing they haven’t taken a lot of time to put this together, but you can see that businesses that are paying social media agencies to do work and getting results like this are very common.

So, I want you to have a look at your business. Are you paying someone to do this? Are you paying an employee to do this? Because you’ll probably find that it’s not getting much reaction.

If I click on this 2nd post, for instance, you can see that there’s some engagement here.

I can see that one person loved it, one person liked it, and it reached 90 people. And once again, there’s a lot of information being written up here. They’ve taken some time to write the copy for the post. They’ve taken some time to put an image together, and all they’ve reached is 90 people, and that was a couple of days ago from this screenshot.

So, you can see that there’s a lot of effort for not many results. So, here’s my concern is with Facebook Organic is that people are putting a lot of efforts still thinking it’s 2010 expecting 2010 results, yet they’re still getting no results at all.

Watching your Competitors pages

If we scroll down, the other thing that I want to point out is that there are pages to watch.

You can compare your competition to yourself. Now, in this case here, Absolut Airflow has added the pages Comfort Air,  General Air Conditioning, Timo’s Air Conditioning, Esser, and Blair Heating. And you can see,  that in this case here Absolut has got 2.1K page likes, which is more than the others below it. They have spent the time to create five posts and they have only had 13 engagements, whereas Comfort Air has created three posts and they’ve got 1.2K engagements.

So, it may be worth you looking and asking, “What did they do to get that much, much traffic?”

You can click on Comfort Air, you can see here’s their posts that they may have got their traffic from.

You can see there’s only three likes there. You might have to dig in a little deeper to find out what was the actual post that got them all the traffic this week, although they only did three.  But you can see what’s going on with your competition easily on this homepage.

Why is the Followers tab on a Facebook page important?

One last thing I wanted to share, and that is the Followers page.

And you can see here, this gives you a rundown of your total page of followers.

It tells you how many people liked your page and how many people unliked your page or unfollowed page. In this case here, on one particular day, on the 10th of December, 19 people unfollowed the page (Fig1).

So, something happened there. I’m not sure what, but it could have been something that maybe offended people, could have been something that was not posted correctly, it could have been a whole bunch of things. So, there’s some indication of like, ‘hey, maybe I need to fix this up’.

All right. So, that’s ‘Followers’. This is the start of Insights. For the next post, I’m going to dig into posts. I’m going to talk about why and how your posts are working, what they’re doing, and how you can make those even better.

 

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