How to Get the most out of Facebook Insights

Having a Facebook page for your business is one of the most important strategies you need to undertake. Facebook has more global users than any other social network, so not exploiting a Facebook page would be inadvisable. With Facebook Insights you can keep a closer eye on your target audience, who they are and what they’re primarily interested in. While you shouldn’t rely on it for all of your customer management, it does present some tools which can make it a far easier task for you.

And it’s much better now than when it was first developed. You can now see when your fans are online, make use of more advanced filtering options and take advantage of the new benchmarking feature, where you can benchmark your data and compare your page’s performance for particular time periods.

Get an overview and make a plan

It’s incredibly easy to analyse your Facebook page’s performance now. It’s important you do so in order to make your contact methods and content more suitable for your audience. Facebook now makes it a very simple task in the ‘view insights’ option. You can view how many people like what content in particular, and the ways that they engage with your page the most.

It will also help if you keep a constant check on the ‘Daily Active Users’ feature. It will show you how many people look at your page daily and at what times. If you first make a Facebook marketing plan and post particular content at predetermined times of the week, you’ll be able to clearly see what it is that’s drawing people in to your page.

Measure and focus on your demographic

Facebook Insights includes a demographics section, where you can view all sorts of data including the age range, location and gender of the people engaging with your page. You should hopefully have a pretty good idea of your demographic anyway, but your general one isn’t necessarily going to be the same as those who engage with you over social media. Knowing who’s looking at you will allow you to reconsider the direction and type of marketing you use to turn potential customers into current ones.

Focus only on page content that receives Likes and Comments

The ‘likes’ tab in Insights shows you exactly what it is that turns your users on or off. Facebook Likes, Comments and Shares drive up the chance that your page contents appear highly in Google search results. After Google +1 recommendations, they’re some of the highest Google ranking factors. You can view daily activity, total page Likes, Comments and Shares and where that activity is coming from. Get rid of anything from your page which doesn’t serve a purpose and doesn’t satisfactorily engage with your audience.

From here you can turn your performance data into graphs and know exactly how to expand your reach. As well as telling you how many Likes you’ve received, you can view how many were organic and how many were from paid efforts, and how many users hid your posts, ‘Unliked’ them, or reported you for spamming.

As mentioned above, just because you know your general demographic doesn’t mean you know how to approach people on Facebook. Despite the fact that it’s the biggest social network out there, there are many people who don’t use it and won’t have access to you.

Plus, Facebook is a more direct and instant way to engage with your customers, and as such it’s very easy to post something that doesn’t gauge their interest or to make the odd mistake here and there. But with Facebook Insights in your arsenal, you should be able to limit how often this occurs and focus on what actually increases brand awareness and improves your company’s online representation.

Mix up the Content

A final word on Facebook marketing: remember that even when addressing a B2B audience, it’s necessary to ensure that you appeal to the emotions of your audience. This means that it’s not enough to post your blogs and other distributable content, you need to get your audience involved and engaged.

This means that you should also put up industry-relevant memes, ask questions such as “what’s your favourite product that we carry”, run competitions to encourage sharing with a prize that makes it worthwhile. Other tactics include:

• Surveys
• ‘Fill in the blank’ posts
• Caption competitions
• Curated content that will interest your audience

Keep a good mix of fun, visual, interesting and valuable content and a friendly, approachable tone and in no time at all you will see the difference. Facebook is perhaps the most ‘personal’ of all the social networks so try to appeal to the individual that falls within your demographic and it’s likely that you will see much better results.

It’s also a good idea to ensure that you address the audience in a tone that belongs to your brand; be consistent in order to ensure that your brand becomes recognisable, even through the tone and style of written content including blogs and site content and the posts that you put up. If there is more than one member of staff working on social, then ensure that you have a brand style guide to help them to get this right.

Finally, don’t disable your wall. I see so many companies doing this because they are afraid of what others might post. Trolls can be blocked and reported; complaints can be dealt with transparently and will be more likely to help, rather than hinder your social efforts. If you disable your wall, you risk not getting that all important engagement as any followers you gain see no way to interact with your business other than in a way that you control.

Businesses have to face up to the fact that they are no longer in control when it comes to Word of Mouth (WOM) advertising and that’s what every social network is. Your followers are the ones with the power to boost your business if you give them what they want and interact with them as people, not numbers.