How to Use Facebook Insights’ User Dashboard

You may be interested in creating a Facebook presence for your organization, small business, or community concern. And naturally, after creating that presence, over time, you want to see how well your facebook presence is performing. Tracking metrics on the web is normal stuff, and analytical tools help us determine how well our marketing efforts are performing. They show us results.

Well, Facebook has a native feature that’s designed to do just that. It’s called Insights.

Now, if you track this information for your website, you’re probably using Google Analytics to do it. Unfortunately, Google Analytics can’t see the information held on Facebook servers so you have to use Insights independently from Analytics. That forces you to use the Facebook Insights tool exclusively from within Facebook.

A couple of pre-requisite concepts before we begin: Pages and Profiles.

To use Insights:

1. Pages vs Profile. You must be running a Facebook Page and not a Facebook Profile. There’s a difference. Insights only works on Facebook Pages. So, if you’re a company who used a Profile instead of a Page – so that your brand could “friend” someone rather than be “liked” – Insights aren’t available to you.

2. Pages Beat Profiles. There’s another good reason to run a Facebook Page as a brand rather than a Profile. A Profile is limited to 5000 friends. If your brand has a potential to attract more followers than that, then you need a Page with no cap.

3. 30 LIKES. In order for Insights to “kick in”, you Page must have at least 30 “Likes”. After the 30th “Like”, Insights will be available from the left-hand navigation bar when viewing the page as an Administrator. Only Administrators can see Insights.

Insights Data Categories

There are two buckets of data that are captured by Insights: Users and Interactions. In this article, we’re primarily going to look at User data. I’ll look at Interactions in a future review.

Users on Facebook inherently have certain demographic information we’re interested in. Users will “LIKE” and “UNLIKE” your Page; they’ll look at content on your Page like tabs; they’ll refer status updates made on your Page; they’ll consume media found on your Page. User “actively” participate with your page on a daily basis, weekly basis, and monthly basis.

“Active Users” in Facebook lingo reflects people who have viewed your Page, interacted with your Page, or consumed content on your Page. They could have seen a status update scroll by in their News Feed, clicked on a link you provided, posted a comment, or uploaded content.

In this shot, you’ll see the purple line reflecting monthly, the green reflecting weekly, and the blue reflecting daily users, spread over a calendar of time. You can select and de-select the checkboxes to add or remove the layers of Active users. Also, if you hover your mouse along the curves, then you can get more specific information from the data-points.

Core Active Users Stats

There are three numerical stats that are shown on the Users Insights page. New Likes, Lifetime Likes, and Monthly Active Users. These aren’t LIKES on comments but are rather LIKES (as in ‘subscriptions’) to your Page itself. These aggregate numbers are controlled by the date range of the Inight’s filter as measured in 30-day increments. They’re comparisons of the current month to last month.

New Likes. In this example, for the month of December 2010, my page only acquired 6 new “Likes” – where people actually clicked LIKE to the page and subscribed to my content. That number is down 65% from last month, November 2010.

Lifetime Likes. As people can “UNLIKE” pages and end up unsubscribing from them, Facebook tracks the number of LIKES that a Page has received in its lifetime, as of the last date in the date range. In my case, the most that’ve ever liked my Page are 37 users.

Monthly Active Users (MAU). Simply put, MAU refers to the number of unique users per the past 30 days. Now, you’ll see an odd discrepancy here between Lifetime Likes and MAU. Why are there 38 MAU when I’ve only had 37 Lifetime Likes? That’s because how Facebook categorizes a “unique user”, which may include programs that interact with the page (like API’s, games, and applications). They’re also considered users. So, in this case, I’ve got at least few “users” here that aren’t really people at all, but are automated services that interact with my Page.

By clicking on “See Details”, more specific User Information can be obtained, including what specific things users did with content from my page.

Daily Average Users Breakdown

These stats show me a more than a couple of useful metrics:

Unique Page Views: How many people actually looked at my Page rather than the specific content. This is useful if I’m tracking the results of a Facebook marketing campaign that’s driving people specifically to my Page, where I’d like to see more people viewing my Page, for instance.

Post Viwers: How many people actually saw my posts. Users in Facebook can hide posts from Pages and Users, and filtered content isn’t seen. Also, Facebook loads “Newer Posts” in its News Feed – some people don’t log in regularly and miss my posts because they happened further in the past. In this example, it’s clear that – although I’ve 37 subscriptions to my page – not everybody is seeing my content regularly. In fact, it comes and goes in spikes, and only 54% of my audience is paying attention. What this is actually telling me is that I should recycle my posts more often to reach a wider audience – repost similar content, maybe with different wording, in intervals, to catch people between logins. Not everybody reads everything streamed to them in their News Feed. This is also telling me that I’m likely being filtered by groups or lists that Users have set up. Hmm – nobody likes what I have to say? Shame… I wonder why that is (grin)?

Liked a Post, Commented on a Post, and Daily Wall Posts: Self-explanitory. These metrics are prime interactive material that’s really sought after in Facebook. I really want my audience to give me a thumbs-up when I post something; I’d love to engage them in feedback on those posts in a dialog of comments; I’d love for somebody to wander-in to my Page and post on its Wall. I’m going to drill-down into those two segments by de-selecting the others.

Apparently, I’m not generating much “buzz” with my content. I’ve only one or two users actually giving me a THUMBS-UP LIKE or COMMENTING on what I’m writing on, and I’ve got nothing for Daily Wall Posts. That’s not so good. I really want more interaction from my audience, and right now, I’m barely capturing their attention. It’s obvious I’ve got a lot of work to do to engage my audience and to be seen on a regular basis. I may want to try to recycle some of what I’m posting and post more frequently, and, try to understand why what I’m saying through the Page is getting me filtered or ignored.

New Likes

The New Likes metric is broken into Daily New Likes and Daily Unlikes: how many new subscribers I obtain and how many actually unsubscribed. If I were trying to drive traffic to my Page with a Facebook Ad, I’d want to see these numbers increase during that timeframe. Notice that I can also see where these new Like Sources have come from during the time period: three came from requests that I directly made to Users, where as two others were generated from people visiting my fan page.

Now, I can switch the view of this Metric into a Total instead of looking at it through the lens of the time filter:

Ah, some better news in my otherwise dismal performance: I’m not losing subscribers. That’s cool, but I’m gaining new subscribers to my Page extraordinarily slowly. That’s a bummer. I’d want to see a steeper incline here.

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User Demographics

Demographics isn’t particularly useful to how I use Facebook, but it may be an interesting statistic to others. It shows the Gender and Age of my subscribers in a simple bar-graph breakdown, then summarizes the places their from and the languages they speak, between the date range of the filter.

If I were running a Facebook marketing campaign, I’d probably be interested in gaining more subscribers from Vancouver, WA and Portland, Oregon. That’s the target market for my business. I’d also want to cater to the language of a majority of my followers which are – for me – exclusively speaking English. If I wanted to attract more women than men (over two-thirds of my audience are men), then maybe I could re-double my efforts there.

User Activity

User Activity gives me more insight into how people are interacting with my page in total.

This is a very interesting set of numbers and let me explain why.

Page Views are “hits” to my Facebook Page, much like we track “hits” against webpages. A Page View from a Logged-in user is different from a Page View from a non-Facebook user (or a Facebook User who isn’t logged in), and this is what “Unique Page Views” is trying to distinguish.

It’s also showing me what people are doing on my Facebook Page – what they’re looking at – but it’s also showing me where people are coming from … how they’re being referred to my page. In this case, within the time frame specified by the Insight’s filter, Google has referred my Page twice, three people came from their email systems to my Page, and one person came from my own webpage to view my Page. If I was particularly interested in seeing more traffic from Google, or, from my private website to my Facebook Page, I could track those differences here. If I wanted more people to look at my photos, read my reviews – or post a review for that matter – participate in my discussion boards, or look for information, I’d want to see those changes here.

Media Consumption

Lastly, if I’m posting video, audio, or photos, I’m really interested in how many people watch, listen, view that content. Here’s the Media Consumption break-down during the time period.

Now, if I had recently posted some media content, I’d really want to see people interact with me on that, and to see more engagement there. I’d want people to listen, view, or watch more. Also, in my case, I have to think about competing channels. I recently made a video, for example, and I posted it to my Page as well as to my personal Profile. Some of the views of that video may have clicked-through my Profile insetad of the Page, distorting these stats through an error of omission. I may wish to consider that content I do wish to track only gets posted on my Facebook Page’s wall so I can track it through Insights.

Summary

Generally speaking, my Page goes woefully underutilized. Under this time-period (December 2010), I had a lot of people look at my Page’s wall, but others look for photos, reviews, information I’ve posted, or discussions. Now, I have very little content in these other tabs for the users to interact with, which is unfortunate: there was some interest in those tabs. I probably need to take some time to provide more content so that I can engage my audience more thoroughly. What these metrics are trying to suggest is that my company’s Facebook Page could perform much better, my growth is near stagnant, people are filtering what I have to say or aren’t seeing it, and there’s very little interaction between my audience and my brand.

In the short term, maybe over the next 90 days, these stats are telling me that I need to:

1. Figure out why I’m being filtered by my audience.
2. Come up with a strategy to re-post and recycle updates so it’s seen during my audience’s absence from Facebook.
3. Post more frequently as to catch my audience.
4. Create more content that users are expecting to see on my Page.
5. Increase my LIKES, COMMENTS, and WALL POSTS. Get more interaction going on my page rather than just viewing my content. Maybe I need to ask more compelling questions of my readers?
6. Drive more traffic to my Page, perhaps with Facebook Advertising or promotions offered across my website.
7. See a steeper increase of LIKES – I need to get more momentum for people liking my brand and engaging me on Facebook.

What’re your ideas? What else could I do to improve the performance of my Facebook Page? Thanks for reading.

R

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