How many people have seen Facebook posts? Who are page fans? How many of them have interacted? To see Facebook page stats and to be able to read them is crucial to plan best contents and to keep growing.
To increase the number of Facebook fans is satisfying, but this isn’t the most important matter: social media are meant to interact with followers, so engagement with posts is the real threasure of pages, while knowledge of the characteristics of fans is the added value. Facebook page goals need to be taken into account: for instance getting traffic on website, generating reservations or quotation requests, obtaining views and doing branding communication.
Once clarified what issues matter and defined goals, it is time to view Facebook page stats. The section is Facebook Insights and it can be seen only by accounts with operative roles. You can reach it from the upper menu in sthe second row, that with white background. The page summary screen opens, while on the left here is a side menu with detailed entries. Here we will see most important Facebook page stats.
Who are the fans and what are their characteristics
The first Facebook page figure that we see is the number of fans that get Like: we are used to think that many like means reliability, but this isn’t always true.Some page buy new fans, very risky habit that could bring penalization. What really matters is to know our fans.
In the first two tabs of Facebook Insights we see the number of likes (fans) and followers. The difference is that fans decided to offer their support and do it by committing themselves with a like. Followers instead have choosen to receive updates from your page in their newsfeed. By default fans are also followers, but they can disable this option; followers instead are not fans. In these two tabs, Facebook shows how fans and followers grew, the new ones (organic or paid, acquired by advertising) and the lost ones. Loss of fans and followers could be a warning signal.
Below, in people tab there are the characteristics of fans and followers: age, gender and city. “Engaged people” nd “Reached people” are very important reports that respectively show users that enaged with the page (likes, comments, sharings) and users that have seen page and posts, even if they don’t follow the page. These two charts are very important because they tell us about active users and the ones that we can reach by our communication.
An interesting figure to better understand our audience is in “Posts” section. In the first part we can see at what time our fans are online. Note: the chart follows Pacific time zone, so for Italy we should add 9 hours. We need this inforrmation to plan posts publishing.
Page views and actions
After having learnt about fans, we can see on Facebook Insights whar they have watched. Let’s begin from “Page views“. It is useful to know how many people saw every section of the page (for instance how many of them came from the website).
Now move to actions on page. This section tells us about calls to action, that are interactions to ask driving directions or to call, how many users clicked on website address and how many interacted with the hghlighted button. These are important actions for a local business that uses Facebook to acquire new clients.
Posts views and engagement
Let’s move to the heart of the commuication for a Facebook page: posts. If a Facebook page is not regularly updated, it is useless and stats about views are the metric to find out if we are working well.
In “Reach” section of Facebook Insights we can see the total view of published posts: we can find out how many users (even those that don’t follow the page) saw our posts and their engagement: like, other reactions, sharings or comments. As I said, engagement is the metric to evaluate our activity on social media
Moving to “Post types” on top, we can se what format (for instance photo, link, video) is more effective in terms of reach and engagement. Below we have the detail on single posts. It is useful ti have these informations only in one page because it let us know, according to our goals, what format, topic or time of publishing is more effective for our page: this is a great hint for improving.
Creator Studio for Facebook and Instagram
Creator Studio is a much more modern interface for page management that let you see the same stats as Facebook Insights. Here there are also stats for Facebook advanced contents and it is possible to connect Instagram page for a wider overview.
How to use Facebook Insights stats
We have learned how to read the most important Facebook Insights stats. Now we have to implement data we collected. We have a wider knowledge of the page audience and we know what are the effective posts.It’s time to use data to improve social media publishing plan and grow more and more
