So you have created your own Facebook page for your website, great!  Now what?  Well simply having a Facebook page is only the start, you want to be driving traffic and engaging with as many people as possible.  As well as that, you need to be analysing how your page is operating, otherwise how do you know whether the effort of running the page is worth it.  Thankfully Facebook lets you see how well your page is doing by letting you use the free “Facebook Insights“.

Facebook Insights come in two forms, ‘User Insights’ and ‘Interaction Insights’. User Insights measure information including (but not limited to);

• total page likes
• number of fans
• daily active users
• new likes/unlike
• like sources
• demographics
• page views
• unique page views
• tab views
• external referrers
• media consumption

Interactions Insights focus on more of the day-to-day data, such as;

• daily story feedback (post likes, post comments, per post impressions)
• daily page activity (mentions, discussions, reviews, wall posts, video posts)

Understanding this data is important to knowing what steps you should take to increase the popularity of your page. The global, long-term data and more live, up-to-the minute information contribute to a complex portrait of how your page is being received. Facebook provides its users with a lot of data, so it’s important to know which sets to pay attention to. Here is some information you might find particularly useful:

Facebook Insights

Overview

This measures how often you’re attracting new people to your page in the form of “reach”. If you observe a steady rise of 10 to 13 percent, that means you’re doing very well. Most pages don’t accrue fans like that without promotional effort, so achieving that level of growth will require more active engagement on your part than it would for well-known brands.

Here is where promoting your page aggressively on a variety of websites and social media services is the best way to increase overall fan size. Getting your friends and their friends to “like” your page will increase fan size, and since only fans of your page will get updates from it, raising your rate of growth is the best way to share information posted on your page.

Average Likes

Similar to fan size growth, this measures how often fans of your page “like” and comment on material that you’ve posted to your page’s wall. The benefit of this metric is that it helps you identify what kind of content elicits the strongest responses from your fans (photos, links, etc.), enabling you to tailor your posts to maximize community engagement. Finding material that your fans will talk about will serve to build a community around your page, encouraging fans to invite more of their friends to “like” your page, comment on your content and so on.

Demographics

This measures the makeup of the people who are fans of your page, as well as those who are talking about it elsewhere. Facebook Insights provides a breakdown by age, gender and location. This information can be helpful if your goal is to target a specific demographic or to determine what kind of demographic seems most interested in your page and posted content. Getting sites that your demographic might frequent — like, say, Pinterest in the case of females between ages 20 and 50 — to link to or in some other way to advertise your Facebook page is an excellent tactic for making use of the demographics metric.

Reach

Reach data lets you know how many unique visitors your page receives outside of your pool of fans and provides you with information on how such visitors found your page (through search engines, other websites, etc.) Knowing how other people find their way to your page can be helpful when it comes to attracting them to your page or just in terms of general promotion. Adding “like” buttons to websites associated with your page can help attract those unique visitors to become fans of your page, making it easy for them to join in on both your page’s community and promotion.

Do you use Facebook Insights to measure how well your page is working?  If not, what other methods do you use to measure how well you are doing on social media?  Let us know by leaving a comment below!