What’s New This Week?
This week Facebook are revamping their Insights tool for business pages hopefully increasing its value to the marketing world.
Facebook is planning to introduce these new metrics in the coming weeks, and on December 15th, the old version of Facebook Insights will be removed from the site.
Important Metrics
While we’ve always known how many total likes a page has, we can now clearly see the total reach our page has based off these likes. This number is the number of people you can potentially reach if everyone you are connected to talks and/or shares your page on their account, for example friends or subscribers to your fans.
Facebook Insights now also include a “Weekly Total Reach” and “People Talking About This” metric. The first is the number of unique people who have uploaded content about your page on Facebook in the past week, meaning they have never shared your page or content before. The “Weekly Total Reach” is the actual number of people who have seen that content, which is aggregated by adding all the “friends” each shared post has reached. Basically working out how many people directly see your page or content and then its further amplification on Facebook.
A metric of total reach is to a marketing pro what a count of total media impressions is to a PR officer – except better. When a story is published in a newspaper, we know how many people buy that publication a day, but we can never truly measure how many additional eyes have seen it.
Facebook’s new reach metrics allow you to see exactly how far beyond the initial user that content went. The more the content is viewed, the more people get directed to your page, and the higher the chance of them clicking on an offer or following a link to your website.
You can now also see and monitor how many people are ‘Talking About You’. This means you can see not only how many impressions your page or content has had – but its impact as well. It’s all well and good to be frequently adding content but if it doesn’t stir up interest it’s not doing its job.
Understanding Your Posts
How many users that specific update engaged? How many people are talking about it? Facebook has answered our deepest social marketing metric wishes. We can now look at the metrics for each individual post, its engagement and how many people are talking about it. You can also filter the post type – to specifically measure how successful a photo, link, user update has been, all useful stuff.
Marketing Takeaway
This tool can you help you evaluate what types of offers and posts are performing well on Facebook, giving you insights into what your fans actually want. You can then post content and offers catering to their likes and then more efficiently earn social media leads. Additionally, you can then see how likely a person is to share that piece of content – a fantastic way to gauge the type of content your fans will and won’t respond to.
Analyse Your Audience
Previously Facebook offered demographics which were based on user’s activity who ‘liked’ your page. The new version of Facebook Insights allows the admin of a page to further analyse based on two new platforms: people you have reached and people talking about your page or its specific content. These three demographics are organised in the same way – simply click on one of the options to see insights into the demographic of users beyond those who only ‘like’ your page.
Timeline
Facebook now appear to be strongly pushing company pages to display their Timeline (a feature launched by Facebook in recent months – visually displaying a page’s progress). When an admin logs on to their page they are greeted with a message asking them to get the Timeline. The feature was greeted with a mixed response with few users actually picking up the feature. It now appears that Facebook has cottoned onto this – and are perhaps trying to get company pages to pioneer the feature.
These changes prove that Facebook is in itself an essential tool for marketing in modern marketing. However these updates to the Insights feature mean that the information available from Insights is becoming an indispensable tool to marketers around the globe.
The old Insights will be removed from the site on December 15th so it would be a good idea to get up-to-date with the newest versions.
To help us along with this, Facebook has launched a micro site (www.learnpageinsights.com) to make this a bit easier. You can start your course on the sight and allow Facebook to tell you in their own words how to make the best use of their new Insights feature.
Insights have been a valuable tool in the marketing sphere and hopefully these updates will strengthen the good work they’ve already been doing.
At Anicca we specialise in digital marketing. We provide services and training to companies wanting to strengthen and know more about their online audience, success rate and how to get their site searchable on Google
We also provide social media management – working with you to set up social media profiles and keep them working effectively.
If you’re interested in our services, get in touch!
By Lucie Crouch
