If you’re managing a Facebook page, it’s critical to know what’s working (or not) with what you’re posting. It’s also important to get a real sense of who your audience is.
And all that data can be found in Facebook Insights.
You’ll find Facebook Insights by navigating to your Facebook page and clicking on “Insights.”
Meet the Overview section of Facebook Insights
It defaults to the Overview section, which gives you a one-stop-shop of sorts to get a sense of what’s happening on your page.
Notice that it also defaults to looking at the past seven days and is comparing those days to the seven days before that. This can be changed in the top left corner of the screen to today, yesterday or the past 28 days.
Use the Pages To Watch section at the bottom of the Overview page. The value of this is only limited to the pages you select to compare yourself to (competitors or similar pages are best). However, it will give you an overall gauge of how your page is doing.
There are a number of sections you can explore in depth in Facebook Insights, but two of the most helpful tend to be Posts and People.
Meet the Posts section
In Posts, you can see at a glance how your posts are performing, as well as data showing when your fans are online (which may help shape your post timing).
You also can control how the reach and engagement data are displayed, but the available list graph will show you how your latest posts compare to one another.
Ultimately, your strategy will dictate whether you value reach or engagement more. Typically, you should be taking both into consideration. Take note of what worked and what didn’t. Over time, these successes and misses will help shape your posting.
Meet the People section
The People section also holds a lot of relevant data for your Facebook strategy.
In it, you can see the gender, age and geographic breakdown of your audience, who you’re reaching and who you’re engaging. Plus, you’ll see how they stack up against Facebook’s overall audience.
Take a moment to explore Facebook Insights on your page. Get comfortable with the navigation of the data there, and make it a regular habit to check it. This will build an ongoing library of takeaways that will help you make better content and posting decisions on your page.
For more, hear from the social network itself.
While you’re at it, dive deeper into the opportunities and challenges of Facebook for small businesses.
