You’ve heard everyone is on Facebook, so you created a Facebook page for your business.  Welcome to the club! You also might be social sharing your emails and getting “Likes”. Now what? Wondering if there’s any value in it? Wondering how to figure out if it’s successful? The fine folks at Facebook thought you might be, so they have a handy tool called Facebook Insights.

According to Facebook, “Insights provides Facebook Page owners with metrics around their content. By understanding and analyzing trends within user growth and demographics, consumption of content, and creation of content, Page owners are better equipped to improve their business with Facebook.” And Insights is free for all Facebook Pages. Great!

To see metrics on your Facebook Page, go to the Insights Dashboard. Only Page administrators, application owners, and domain administrators can view Insights data for the properties they own or administer. To view comprehensive Insights on your specific Page, click on the corresponding item on the left navigation bar.

There are two kinds of Facebook Insights – Users and Interactions. They are explained below:

1. Users Insights: Total page Likes, or a number of fans, daily active users, new Likes/Unlikes, Like sources, demographics, page views and unique page views, tab views, external referrers, media consumption.
2. Interactions Insights: Daily story feedback (post Likes, post comments, per post impressions), daily page activity (mentions, discussions, reviews, wall posts, video posts).

Data is aggregated on a daily basis and is made available within 24 hours after the full day is complete.

So, wondering where to begin? You might not even be sure. Here’s what I recommend to get started:

First, start by looking at the number of Likes or Comments you get. If you know the number of times people interact with each of your posts, you can find out what interests them most. Watch for unusual blips or drops in this number. This metric is really helpful in choosing what content to post. The more Likes and Comments a post gets, the more highly engaged your fans are.

Next, record the number of fans (or “Likers”) you have and keep track of how it grows. If you see blips or drop offs, investigate further, otherwise you should see steady growth over time (but you have to be engaging to do this).

I also look at demographics because they provide me with the gender, ages and where our fans are from. Neat, eh?

Lastly, I look at Page Views because it shows how many of your fans are return to your page. By doing a little simple math you can subtract the number of unique page views from your total number of page views and you will see how many of your fans are actually coming back to your page! Cool!

You can get a ton of data and insight from Facebook Insights so spend some time with it and see what your fans respond to and give ’em more of it!

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