Facebook just introduced several updates to their Insights analytics program for Pages. In fact, if you use social media for business or an organization, you may have noticed the new inline reporting, where “number of people reached” has replaced “number of impressions.”

According to Facebook’s Advertising Communications Manager, Elisabeth Diana, “One of the purposes behind Facebook Page Insights is to provide all page admins with ways to understand how to reach and acquire new customers.” With business social media, user engagement is the holy grail, and can be challenging to achieve. The new page insights mean that businesses and organisations can gain a more real picture of user engagement, and figure out how to enhance it.

Friends of Fans

This new metric gives a more comprehensive idea of your page’s potential reach. As you can see in the image above, a page’s potential reach is many times larger than just the number of fans it has, and this shows just how powerful viral content can be.

Demographics and Location

Engagement won’t happen if you content isn’t relevant, and this is where Facebook’s new demographics come in useful. We now see a display of the gender, age range and location of people “talking about” your page, that is, people who actually engaged with the content, as opposed to those who simply had the content display in their news feed. This gives us an idea of the types of people who are really interested in a page’s output, and who are likely to continue to engage in future. 

People Talking About This

“People Talking About This” is a new metric in itself. What does engagement actually refer to in this context? Well, this metric measures how many people liked a page; liked, commented on or shared a page post; answered a question; responded to an event; mentioned a page; tagged a page in a photo; or checked in/recommended a place. This is measured in a metric called virality – each piece of content you release on your page gets a virality level, as shown in the table below.

Like Sources

Like sources show us where our “likes” are coming from – another way of measuring whether paid ads are coming in useful, and whether it’s worth trying to gain “like exchanges” from other pages.

Finally - How to Apply Facebook Insights

Facebook insights provides some valuable data, clearly laid out and easy to access. But how to actually use this new information to best advantage? Something to bear in mind, along with making output relevant to your fans’ ages, locations and genders, is the type of content with the best virality. Are your users going for pictures, videos, or text? Do they prefer news from you “direct from the horse’s mouth”, or news you’ve shared from other sources? What times of day and days of the week are getting the best virality percentage? You can then make more of these popular types of posts, and watch your engagement levels soar.