Fresh Thoughts Blog

New Facebook Insights Tool

Written by Thought Labs | Jun 10, 2009

As marketing is moving away from traditional one-way business to consumer methods, and taking on two-way interactive approaches, businesses need a measure for performance. Facebook is arguably the forerunner of the social media platforms, so it’s only natural for them to develop a sophisticated tool that will adapt to the increased usage of Facebook for business and professional purposes.

Their new Insights tool allows organizations with business accounts to collect and analyze page interactions and overall quality of your page’s content. It gives you access to the number of general interactions on your page, such as number of page views, wall posts, fans and other basic interactions. The number of wall posts, Likes, discussion posts, video plays, photos viewed, links, related notes, and any other interactive forums input is also tracked, as well as the gender and age breakdown of those viewers.

However, it doesn’t end there; not only can the new Insights tool measure quantity, it now can measure quality. The new Insights tool allows business pages to collect and analyze page interactions and overall quality of your page’s content. This includes not only the basic interactions, but complex interactions such as media consumption, posting related links, interactions per post, post quality and more. This data is meant to give a picture as to how engaging the content of a business’ page is, not just measuring simple site traffic. On average, more interactions of any type translate to a better quality, more effective page. These new metrics are displayed by simply choosing which interaction type to view:
 
With more and more companies creating Facebook Pages, it is becoming increasingly important to make sure your marketing is reaching the targeted demographic. Merely having a Facebook page is not enough to know if you are reaching the right segments, so the new Insights tool can deliver the relevant data for an assessment. The old Insights tool provided objective data, but now it is even more effective because it performs a more in depth analysis to help determine content value, and how involved, beyond merely seeing the page, viewers are becoming.

Have you found the new Insights more beneficial in gathering metrics for your Facebook page? Is there anything you'd change or that you want more of?

Speaking of Facebook Insights, come join us on our Facebook page so we count you in our metrics.