Onsharp

Last week we talked about how to use YouTube Insight to learn how your business's YouTube videos were doing, and what they were doing for your company. Your company's Facebook page also has an insight panel, and you can get some useful information there, too.

Primarily, Facebook's Insight looks at three things: your fans, your interactions with them, and the quality of your posts.

First, you can see how the number of fans at your page is increasing over time. There's a simple graph that shows your total number of fans, and also your unsubscribed fans. Your fans should increase, while unsubscribed fans should stay a small proportion of the total.

You can also see how old your fans are, whether they're male or female, and where they come from. This can give you good information about your customers. It can also alert you if your Facebook page is appealing to people who aren't really your customers. If you're making friends among young women in New York City and you sell tractors, your page may not be doing what you want for your business. 

Facebook Insights also show you how many interactions you've had with fans: comments on your posts, reactions such as "like," and other kinds of activity are measured. This data also includes demographic information, so you can see where your most active fans come from and what groups they belong to. 

Finally, you can see the quality of your posts, according to Facebook's calculations. It would be nice if that meant that people in the Facebook office were reading your posts and giving you an honest critique, but the number is really based on the number of interactions in the preceding seven days. The theory is that good posts will be more likely to get repsonses than bad posts. That may be true. 

In any case, Facebook Insights can help you measure the value of your company Facebook page. Combine that information with the amount of traffic Facebook sends to your website and the conversion rate of that traffic to get the kind of data you need to plan your Facebook strategy.