Marketing in Facebook: 5 Secrets to Using Facebook Insights to Grow Your Fan Base

Facebook has its own internal metrics program called Facebook Insights for Facebook pages.

Insights lets page administrators improve their business pages by providing statistics on user growth, demographics, and creation and consumption of content.  To view the metrics on your Facebook page, you must be a page administrator. To see the metrics, go to the Insights Dashboard on the Admin panel of your Facebook page.

Through the use of Facebook Insights, you can greatly improve the way you manage your Facebook business page.

Here are five ways you can use Facebook Insights to grow your fan base:

1.  Understand the metrics.   When you view your Insights statistics, you see a variety of metrics that gives you insight into how your fans as well as other Facebook users are interacting and reacting to your page.  To access Insights features, click on the Insights link, found in the lower center section of your Admin panel.  If you click the “See All” link, you’ll see your full Insights dashboard.

2.  Dashboard metrics.  In your dashboard, you’ll see four metrics at the top of your Insights tab that permit you to quickly understand the size and engagement of your audience. You should monitor these metrics closely to assess the success of your Facebook marketing strategy.  You can view this data through your dashboard, or export the data.

You’ll see that some of your posts are more effective than others; some posts attract more attention that results in new fans, while others may cause fans to unlike your page.  Consequently, you need to know which posts are inspiring what kind of action.   You can see exactly how people are responding/reacting to your posts in the main dashboard area.

• Total Likes reflect the number of unique people who like your page.
• Friends of Fans show the number of unique people who are friends with your fans, including current fans.
• People Talking About This are the number of unique people who have created a story about your page in the last seven days.
• Weekly Total Reach is the number of unique people who have seen any content associated with your page (including any ads or sponsored stories pointing to your page) in the last seven days.

Two of these metrics – Total Likes and People Talking About This – are visible to anyone visiting your page, so in a glance that can understand how popular, active and engaging your page is.

3.  Date and time.  This  metric tells you when your posts are reaching the most people “live,” and thus getting some fan page interactions.  By tailoring your post times to your busiest interaction times, you can be sure to get your fresh posts in front of the most people possible. Note that the times noted are in U.S. Pacific time.

4. Demographics.  When you know who your target market is, you can customize your posts to them and win even more fans like them over to your fan page.  The demographics metric shows you the exact demographics of the people who like your page, including gender, age, location, cities, languages, and like sources.  You can see similar demographics on your Reach as well as Talking About This.

5.  External referrers.  Located in your Reach tab,  this metric shows you where your fans are coming from via a URL that is outside of Facebook. Knowing how your fans are finding you is a great way to identify areas of your Internet marketing that might need some work.

More and more businesses are using Facebook fan pages as a marketing tool with great results.  Now that you are using Facebook’s fan page feature to your advantage, study your Facebook Insights to fine tune your fan page accordingly so that you attract more fans and more interaction on your Facebook page.

You can discover more info on how to use Facebook Insights with an ebook published by Facebook, Facebook Insights Guide.