Last Tuesday, Facebook completely revamped its internal Insights tool and introduced a new approach to measurement on Facebook. Overall, the changes will allow us to delve deeper into how our Facebook page is reaching and engaging the Facebook community, and enable us to take more specific measures that will help track success.
Here’s an overview of key new metrics now available through Facebook Insights:
- Reach vs. Impressions – Facebook has replaced impressions with reach as the main metric. Reach measures the number of unique people who see your posts. We now have the ability to separate Organic, Paid and Viral reach. Impressions are still available, but only when exporting data.
- Virality – Represents the number of unique people who created a story (something friends can comment on/like) based on your page content, as a % of people who’ve seen it. This enables us to compare results across posts and help identify what types of posts are most and least shared.
- Friends of fans – Measures number of unique people who are friends of your fans, also the total potential reach of any post
- People talking about this – Measures the total number of unique people who have created a story about your content. A story includes liking your page, posting to the page Wall, liking, commenting, sharing content from your page, answering a question/poll, phototagging your page, or checking in at your place. This metric includes everyone visiting the page, even people who aren’t fans.
- Weekly total reach – Measures the number of unique people who have seen any content from your page within the last 7 days.
- Distinguishing Organic, Paid and Viral Reach – Facebook now allows you to track detailed breakdown of the type of reach within an individual post.
- Organic reach = people who say this post in the news feed
- Paid reach = people who saw this post as result of sponsored product
- Viral reach = people who saw this post from a story published by a friend
- More detail – additional tabs allow you to dig deeper even into the demographics (age, gender, geography, language), type of reach, as well as other useful information about acquired fans, engaged fans and people talking about your page.
A Facebook training module (http://www.learnpageinsights.com) has been made available to help users learn about the new features of Insights. It’s a 20-minute, interactive deep-dive on each new feature and includes quizzes to help page administrators understand and interpret these new metrics. Page administrators will find this training module a great introduction to these new features.
