For small businesses that have already jumped into social media marketing, keeping track of your Facebook activity just got a little easier. (And if you haven't gotten involved with social marketing yet, what are you waiting for?) Facebook has a tracking feature called Facebook Insights that allows page administrators to measure activity on their Facebook pages, tracked over a 7-day period. This detailed information is critical to understanding how well your Facebook page is performing for your business.
To see your Facebook activity, all you have to do is log in to your Facebook account, and then click on the Facebook Insights link displayed in the left column of the page (remember, this will be visible only to administrators of the page). Data is typically updated 12 hours after each full day, so you can see fresh stats on how your fans are interacting with your content, and easily watch for trends and overall performance.
You can look at your data in two main ways; 1) by fans that have "interacted" with your page called the Fan Interaction Dashboard, or 2) by all fans of your page, called the Fan Dashboard. An "interaction" occurs when a fan writes on your wall, leaves a comment on a post, or clicks on the "likes this" link on your page. So visitors and fans that simply read your latest information but don't click on anything or leave a comment will not be counted in this data, but will be counted in the Fan Dashboard instead.
The Fan Interaction Dashboard
Some of the stats available in the Fan Interaction Dashboard include:
To help boost your interaction stats, you need to encourage visitors to interact with your content in some way. Like any other form of online marketing, you must contribute high-quality content to your Facebook page if you want your fans to actually interact with that content. For instance:
When fans interact with your content, it helps distribute your content virally on Facebook, which in turn helps build organic links for you and increases the amount of your high-quality content that gets published and shared in other peoples' profiles and/or pages.
The Fan Dashboard
The other way to look at your Facebook data is by looking at all fans in the Fan Dashboard, which includes:
You may have already noticed that within the last few weeks, Facebook has started automatically sending a weekly email to page administrators with a brief summary of their Facebook activity, along with a link to their Facebook Insights stats. This can be a helpful reminder to review your weekly Facebook information, and also to remind you to post your most recent relevant, high-quality content to draw in and engage your visitors.
400 Million Users Can't Be Wrong
Of course, Facebook is only one of the many social networking platforms that can help you market your small business, but it is certainly the most-used social site today (it has even surpassed Google as the most-visited site on the web!). There are more than 400,000,000 active Facebook users, and that number continues to grow every month. Like it or not, your customers are already using Facebook, and you need to meet them where they are spending their time.
But with Facebook Insights, it is now a little easier to measure how your Facebook page is performing for your business. By watching the data over time, you can identify the things that really capture interest or result in better visitor interactions, then focus your efforts on doing more of those things. The more you can build your fan base, spread your content to others, and provide high-quality information, the better the results from your social marketing efforts.
Lauren Hobson, President of Five Sparrows, LLC, has more than 16 years of experience in small business technology writing, marketing, and web site design and development.
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