If you don’t know what to post on Facebook…
Or, if you wish to know who was looking at your Facebook page…
Or maybe, you just want to know if your marketing campaigns are even working on this platform…
What if we tell you, you can find all of this information right in your Page Insights?
And no, we’re not talking about your paid ads. We’re talking about your organic posts here.
So if this is something you want to learn more about, then stick with us.
Because today, we’ll be doing an overview of Page Analytics (called Insights), and walk you through the most important stats for beginners.
As well as how to use the information you see to create better content and ads.
Plus, we snuck in 4 ideas to help you increase your organic reach later in the post, so be sure to read this post until the end.
- Facebook Page Analytics is an under-utilized analytics tool but we recommend checking it once every couple of weeks or so.
- Don’t let Facebook Page Analytics scare you. Just start small and focus on the most important areas.
- You’ll want to keep track of any changes you make over time, and how your audience reacts to them.
What Is Facebook Page Analytics And Why Does It Matter?
When we talk about Page Analytics, we’re specifically talking about information regarding your audience and post feed content.
When we think about analytics, we usually think about paid ads.
You may have even seen or heard other people talk about Audience Insights and Ad Analytics.
These are important analytics tools from Facebook that we’ll cover in the upcoming posts.
Because it’s such a big topic, we’ll only go over Page Analytics, aka Insights, today.
This includes what to look for, and how to use the information you find to make better content and ads.
Facebook Page Analytics, aka Insights on Facebook, is an under-utilized analytics tool that most beginners don’t spend much time on.
It gives you information about the content, activity, and people associated with your page.
We recommend checking your Facebook Page Analytics once every couple of weeks or so.
You’ll want to keep track of any changes you make over time, and how your audience reacts to them. Monthly reporting will help you get a clear snapshot.
We’ll start with the Overview Page.
3 Important Facebook Page Analytics Tabs
1. Overview Page tab
There are a couple of ways to get to the Overview Page.
If you’re looking at your page from your Facebook Business Manager, you may see something like this.
Your top navigation bar has a bunch of page management tools. And for this post, we’ll be looking at Insights.
When you click Insights, a new page loads. And, you’ll land on the Overview Page by default.
This is a great place to quickly look at the overall health of your page.
There are 3 sections on this page, and we’ll talk about each section in detail next.
Quick tip: If you’re hanging out in the Insights section and forget what any of these categories mean…
…just hover over the question mark, and Facebook does a good job of explaining them to you.
a. Page Summary
Your Page Summary gives you a quick look at important engagement stats for your page.
You can change your view to stats for just today, yesterday, the last seven days, and the last 28 days.
If you want to look at stats for anything further back, like for the last quarter, you’ll want to select Export Data.
Choose between page, posts, video data, file format, date range, and layout.
Layout is where you can get really specific with the information you download.
This is for more advanced marketers and is not something you need to worry about when you’re just starting out.
If you’re a beginner, we recommend starting with the basic info that Facebook provides.
It can be overwhelming and confusing to dive into all of the other details.
But if you’ve been into marketing for a while or like to jump into the deep end, don’t worry. We’ll be going over more advanced analytics in future posts.
You may see a note like this in your account.
We used to be able to view Ad Results below the Page Summary.
However, Facebook has moved all of this information from Insights to Ad Manager.
So if you haven’t yet, you’ll want to set up a Business Manager and Ad Account.
Here’s our post about Facebook Ads for Beginners that you can read next.
b. 5 Most Recent Posts
Your Most Recent Posts section quickly shows you how each post is performing.
You can see post type, reach, targeting, and engagement.
You also have the option to boost posts from this page. Click each post to see detailed analytics for each, like this.
What can you learn from looking at your Most Recent Posts?
Firstly, you can see what’s performing the best.
If you notice that all of your videos get twice as many comments as your static photos, or that carousels do much better than single images…
…you’ll want to make more video or carousel posts, and less static single-image posts.
You’ll also see an option to boost posts from here.
As you may know, Facebook organic reach is very hard to come by.
The Facebook algorithm will only show your organic posts to roughly 6% of your followers.
For that reason, we recommend spending at least $150 a month boosting your most popular posts.
c. Pages to Watch
Facebook usually includes a smaller page, a page around your size, and a much larger page to start with.
You can add pages that you’d like to watch, like your competitors or similar pages.
This is so that you can quickly compare your Facebook business page performance.
You can see:
- total page likes, and whether that’s up or down from the previous week,
- how many posts were published, and
- how much engagement each page got
This is a great place to see at a glance if you’re doing much worse, or much better than your competitors.
If your page is much smaller and has lower engagement, for example, and you notice that the other pages post 8 times a week while you’ve been posting 4…
…that may be an indicator that you should post more often.
Likewise, if you have similar engagement and posting frequency to bigger pages, but trail in followers, you should consider running a Page Like ad.
This is so you can find the people who like those other pages.
Take everything you see here with a grain of salt. Huge follower numbers aren’t necessary to do well on social media.
And sometimes, they’re just not realistic depending on your business or niche.
Changes will take time to go into effect, so be patient, and make it part of your regular process.
2. People tab
For deciding who to target in your paid ads, we’ll go to People in the left column.
This section gives you some details about the people engaging with your business.
You have four groups of people who engaged with your page in some way.
They’re grouped by Facebook targeting demographics, including age and gender.
You can also see engagement by top countries, cities, and languages for each audience type.
- Your fans
- Your followers
- People reached
- People engaged
Take a look at which age groups and genders are engaging with your content the most, and see if you’re surprised by anything.
Maybe you’ll learn something new or see your product in a new way.
This is also where we’d start deciding who to target for using paid efforts, especially if you’re just starting to run paid ads.
You’ll combine this with some of the info from the Posts tab, which we’re covering next.
3. Posts tab
For improving your organic results, you’ll want to check the Posts tab on your Facebook Page Analytics.
If you’re going to be putting effort into:
- creating,
- publishing, and
- promoting your content
…you need to make sure that you’re paying attention to how those posts are performing.
This is so you can make more of the content that your audience likes. And of course, less of the content they don’t like.
Your marketing needs to be purposeful and should be regularly evaluated, so you can see what’s working and what isn’t.
And this is a great way to check that.
This also tells you when your audience is online, which shows you the best time to post. Save your most important posts for the best time, on the best day.
Similar to your top 5 most recent posts in the Overview tab, the Posts tab has your posts listed out with more information available by clicking on the post.
You can see all posts published, create a post, and boost posts from here.
But we would recommend using the Facebook Creator Studio and Ad Manager for those tasks.
You have a few options for metrics to look at, so play around with those until you find a combination that makes sense for your business.
If the only thing you got on our journey through Page Insights was sad, don’t worry, we’ve got some tips to help you improve your organic reach.
These are things you can do that take some time, but can be done on a tiny budget (or an invisible budget).
4 Ideas To Increase Your Organic Reach
1. Use Facebook Stories
According to Hootsuite, 500 million people use Facebook Stories daily. Many marketers are seeing more organic activity in Stories than on their feed posts!
Stories are a full-screen video or photo image that expires after 24-hours. That is unless you save the Story to your Highlights.
You can also run ads on Stories now, but they’re still a great place for organic engagement. You can share…
- quick behind-the-scenes videos, updates, or news,
- inspirational/funny quotes,
- ask questions (users can respond right in the Story),
- create a fun quiz and give out prizes, or
- tag products from your shop
It’s also a good idea to share your most recent feed post to your Stories, so more people will know about it.
Give Facebook Stories a shot and get a boost in engagement. Learn more about Facebook Stories 2022 in this post.
2. Don’t post and run
Facebook, and other social media networks, likes you to spend time on the platform engaging with other posts.
Schedule some time every day to check in (half an hour is plenty) and authentically engage.
Ideally, you’ll do this after you post, which isn’t always an option if you’re scheduling posts in advance.
You’ll want to take some time to scroll through your feed, and like, comment on, and share posts. Note that we’re talking about your business page feed here.
Leave authentic comments. None of this “great pic” or “cute!” commenting.
Leave a thoughtful, relevant comment, a sentence or two, on a few posts.
Something like, “Wow, this is a really great photo. I love what you said about helping out in the community.”
You’ll also want to respond to any messages or comments you have, and try to get some engagement going in the comment section of your most recent post.
3. Switch to video
85% of people would like to see more videos from brands in 2022.
Video is more engaging and consistently performs better in paid and unpaid efforts across the board.
If you aren’t using video for at least half of your content, it’s time to start strategizing.
Video seems scary, but you can make it work for any business. Start with brainstorming ideas for:
- how-tos,
- explainers,
- educational videos,
- behind-the-scenes,
- unboxings,
- interviews,
…and anything else you can think of.
Make sure your video is optimized for silent viewing.
Have you ever been somewhere quiet and had a video from your feed play SUPER loud?
Or, were trying to stealthily watch something while a partner, baby, or grumpy cat slept in the same room?
If you don’t have headphones and the video isn’t optimized for silent viewing, what do you do?
Yes, you would probably scroll right on by.
You can increase watch time by 70% when you optimize your videos for silent viewing.
It’s worth the extra effort because why wouldn’t you want your video to be viewable by as many people as possible?
Add captions and other pertinent info to the video during editing.
It also helps to have someone on your team (who didn’t write the script or record the video) to watch all the way through without sound.
This is so they can tell you what they got out of it. This is a great way to check and see if your video is too sound-dependent.
4. Start a community with Facebook Groups
This is a long-term strategy, one that will take regular effort and engagement, but can be priceless.
Build a community with your customers. Make them feel heard and valued, and you’ll have lifelong devotees.
There are a ton of different ways to set up a community, but we’ll focus on Facebook Groups for now.
You have more options beyond feed posts, stories, and comments to interact with your customers on Facebook.
In Facebook Groups, you can achieve a new level of customer engagement and support. You can:
- host giveaways,
- provide customer service,
- learn what your clients really think,
- test out new products,
- collect and encourage user-generated content, and let other people do the selling for you
We try to steer from too much direct selling or pitching in Facebook Groups.
It will depend on what your business is, and who your audience is, of course. But, treat these as a more casual encounter outside of “marketing” or “sale”.
Conclusion
So, those are the tips we have for you in using Facebook Page Analytics. We hope you found them helpful and that you give them a try.
Don’t let Facebook Page Analytics scare you. Just start small and focus on the most important areas.
As you get comfortable with using basic post and page analytics to improve your organic content and decide what ads to run…
…you should see increased engagement and better results.
And speaking of better results, when you work with our Facebook marketing company, we don’t just give you better results.
We always thrive to give our clients the best results possible.
So if you want to generate this type of results for your Facebook marketing campaigns, we’re just a call or click away. Contact us now!