How to Use Facebook Insights

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Facebook Insights is their analytics platform for page managers. Anyone that manages a page on Facebook has access to this tool, which is easy to use and can provide exactly what you’d want it to, insights.

Where can you find Facebook Insights?

Log in to Facebook and go directly to your page. There should be a number of options at the top of the page, “Page”, “Messages”, etc. One of them is “Insights”. Click it.

What does Facebook Insights tell you?

Facebook Insights currently breaks itself into 6 categories: Likes, Reach, Visits, Posts, Videos, and People.

  • Likes – here you can see how many people liked your page over a given time period, and how and where the like happened.
     
  • Reach – this page shows you how many people your page reached, or how many people saw something coming from your page. It breaks it down into organic and paid, assuming you pay to show ads or boost posts. And it shows you how many people you pissed off, with total numbers of users who unliked the page, reported your posts as spam, or hide your posts altogether.
     
  • Visits – quite simply, this page shows you how many people visited your page, how they got there, and what they looked at once they got there.
     
  • Posts – here you can analyze each post you made to your page to see how many people they reached, number of shares, clicks, likes, and comments. You can also see which types of posts do better than others, and what days of the week or time of the day is most effective.
     
  • Videos – if you post videos to Facebook, this is where you can see all the viewer stats for those videos.
     
  • People – this page breaks down all the people who like your page by a variety of different geographical and demographic attributes, including gender, location, language, etc.

How can Facebook Insights help you?

Facebook Insights is a great tool for marketers who want to get more value out of their Facebook account. There are almost an endless number of ways to use the data provided by Facebook Insights, but here are a few suggestions.

  1. Use the posts and reach tabs to learn when and what to post. Find the posts that get the most engagement and start to develop more of them, leaving behind the kinds of posts that don’t do all that well with your fans.
     
  2. Use the likes and visits tabs to figure out how you’re currently getting people to your Facebook page and double down on those efforts that are bringing them in to grow your total audience.
     
  3. Use the people tab to track who your fans are and use that information to better target a Facebook ads campaign in an effort to reach more people like them.

Click here or more information on getting started with Facebook Insights from Facebook itself.

How to Develop Content – Where

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There are people that will tell you that good content is good content, no matter what you’re using it for. Successful content marketers know that is not the case. Content is only as good as the medium which is used to distribute it.

A Facebook post is not a tweet, is not a blog post, is not an article, etc. To successfully build great content, you must first know where you intend to share said content.

If you’re writing for your website, you might use a longer form, writing an article in detail. A blog post might be a little shorter and more to the point. It might use bullets and lists to help people take in the information more quickly.

The content gets even shorter and more creative if you’re posting directly to Facebook or Twitter. Images work best for Pinterest and Instagram, so you will have to say what you want to say with an image and short caption. And if it’s video views you’re after, then you can look to Youtube or Facebook.

It’s also important to know that the same piece of content can be broken up in a variety of different ways and used across a number of different channels. For example, you might write a long-form article for your website. Then you might add a short video to it and post it to Facebook or Youtube. And you might find one key quote to use from it on Twitter. And you might have an image or infographic that outlines the key points and post it to Pinterest.

The key is not to try to force the content you’ve already created onto the distribution channel, but to customize each bit of content so that it’s made for wherever you plan to post it.

Marketing Trends – Part 1

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Welcome to the first installment of our brand new weekly blog series, Marketing Trends. Each week, we will identify a key trend in the world of marketing. We’ll discuss the trend, why it’s important, and suggest ways that you can take advantage of this trend in your company.

Today’s Trend = Audience Targeting

What do I mean by audience targeting? It used to be that companies in their advertising efforts would target a broad group of people. TV advertisers could choose time of day and networks to air on. Print advertisers can choose the type of publication to advertise in. Outdoor advertisers could choose the location where they display. And even online advertisers could target folks by keyword, or website, and even some basic behaviors.

But the world has changed, especially online. Advertisers now have a greater ability to target specific audiences they know are most likely to respond to their ads.

Now, companies like Facebook and Google, as well as many others, let you target an audience. You can do this in a number of ways.

  • Site Visitors – target marketing across the web to people who visit your site through retargeting.
  • Leads – target those people who have filled out a form on your site or requested more information through remarketing and email.
  • Past Customers – target existing customers through remarketing and email.
  • Interest Categories – take advantage of the data Google and Facebook have collected on their users to target people who have identified an interest in what you do through past purchases or browsing behavior.
  • Lookalikes – Share a list of your customers with Facebook or Google and they’ll do the data mining for you, identify those key elements that your customers all share, and then look through their users to find others who share those characteristics, letting you target people who are similar to your customers.

Using these different kinds of audience targeting allows you to have more faith that your ads are being seen by the right people. It may not be the way to reach the masses, but it’s a great way to make the most out of a limited budget.

The more targeted your ads, the greater the ROI.

While most of this audience targeting activity is still confined to the online world, expect the coming years to see this trend evolve as other channels adopt these opportunities. See also Direct Mail, which has allowed you marketers to do things like this for years.

What marketing trend should we cover next? Now accepting submissions for marketing trends that we will cover in an upcoming installment of this series. Submit your ideas via our contact page or in the comments section below.

If You Only Do One Thing – Part 3

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Welcome to the latest installment of our new weekly blog series, If You Only Do One Thing. Every Monday, we will discuss one thing that you can start doing today to improve your marketing performance.

With so much advice floating around from so many different sources, it can be tough for marketers and small business owners to know where to focus. This series aims to help you out. Last week’s thing was Create a Mobile Website.

Today’s Thing = Create a Facebook Page

Can we all agree finally that Facebook is not a passing trend? It’s here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future. And some of the changes that they have made over the last couple of years have been all about helping business and marketers use the service to reach new audiences.

So, as marketers, we need to spend more of our time with Facebook. With 1.3 billion active monthly users, the potential is there to really grow your business.

And without spending a penny, you can create a brand page that opens the door to all those users. Here is a link to Facebook’s own content about how to set up your page and use it to attract people to your business.

Creating a page on Facebook allows to you generate a following. You can join in the conversation that may already be happening around your products or services. You can deliver fresh and interesting content to people in their newsfeeds. You can answer questions, or make special offers that only Facebook users can see. You can host fun contests and ask users to help generate content with you.

And if you start to see your free page paying off, it opens the doors to test Facebook’s ad platform, which allows you to show custom content and promote your products to even more of Facebook’s user base.

Facebook is one community marketers can’t ignore.

Share “If You Only Do One Thing” with all your marketing friends, and suggest future topics in the comments below or on Twitter @zheller. 

What is Facebook?

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How would you describe Facebook if someone asked you? Would you call it a social network? Would you tell them about profiles and newsfeeds?

The beauty of Facebook, from Facebook’s perspective, is that it is many things to many different people. And there is no limit to what it can become. It is so much a part of who we are and what we do, that the business opportunities that exist for them are almost endless.

And in the last two weeks, Facebook has made two announcements that I think other companies should be paying attention to:

  1. Ask – Facebook added an “Ask” button for users to inquire about other users, most specifically about their relationship status.
     
  2. Menus – teaming with Constant Contact, Facebook added the ability for restaurants to add menus to their pages on Facebook.

And if you ask me, that sounds like step one toward both an online dating and a food ordering or reservation booking service through the Facebook platform. I know that if I was running companies like Seamless/Grubhub, Menupages, Opentable, OKCupid, and Match.com I would not be too excited about Facebook potentially coming after my business.

Facebook, as a publicly traded company, is interested in creating value for shareholders. That means building out their advertising platform in hopes that more companies will spend more money advertising to its users. And it means finding new revenue sources through add-ons or new businesses.

Could Facebook venture into online dating or food ordering? Of course it could. Will it? We will just have to wait and see.