25 Nov How to Leverage Facebook’s New In-Line Insights
Posted at 10:23h
in Facebook
I have, in the past, accused Facebook of ‘tinkering’, toying with minor changes to the way the platform operates so that we don’t know from one week to the next quite how it’ll work or look. It’s just made another one. But at the risk of having to eat my words, I love it!
Facebook has now added in-line insights to pages, enabling at-a-glance analysis of every post that an administrator adds to their wall. The insights now appear under every status update when logged in as a page administrator, and feature Impressions and Feedback statistics. Understanding what these two simple figures mean is important and can help page administrators hugely in making their pages more engaging, effective and successful.
Impressions is the number of page impressions that a given post has received; it is NOT, however, the number of times that post has actually been read. Taking a leaf out of Google’s book, a page impression (also known in web circles as a ‘page view’) is generated every time that someone views a page displaying that post. With Facebook, that may be on the page Wall itself, in a user’s newsfeed or as a result of the post being ‘shared’ between users. Feedback is the number of people who have taken action on that post in the form of a Like or a comment, expressed as a percentage of Impressions.
So how do page administrators use these two statistics? The key is in cross referencing time of post and content. With Impressions, by logging the figures alongside the day and time of day that each update was posted, an administrator can start to build a clear guideline as to when is the most effective time to post updates to their Wall. Effective timing of Facebook updates is something that I very recently researched and blogged about, and the new Impressions analytic provides even more depth to that research.
With the Feedback insight, this quite simply enables administrators to see what type of content their fans are engaging with. Is it video, pictures, text only, short pithy content, brand messaging, weird stuff, humorous content, serious content…suddenly administrators have had opened a very real way of evaluating this and continuously improving their page content. And finally, by cross-referencing all of these statistics, administrators can even build up a picture of what content works at what time of day.
So hats off to Facebook for this bit of tinkering. At last, a genuinely useful and brilliant site update. My big tip? Experiment.
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