How effective are your Facebook marketing and communication activities? How many of your fans are seeing your posts? Which posts get more engagement, and why? What can you do to improve your results? Facebook offers a wealth of statistics and insights into the performance of your Page and posts. By reviewing these, you can learn what your fans respond to and don’t, what’s keeping you from getting more responses, and how to improve.

Internet marketers have found over the past decade that using analytics is essential to success, and Facebook marketing is no exception. Quantify and Improve Your Page’s Performance Internet marketing, which includes social media, search marketing, email marketing, and more, is a diverse profession. Depending on your background, you may or may not have been exposed to the idea of web analytics.

Analytics is the discipline that seeks to quantify and graph performance. It’s essential to any marketing system if you want to get better results and remain competitive in an ever-evolving marketplace. Even if all you want to do is socialize with your fans, insights from analytics will help you calibrate your messaging, topics, and approach to better interest and engage your audience.

The first metrics you’ll see as a Facebook Page administrator are impressions and feedback rate. These will show on each of your posts right above the post date and time (see Figure 5.1). This data won’t show right away—it can be delayed up to 24 hours. Impressions are the number of times your post has been displayed to users. Feedback rate is the total number of likes and comments divided by impressions.

Inside Facebook Page Insights

If you have a Facebook Page, you have access to some pretty in-depth analytics called Insights. Go to your Page, and then look in the right-most column for the View Insights link (see Figure 5.2). Clicking it takes you into the Facebook Insights.