Facebook 101: A User Guide to Insights

November 30, 2011 | Posted by Andy Kutcher

If you are the administrator on any Facebook Page, you should by now have been prompted to use the new set of Facebook Insights. If you haven’t, you need to look into them because they are AWESOME. The new Insights are so much more in-depth and thorough than the previous set of Insights (and let’s not even talk about the Insights before that. Yikes).

In addition to being utterly awesome, the new Facebook Insights can seem overwhelming. They look different, they feel different and people aren’t always crazy about different. But, don’t fret – Facebook to the rescue! Facebook did it right this time and they’ve created a very in-depth and detailed guide to using the Facebook Insights. If you haven’t yet seen it, you can review the PDF version on Facebook or here.

In addition to the guide they’ve created, you can also take a tour of the new Insights, which I highly recommend.

If you’re wondering what’s so special about this set of Insights, here’s a sneak peek of some of my favorite new features:

1. Users by Frequency – This graph breaks down your users by the number of times your content reaches them. The graph to the right is from one of our clients. Their content hit 2,700+ people one time during the past week, which is great but what’s even better is that their content hit nearly 3,000 people more than 21 times in one week. That’s a huge testament to the number of people who are not only engaged but loyal fans.

2. Engaged Users Graph – Like the old Insights, the new Insights gives you a breakdown of your content and shows you the Reach, Engaged Users, Talking About This and Virality of each individual post. My favorite part about this is if you click on any of those numbers you get a deeper break down. I personally like the Engaged Users Graph the best because it shows you what people did, not just comments or likes but clicks, stories generated, views and more.

3. Page Post Sorting Options - One thing I also really like about this new set of Insights is that you can sort your content by type in addition to being able to sort by Reach, Engagement, etc. So if you want to see what kind of impact photo posts specifically are having, or how they compare to each other based on day, you can see that without doing a whole lot of manual work.

Those are just three of my favorite features from the new set of Insights. If you’re still reading this, go to Facebook now and learn all you can about the new ways to measure success on Facebook!