A Few Insights Into Facebook Insights

In a move recognizing small businesses and organizations, Facebook is now releasing stats, viewable only to page administrators, on every wall entry.  The feature has been out there for quite some time but was previously available only on pages that had more than 10,000 fans.  While the rearrangement of features and new look of profiles in the latest Facebook makeover will undoubtedly frustrate some users, the instant feedback will quickly provide pertinent information to all administrators.   

Of course, now that you have access to it, it’s  critical for administrators to understand what they’re seeing.  The instant raw data that Facebook is releasing appears directly on your wall and contains Impressions and Feedback.  Impressions is the gross number of times that particular post has been viewed.  Views may come from visitors coming to your page and seeing it, or through it appearing on your fan’s news feed.  Feedback has to do with how many users stop and actually read through or act on a post after it’s made an initial impression.  In other words, how many people left comments, shared the post or liked the post.  Feedback is given as a percentage based on the total number of impressions.   

Now ideally, we’d like to see that every post had such an impact on readers that they felt compelled to comment on it.  That’s probably not going to happen, but don’t be too alarmed over low feedback percentages, they aren’t always a cause for concern.  What these two numbers will provide is insight into the kind of coverage you’re getting as well as trends in feedback.  As your organization grows and makes more overall impressions, your feedback statistics will most likely not grow at the same rate.  But, at least now Facebook is providing a way to track your personal trends in feedback and a quick way to evaluate a number of metrics.  For example, administrators can now analyze the types of posts that fans respond to more actively or times of day that posts seems to make the most impact.  Access to this data won’t give your organization all the information it needs, but what you decide to do with it can greatly improve your Facebook strategies and overall outreach efforts.