How to use the Facebook insights tool.

• Author: Adams, Jullian
• Position: SOCIAL MEDIA

AS BANK MARKETERS CONTINUE TO INVEST more time and money into social media sites such as Facebook, it is increasingly important to measure and analyze the level of activity on such sites--so that you can convey the site's value to upper management.

Insights is a tool that Facebook supplies lo page owners and administrators. This tool provides metrics about the page and user activity. Late in 2011 Facebook overhauled this tool to better help marketers understand how users interact and engage with the content on their page.

Tailoring page content

By tracking metrics such as "People Talking About This" you can better tailor your content to your audience. Generally, and across all pages we manage, we see the largest spikes across all metrics when running a contest. Ifs important to notice the topic/type of content "fans" of your page respond to. Some pages we manage respond particularly well to bank news and others generate more interaction around community events. We found that the online community at one of our client banks responds especially well to content about local sports, so whenever there is a sports event we always post about it to generate engagement.

Facebook also allows you to view demographics (age, gender and location) of people who "like" your page, who you've reached, who are talking about your page and people who have checked in at your place. This last factor can be especially interesting, in a recent report we generated for a client we found that although "fans" of their page were mostly females aged 25-55+, their posts were mostly reaching adults of both genders aged 18-24. Given this information, we can tailor posts to this age demographic. For instance, financial information/tips, first-time home buyer information or mobile banking will be especially relevant to this age group.

To dig even deeper, you can export the data for a specific date range by using the "export" function. Sample reports include key metrics such as lifetime total "likes" where you can see growth over time, daily newsfeed impressions, and daily "likes" and comments. Other information includes lifetime "likes" by city, gender and language. Any of this information is easy to graph and great for presentations.

Did your contest generate more Mikes'?

"Like Sources" is another powerful Facebook metric. If you're running Facebook ads or a contest application, this measurement will show you the number of "likes" your page has gained due to those sources...