While many brands are on a clear race for Likes, those smart Facebook Page owners will be looking beyond the number of Likes on the side of their Page and into more detailed analytics that show them how their Page is performing, and where they stand in relation to their competitors. Facebook itself offers a comprehensive analytics dashboard that tells you how your Page is performing, and I wanted to take a look at some of the tips for using this, as well as other sites that can help you get more out of your insights. As with all form of analytics, remember that the magic only really comes when you make actions off the back of the data, and don’t fall into analytics overload.

See what you did right/wrong

Under the Users dashboard in Facebook, you can access a simple graph that tells you how many new Likes you’re getting each day, as well as the number of Unlikes. This is incredibly valuable information as it allows you to see what you’re doing that’s working for you on your Page, or not working. This is useful if you click into the graph when you see an unusual pattern such as a sudden increase in the number of Unlikes. Look for what you might have done on that day that turned people off. Did you post too often, did a competition end, did you post irrelevant content? Try and find a pattern here and make sure you don’t keep doing the same thing!

Optimise your traffic referrers

Also within the Users dashboard in Facebook Insights, you can see the external traffic drivers to your Page. You should pay attention to these to see if you can optimise sites that are driving you traffic, to get even better results. You should also be looking at those sites that are referring traffic, but maybe not as much as you hoped. If you’re running a promotion on another site for example, or your own site, and the traffic isn’t coming through, you might need to look at how you’re enticing people through, or how prominent the link is. The external referrers are incredibly important for growing your fans organically so make sure this activity is optimised.

Are your fans actually active?

If you’re investing in a campaign to drive up the fans on your Page, you should always be looking at whether these fans are actually active, or whether they’re just contributing to an idle number of Likes. This is easily accessed with Facebook Insights and can be tracked over daily, weekly, or monthly users. If this number isn’t where you’d expect it to be, look at what you can do to drive interaction or, more importantly, bring the right kind of fans into your Page.

Implement on-click tagging

While Facebook’s own insights tell you a lot about how fans are performing on your Page, you can get a lot more in-depth by combining with your own analytics package. By implementing on-click tagging for a Facebook app for example, you can get a complete overview of how the app is performing. Through this you can effectively see drop-off rates, such as the amount of people that entered their email address vs the amount of people that landed on this Page. If you’re getting high dropoff rates at certain points, maybe you’re asking for too much information or the page isn’t very user friendly and so you’re losing the conversion.

Track against competitors

Social Bakers is a great site for getting free Facebook stats worldwide, as well as those that apply more specifically to you. If you want to see how many Likes you’re getting compared to your competitors, perhaps for benchmarking before a new campaign, you can do this easily through Social Bakers. Simply click onto ‘Pages’ at the top, then filter by country and category, to view the Page breakdown by industry. As well as looking at the overall number of fans, you can also look at the rate of growth, to see if a new promotion is working well for them in terms of driving numbers to Facebook. This information is also important for your own Facebook Page, to get a quick overview of how quickly you’re driving fans :

Get Insights for your own site

A lesser known feature in Facebook Insights, is the ability to track analytics for your own website. This allows you to see how content is being shared throughout your site, such as the number of Likes you’re getting, or links that are being shared through Facebook. Here you can choose who can view that information, setting this either for your profile or a particular Page. You can also access additional insights such as how many impressions a particular link or content has gained through Facebook. This is great information to show you how your content is performing socially and you can optimise off the back of it, by seeing the type of content that is getting shared most and trying to replicate it :

Possibly Related Posts:

• How 5 Global Brands Are Using Facebook For Campaigns – Video Case Studies
• Why Facebook could be about to topple Apple
• Case study – how AT&T use Facebook for customer service
• The Huge Success Of Nike On Facebook – Behind The Scenes Case Study
• Citroen Launch Mobile And Facebook Real World Hide And Seak Game To Win Cars