What is Insights?
Facebook Insights is a built-in utility on Facebook that uses graphs and charts to show such page statistics as likes, page views, reach, virility, and engagement. Insights is available to owners (and administrators) of Facebook Pages, not user accounts, and the page must have at least 30 likes before it can be used. Insights is meant to be used to keep tabs on how many visits and likes your page gets, how they are interacting with your page, and provide stats that allow trial-and-error posting and engagement that can be used to optimize your page.
How do I find Insights?
Your Insights are relatively easy to find, first of all you will see a button that says “Message” to the right of where your page name and profile picture are. There will be a downward facing arrow to the right of this button, click that and a drop-down box will appear. Within this drop-down box, click “View Insights”.
How to Read Insights
When you first see the Insights page, you will notice a number of metrics that are not always readily understandable. Here are their definitions in plain English.
Total Likes – Simply put, the number of people that have liked your page. This stat seems to be counted up until the previous day, so likes on the current day won’t be shown yet.
Friends of Fans – This is the total number of friends that all of your Facebook friends have, including mutual friends.
People Talking About This – The number of people that engage with your page over the last 7 days. This includes actions such as: Posting on your page wall, Likes, Comments, Shares, Answers a question, Responds to an event, Mentions your page, Tags your page in a photo, Checks in at your place or Recommends your place.
Weekly Total Reach – This metric represents the number of people that have seen any content associated with your page over the past 7 days. This includes Ads and Sponsored Stories pointing to your page.
Below these four metrics you will see a graph for the past 7 days that features numbers for “Talking About This” and “Weekly Total Reach” in line graph form. At the bottom of the same graph you will see dots or “Bubbles” representing “Posts” which represent how many posts you made on your page on that day; larger bubbles mean more posts.
Understanding Page Posts Information
Scrolling down farther below the graph, you will see a spreadsheet of page updates, most recent first, and other information about how Facebook users have interacted with your page. The columns can be sorted by clicking the appropriate heading and you can filter them by clicking the drop-down box labeled “All Post Types” on the top left of this section.
There are even more definitions for this area of Insights, and these definitions represent each column.
Date – The date that the post in question was published.
Post – An icon representing the type of post published (post, photo, video, link, platform post) as well as a short excerpt of the post.
Reach – The number of people who saw the post, or the number of times it was displayed.
Engaged Users – The number of people that clicked somewhere on your posts.
Talking About This – The number of people who have “created a story” from your post. This includes actions such as: Posting on your page wall, Likes, Comments, Shares, Answers a question, Responds to an event, Mentions your page, Tags your page in a photo, Checks in at your place or Recommends your place.
Virility – The number of people that your post has reached that are also included in the “Talking About This’ metric. (Talking About This divided by Reach).
The Likes Tab
Near the top of the page, there are tabs labeled “Overview”, “Likes”, “Reach”, and “Talking About This”. The previous section of this article has been about just the “Overview” tab. The following three tabs simply contain more detailed data about the stats already shown in “Overview”, but we will touch on them anyway, starting with “Likes”
The First section of the Likes tab is labeled “Gender and Age” and is quite self-explanatory, it simply breaks down the Likes your page received based on the demographic metrics of Gender and Age. The top row represents how many females Liked the page (out of 100 percent) and the bottom row stands for Males (again, out of 100 percent).
This section is further broken down into a bar graph with six age groups: 13 – 17, 18 – 24, 25 – 34, 35 – 44, 45 – 54 and 55 and up. This section starts at age 13 because Facebook’s Terms of Service does not allow Facebook users that are under age 13. Again, like the gender percentages, the age stats are ‘out of 100 percent’.
The next section of the Likes tab is “Countries, Cities and Languages” and this section is extremely simple. There are three columns; Countries, Cities and Languages, and these columns simply have a vertical list of either countries, cities or languages that people who have liked your page live in or speak.
The final section of this tab is “Where Your Likes Came From”, and this consists of a simple line graph with two metrics on it: On Page and Timeline. These basically mean whether the likes occurred on a page outside of Facebook, or on the Timeline where, likely, the page was shared. The Line graph shows how many of each type of like you got by day.
The Reach Tab
The reach tab is almost identical to the Likes tab except that the stats and metrics contained within it revolve around the reach that the page has gained rather than simply the likes that people have given.
The previous two images are much like the images in the Likes section, but the next graph is totally new. This graph shows how people were “Reached” by your page and the frequency of this happening.
And a simple line graph much like the “Likes” tab.
The Talking About This Tab
The last tab features stats that are related to the previously-mentioned “Talking About This” definition. This definition, as a refresher is “The number of people who have “created a story” from your post. This includes actions such as: Posting on your page wall, Likes, Comments, Shares, Answers a question, Responds to an event, Mentions your page, Tags your page in a photo, Checks in at your place or Recommends your place.”
A difference on this tab is that the first two graphs will not calculate unless your page is being talked about by at least 30 people.
The section immediately following these two graphs, however, works just fine even below the 30 people. This section includes two line graphs, one that shows the number of unique people “Talking About This” and the other that shows the viral reach of the people “Talking About This”.
This concludes the main overview of Facebook Insights. As a note, this overview was done after several updates to Insights as well as after the Timeline upgrade to Facebook. I have no doubt that Facebook will continue adding additional features and metrics to Insights so stay tuned for an updated guide should this happen in the near future.
