Many small business owners aren't aware of the vast data that social media platforms collect and collate for you to review, which if utilised correctly can be beneficial to increasing engagement to your social posts. In this article, we will run through the most helpful Facebook and Instagram insights, how to access them, what they mean and why they are relevant. To begin with, we will start with Facebook insights. How to access Facebook insights?
Step 1: Head to your business Facebook page on either your desktop or your mobile.
Step 2: If on your desktop, click the insights tab in the menu on the left side of your screen. If you're on your phone, you will see bubbles at the top of your Facebook app swipe along until you find the bubble labelled "... More" and then select insights.
NOTE: I recommend accessing insights on a desktop computer as I will be catering this article to the desktop view rather than phone. If we receive enough requests to do a mobile version of this article I will be more than happy to go through all this information for the mobile view.
What Facebook insights should I use and why?
NOTE: you can adjust the date range to the following options to today, yesterday, the last 7 days or the last 28 days by clicking on the blue date range on your desktop.
We will now highlight the key insights on your dashboard which you should pay attention to:
Actions on Page: this insight tells you how many people have actively clicked a button or post to interact with any aspect of your Facebook page.
Page Views: this insight tells you how many people have viewed your page within the time frame.
Page Likes: tells you how many people have liked your page within the time frame, this is not a total of your page likes.
Post Reach: tells you how many people your post has reached on Facebook.
Story Reach: tells you how many people viewed your stories.
Post Engagement: engagement is the level of reactions, comments and shares you get on your posts.
Now Facebook will tell you whether these figures are going up or down, and ideally you want to be increasing all of these where you can through posting and interacting with your audience regularly. You can also view the engagement on your individual posts by scrolling down on the page, this is important as you can see what content is performing well and cater your posts to include similar content in the future.
There is a menu on the side which will break down analytics for a range of different aspects of Facebook including likes, reach, posts, etc. which can be quite overwhelming for most small business owners and often leads to information overload. However, there are a few helpful graphs which can be beneficial to increasing your online engagement that we will help you locate.
Posts: the posts tab in the menu has some amazing data which can be beneficial to any small business. Not only does it include a break down of your individual social posts but it shows you the different times at which your audience is most active on the Facebook platform (pictured below).
Why is this important?
This is important as you can schedule your posts to align with when your audience is most active, this gives your posts the best chance of getting maximum engagement.
Reach: the reach tab of the menu includes a few different graphs which can depict the fluctuations over time in post reach, story reach, as well as reactions, comments and shares. When increasing your social presence this is an easy way to see the effects it is having on your engagement (see below).
Now for Instagram insights:
How do I access Instagram insights?
Step 1: Instagram insights can be accessed from the app on any mobile device, to access insights go to your profile.
Step 2: select the three lines in the top right corner and select insights (see below).
Instagram insights is broken up into three segments; content, activity and audience. We will go through each segment for you to understand it's importance and how to utilise it.
Content
The content section contains all your individual posts and stories, it will show you a range of insights for each individual post. To utilise this feature you click on a post and then click "view insights" underneath the image (see image on left).
The post insights includes an interaction break down of likes, comments, shares and saves, as well as profile visits from the post. The discovery section of post insights includes how many follows you received from the post, the reach and impressions, as well as a break down of how those impressions came to find your post (see below).
The individual post insights feature has a similar importance to the Facebook posts feature, it shows you what posts are performing well and you can then go on to cater your content to what you find is effective for your audience. The impressions break-down also allows you to see how your audience is coming to find your post, for example if you are finding only a small percentage of people are coming through to your post from hashtags, you may need to reevaluate the hashtags you are currently using as they may be ineffective.
Activity
The activity section gives you a breakdown of the past week of instagram data, including the discovery and interactions categories. The discovery category includes the overall reach and impressions, as well as a graph showing your daily reach (see below).
Where as the interactions section shows the weekly post actions, profile visits and website clicks through your Instagram activity, as well as a graph down the actions to show which days people are interacting more with your posts (see above).
Audience
The audience segment shows updates on your following including your new follows, unfollows and overall growth, as well as breakdowns on the demographics of your audience by location, age, and gender (see below).
The final and most important part of the audience is a graph depicting the time of day which your audience is more active on the social media platform (see below).
That concludes our break-down of Facebook and Instagram insights, we hope it was helpful and will help you with your social media activity in the future. If you have any questions about this article or need help with your social media management feel free to message us!
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