There have been big developments for social media marketing experts this week as Facebook has rolled out updates to its Page Insights system.
Aimed at providing page owners with better information about the people who visit its pages, it has four key features that marketers will need to get their heads around.
- Revised metrics – the old interaction stats for pages have been updated so that it is easier for their owners to identify different ways in which people are engaging with them. Likes, tags, mentions, direct visits to the page and more are all recorded separately. This should enable more precisely targeted page design.
- Aggregated info – positive interactions and negative interactions for any given page are grouped into two categories that can be viewed side by side, making it easy to get a quick estimate of how the page is doing that is more meaningful than just noting how many people like it. Likes, shares, comments and clicks are listed in the positive category, while unlikes, hiding posts and spam reports are listed as negative.
- Better insights – instead of just recording who has seen a post, Facebook can now reveal who has engaged with it by liking, sharing or commenting. This makes it easier to identify demographic trends in responses and, based on this analysis, to target future posts more effectively.
- Export flexibility – Page Insights information can now be downloaded in a custom template, making it easier for businesses to keep all their search engine marketing records together in coherent form.
Alongside these features, individual posts are now tagged with scorecards that provide a quick way to check the positive and negative responses they have received. If a lot of people have suddenly joined or left the group, looking at individual posts can help to establish the probable cause. After a new group has arrived, such as in response to a promotion, it can be used to track what sort of post is helping to engage them and encouraging them to stay.
The new Page Insights system was initially tested on a smaller group of pages before being extended to everyone. The speed with which this extension has happened suggests that the initial responses were really positive. In an interesting move, Facebook has chosen to keep its old metrics running alongside the new ones so that page owners do not have to make the change if they do not want to – at least not yet. For more advice on how you could take advantage of these changes, talk to Xcellimark.
