Facebook released a preview version of Facebook insights – its reporting package - in November 2011.

I’ve digested some of the things I’ve read over the past few weeks to pick out the main differences – largely two new stats: 'people talking about' and 'virality'.

This 3-minute video gives a good explanation of the updates.

New dashboard

The dashboard details your:

• total likes - people who have liked your page
• friends of fans - your potential reach
• people talking about this - unique people who have created content relating to your page such as a comment, 'like' or photo tag
• weekly total reach – the total number of people who have seen content relating to your page (includes ads/sponsored stories)

This is an example of Which? Action’s dashboard. (You're stuck with the date range Facebook chooses to show you – usually the current week.)

Viral reach

This new stat allows you to see the number of people who saw a story and interacted with it and, as a result, the number of their friends it reached, expanding awareness of your page and organisation.

This allows you to tailor your activity by learning which posts get the most people talking about issues, or have the greatest virality stats.

For example, pictures of our cupcake delivery to the Treasury went down a treat:

Pros:

Focus on engagement - The data allows you to move on from a concern just with the number of people liking your page, to the quality of your content and user engagement.

Better feedback on content – You get information which helps you work out what works and what doesn't with your posts.

Cons:

3 months data only - Facebook can only report on the past 3 months of data so you have to be disciplined in keeping an external record of the data so you don’t lose anything.

Need 30+ people - You need over 30 people to interact with your page that week to pull any engagement stats, so pages with just a few fans will struggle to get stats.  

Charlotte Slayford is Consumer Action Editor at Which?