Facebook fan pages are all the craze with clients, celebrities and those aspiring to be famous in one way or the other. Unfortunately, for those of us who live and and breath analytics this also represents one of the biggest obstacles with Facebook.

Here is what current fan page owners are currently able to get insight into:

1. The total number of fans and active fans on their page. An active fan is a Facebook user who engaged with your fan page in some way.
2. Gender demographic data
3. Fan subscription and un-subscription trends
4. Language and location statistics

To the untrained eye, you’re left rather un-impressed with Facebook’s Insights. And while there is something to be said about its limitations, let’s focus on what we can learn from them. Like any analytics platform, you should use this data to find trends and form hypotheses. Here are some ideas to get you started and in the right frame of mind.

Fan Interactions and Demographics

Take a look at which status updates, video posts, etc. get the most fan interaction (comments and likes) and determine why. Is it because you are giving something away? How did that affect your fan growth rate? What demographic was most active – male or female? You need to ask all of these questions so you can maximize the effectiveness of your future updates and posts.

You want to maximize fan interaction, and in order to do that you need to have an understanding of who is paying attention and why. By looking at a user’s demographic you can better target them with future updates. It’s also a good idea to see how this compares to your website’s users. Does that match up? What you need to determine is how this affects your online marketing strategy.

Un-Fanning Metrics

One area you’ll want to keep a close eye on is un-fanning metrics. It can be difficult to determine what exactly caused someone to decide to no longer be a fan of your page, but there are some questions you can ask to narrow it down. Here are some things you should look at:

How frequently are you updating your page? Perhaps your audience needs more or less updates to keep their interest or to not overwhelm them. Test this and take it one step further by testing different days of the week to determine which days get you the most fan interaction.
How engaging are your updates/posts? Are you giving users a reason to want to monitor your updates and to want to get involved in the conversation? You should try different types of updates to see how it affects the number of fans you have.

Are you losing most of your fans after you give something away or run a contest? This is a common way to lose fans as people will become a fan of the page just for a chance to win. The question now becomes: how can you keep them around? Do you offer up some type of minor giveaway at random times to fans?

Conclusions

Facebook’s Insights provides us with numerous opportunities to ask “why?” Asking questions about the information they give you plus a little out-of-the-box thinking can go a long way to getting the most out of Facebook’s Insights. What questions do you ask when evaluating your Facebook Page Insights?

Many of you may have already seen this update a few days ago, but Facebook just rolled out the beta version of the new Facebook Insights for Pages. For those interested, below is a quick recap.

Aside from the aesthetic changes, there are several important new data points now available (including an explanation for the ominous “Are Talking About This”). Unfortunately, the new data can only be accessed back to July 19 of this year and in 35 day segments.

There are also several new Insights APIs available that we’ll be investigating over the next few days. Basically, there will be even more data available than is provided in the dashboard. Keep in mind, we are still in the early stages of understanding how Facebook is determining these numbers.

Below is the Official Facebook Page Insights Guide:

Here are a few new Facebook Insights highlights:

• Friends of Fans – The potential reach of a page when users create a story about the page (i.e. amplification). There may also be an opportunity here to determine the average number of friends per user.
• Like Sources – Expanded detail on where people are Liking a page. No more “Unknown” category.
• Reach – We can now see the demographics of people that see brand posts in their News Feed. THIS IS HUGE.
  • Organic, Paid, Viral, and Total are each included as categories of reach. In short, this is a much easier way to determine how effective ads are performing against organic efforts. The Viral category may also be a good indicator on how compelling brand content is among users.
  • Frequency – Shows how many users viewed a post more than once, which is a drilled down version of the previous raw impressions number.
• Talking About This – The # of unique people who have created a story about your Page. This includes people that Liked the Page, posted to the wall, Liked or commented on a post, answered a question, RSVP’d to an event, etc. This is basically a redefined version of Weekly Active Users.
  • Also includes demographic data and the “viral” reach, which shows the number of unique users that saw a story published by a friend about your Page.
• EXPORTING – Above all, this is the most important update. Brand posts are now available in exporting and can be broken down by post type (photo, link, video, and platform post). This means that we can see how third party publishers are performing against posts made directly on the page.
  • There are a plethora of data columns that have been added, including post Shares, etc.

For any pages that you currently admin, the new dashboard can be viewed by following the link below and inserting the corresponding page name: http://facebook.com/PAGENAME?sk=page_insights

What do you think of the new Insights features?

For those of you with a Page on Facebook, you’d probably like to know how many people interacted with the stories you’ve posted. Luckily, Facebook is gradually rolling a new feature called Post Insights. This feature will allow  you to see the number of impressions and feedback for each post.

While were not yet seeting Insights on our pages, it is a very simple feature that will provide additional information besides the number of impressions. Feedback in the form of a percentage, will also show you how many visitors actually interacted with a particular post – such as ‘liked it’ or commented.

While this is definitely a step in the right direction, I think there is definitely a lot more data and insights to be pulled out of our page’s visitors.