Getting the most from Facebook Insights part three

Welcome back to the final part of our deep look at the functionality of Facebook Insights which will help you extract more from the data provided as you build donor traffic and engagement to promote your social media for nonprofit fundraising activities. In part one we looked at getting started plus the landing page while part two focused on posts and people. To conclude we’ll dig further into the ‘reach’ and ‘visits’ sections of Insights.

Reach – To get a true measure of how well your audience are reacting or engaging to your content the ‘reach’ tab provides telling statistics. As with each of the Facebook reports don’t forget the calendar function at the top of each page (illustrated below) which allows you to drag and drop your date range exactly as needed or you can select the default W (weekly) M (monthly) or Q (quarterly) settings.

 Once the dates are selected below you can view your organic reach or you can select paid if you are using Facebook Boost (the pay-per-click option) in addition to the engagement levels measured by likes, comments and shares. What I find useful is to the right of the data are sections that can be clicked which allow you to benchmark your data for the chosen time period versus the prior. When viewing data in the default setting it can be difficult to separate the highs from the lows so the benchmark option is very helpful, in the example below we see the default view for ‘reach’ but benchmark (solid black line) has been selected for ‘likes’ below this.

When learning about the ‘reach’ of your Facebook updates there is no automatic correlation between the number of fans/followers and the reach of an update, what it will demonstrate is how and then posts became viral enabling you to study those impacts. It is also extremely valuable when interpreting the success of paid posts.

Visits – You’ll want to review the data under the ‘visits tab frequently as it offers an easy to read snapshot of what people do when they visit your page. Once more you can select calendar ranges and see the benchmark results for how people see each of the tabbed areas on your top menu bar next to your ‘about’ section. Typically these might include photos, a map, videos, events, likes and perhaps a store.

What I find interesting is that changing the placement and order of your tabs will always impact the views of each tab. Remembering that you can only place four tabs in the top row it’s a good idea to cycle different tabs in and out of the top section if you are running far more than four sections. To make those changes follow the instructions in the graphic below.

Also useful is clicking on any date within the calendar view and you’ll be able to see the totals and percentages for each visit type without trying to gauge simply based on the graphs. The visits section will also let you see other activity on the page such as external posts left by visitors to your page, ‘check-ins’ if you have a physical location and offers claimed if you use that feature. Lastly at the foot of the section is a summary of external referrers which can be a huge time saver if suddenly a referral on a non Facebook location is bringing lots of visits, it’s a little like having Google Analytics within your Facebook data.

I hope that the guide has been helpful to you and if you have other tips be sure and leave them in the comments section.

_________________________________________________________________________________

For nonprofit, nonprofit fundraising, CSR business and other news, connect with us on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Google+ and Pinterest or subscribe to our RSS feed.

Miratel Solutions is a Toronto call centre, eBusiness, and letter shop mail house specializing in professional fundraising services including telephone fundraising, online fundraising, lottery services, donation caging, donation processing and other donor management services. We are committed to our CSR business values in all contact centre services and mail house operations and advancing the missions of the nonprofits we proudly serve.