Facebook’s own marketing team make running a business page and using Facebook Ads sound simple and effective. Well, while there’s definitely a huge gulf in the reach between paying for boosted posts versus simply setting up your page and hoping for the best, a Facebook ad campaign without a strategy will be just as hopeless as any other hit-and-hope marketing campaign.
The better you understand your Facebook page, its audience, its strengths, and its weaknesses, the more effectively you can deploy that page and your financial investment into generating worthwhile returns for your business.
For those that are prepared to make that extra effort, Facebook provides more than adequate tools. Facebook Insights is a complete look under the hood of your small business Facebook page, and learning to understand what each part means can empower even the least social media savvy of lone entrepreneurs to turn their online fortunes around.
As a page admin, when you go to your business page you’ll see a series of headers across the top – and one of them reads: Insights. This is the place to begin.
Clicking here will take you to your Overview, which is the broadest look at your page stats, including a summary of recent activity on your page, a report on any recent ads you may have run, more detailed stats on recent posts you’ve made, and the option to create a table that compares your own stats to that of competing or complementary business pages. Typing “pages liked by people who like [your page]” into the main search bar at the top can return some good suggestions on pages to add to this chart.
Click Likes in your Insights menu, and you’ll get a full summary of all the thumbs-up your posts are getting: where they’re coming from, and whether they’re the result of your paid ads. This is a great place to figure out whether your ads are effective, as well as to identify weak areas to improve or strong areas to exploit.
Reach is another way to make this kind of assessment. Rather than relying on people to click the Like button to contribute to your stats, Reach looks at who’s actually laid eyes on your page and posts – including those who haven’t elected to follow you. This is an area where you can identify great potential, by seeing the kind of posts that are being shared by your followers and which ones are having an impact beyond your established fan or customer base.
Next comes Page Views, which can be just as valuable as Likes and Reach if your page contains an enticing call-to-action that encourages visitors to reach out and share their details with you. You can figure out whether they’re doing so in the next menu, Actions On Page.
Posts, People, and Messages are all great pages for identifying who is interacting with your page – from broad demographics to individual customers with queries. Facebook is very much part of the contemporary mode of inbound marketing, whereby ads are no longer things to be looked at but portals of communication waiting to be opened.
If you recognize the potential in all this, you’ll want to work through the ace new visual guide to Facebook Insights below (produced by The Business Backer), which looks at each menu in more detail and offers some handy tips on where to get started. It’s essential viewing if you’d like your page to reach head and shoulders above some of the 50 million other businesses using Facebook today.
John Cole is a digital nomad specialising in leadership, digital media, and personal growth topics, his passions include world cinema and biscuits. A native Englishman, he is always on the move, but can most commonly be spotted in the UK, Norway, and the Balkans.
Image: Pexels
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