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It seems like every other day, Facebook has been redoing old tools or introducing new tools to Facebook (follow Facebook marketing solutions for some of the new tools and updates for developer APIs). It’s been both a curse and blessing – having constant updates and having to constantly relearn how to use old Facebook tools. Facebook Insights has been revamped again, and here’s my attempt at explaining some of the new additions and some of their limitations.

Reading Facebook Insights (from the main dashboard)

Facebook Insights from the main dashboard of an anonymous medium-sized Facebook Page

While many “analytic experts” feel it’s safe to simply make decisions based off of the main dashboard, it’s paramount to drill into your data to really understand what’s going on. Facebook offers in their insights a dashboard, but it only becomes useful when used in conjunction with the 4 other areas of insight offered by Facebook: “Likes”, “Reach”, “Talking About This” and “Check-Ins”. I’ll be going over the main analytic from the main insight dashboard.

Talking About This: One of the biggest obvious changes to Facebook is the “talking about this” metric. This metric is viewable for any Facebook page you like, regardless of whether or not you have insights or not. If you are logged in to the page, this is reflected in the green line in the graph above. One thing to be aware of though is that this metric reflects seven days; therefore, while each person “talking about this” is unique, even though it might seem as if you have 5 people talking about something every day for a week, it could have been the same post talked about once for the course of seven days. I’m not too sure why Facebook decided to implement their metric this way, as it can be easily misinterpreted, so be careful when reading the green line.

Page Posts: The purple circles on the bottom line indicate your number of posts on a given day. Facebook encourages more posts, as they positively correlate this to getting more people talking about your page. While the more you post may positively correlate with more people talking about your page, updating Facebook too often may cause others to “un-like” your Facebook page. Nobody likes following a spammy Facebook page, so post in moderation and with consideration.

Weekly Total Reach: This metric, similar to the “talking about this” metric, takes into consideration everybody reached within a 7-day period. This takes into consideration Facebook Sponsored Stories, your own Facebook ads and updates. By simply looking at the peaks and valleys for this Insight, an obvious drop can be observed between November 12 and 13. Take a minute to consider why it might have dropped.

No guess?

Nothing actually caused it to drop. By examining Facebook Insights, you can see that the last time anybody talked about this page was on November 6th, which is shown as a steady line over 7 days.

In conclusion, you can see how Facebook Insights can be easily misconstrued. When trying to interpret your insights, it’s necessary to check the other insight pages (“Likes”, “Reach”, “Talking About This” and “Check-Ins”), to see what post might have caused someone to “un-like” your page, versus counting on your main dashboard. Each Insight tool should be used in conjunction with the other tools to portray a clear idea of what you’re interpreting.