The social networking giant Facebook is a great place for customers to interactively communicate with businesses, mostly by leaving comments, sharing pictures, and “liking” business-related pages. In a way, Facebook (as well as other social networking sites) can be thought of as taking attention away from actual websites (as discussed in this mySEOblog article). With this in mind, many analysts need information and tools to help gauge how well and popular their business’ Facebook pages are, and now the social networking giant provides these tools, because Facebook business pages are becoming an integral part of business as well.

The new way Facebook is presenting the visitor information to you is by a service called “Insights.” This new service from Facebook provides you with statistical information on both the “likes” and “talking about” aspects of your Facebook page. To view the “Insights” of your Facebook page, click on either the “likes this” or “talking about” links on the left-hand side of your business’ Facebook page. Do note that you must be logged into Facebook and also an administrator of the business page that you would like stats on.

I have provided a list of information below that Facebook presents to you for both of these tiers:

  • Gender and Age – Facebook displays a bar graph of both genders and age levels (e.g. 13-17, 18-24, 25-34, etc.)
  • Countries, Cities, and Languages – A list of geographical information will be displayed concerning the totals where most of your Facebook visitors have come from.
  • Sources – This list will report the method that Facebook users have used to visit your page (e.g. On Page, Mobile, Facebook Recommendations, etc.)

Within the “Insights” of people talking about your business (or its page), the following X-Y scatter plots will be displayed:

  • People Talking About This – The number of unique people who created a story about your page during a specific timeframe.
  • Viral Reach – The number of unique people who saw a story published by a friend of your page during a specific timeframe.

If needed, this information can be exported into an .XLS (Microsoft Office Excel) or .CSV (Comma-Separated Values) file that you can utilize externally outside of the Facebook website.

The Facebook “Insights” section pertaining to a business page is a great way to acquire analytics about your page so that you can focus on the areas that need attention to grab more visitors to your business page in the long run.