Ekaterina Walter is a social media strategist at Intel. She is a part of Intel’s Social Media Center of Excellence and is responsible for company-wide social media enablement and corporate social networking strategy.  You have created a FacebookFacebook Fan Page. Now what? I bet these questions come to mind: “Is my page a success?” “Who is engaging with us?” “Is our engagement effective?” “Does our content strategy work?”  The Facebook Insights dashboard will help you answer some of these questions. As defined by Facebook, “Insights provides Facebook Page owners … with metrics around their content. By understanding and analyzing trends within user growth and demographics, consumption of content, and creation of content, Page owners … are better equipped to improve their business with Facebook.”  So what’s the best way to use this relatively new tool? We’ve outlined some steps below that should have you measuring Facebook engagement in no time.  Note that only page administrators can view Insights data for the properties they own or administer.  There are two types of Facebook insights:  The question then becomes: “What do you want to track and measure?” There is a lot of data offered, but you want to sort through it and identify what information is meaningful and will help you make decisions about your engagement and content strategy. If that data is not readily available, you might want to do some manual calculations to derive the numbers you’re looking for.  Below are the insights I recommend you pay attention to and track.  Unlikes and attrition rate: The fact is that you will always have some unsubscribes, no mater how great your engagement is, but hopefully it is just a small number. I usually just watch for spikes in the unlike numbers. You want to try and correlate them with the activity on your page and understand why people are leaving your page. It is rather hard to nail down the exact reason, but if there is an unusual spike, you will usually have a pretty good idea.  The simple attrition rate formula is:  Daily Unlikes / Daily Fan Count  This metric will tell you how many of your fans are leaving your site. It is normal to have small constant attrition over time.  Some of these metrics require constant manual tracking and analysis, which is a big downside. However, the above metrics will help you make decisions about your engagement and content strategy that would allow more effective interactions with your customers.  - HOW TO: Get the Most Out of Your Business Facebook Page - 5 Huge Trends in Social Media Right Now - The WikiLeaks Debate: Journalists Weigh In - A Field Guide to Using Facebook Places - 5 Useful Facebook Trend and Search Services  Image courtesy of iStockphotoiStockphoto, alexsl  More About: analytics, beginner, brand, business, comments, demographics, facebook, facebook insights, facebook page, likes, List, Lists, measurements, metrics, monitor, small business, social media monitoring  Jobs TMG Custom Media, based in Washington, D.C., and one of the country’s leading custom-media firms, seeks a “triple threat” producer, shooter and editor to create quality online videos for a variety of ...
Facebook Insights can be a powerful tool for tracking the growth of your brand's Fan Page. Here are some tips for getting started.