Facebook by the Numbers

Ok, so you have a Facebook page, you update it regularly and you interact daily. You’re doing everything right so far, but there’s one aspect of managing a Facebook page that you may have overlooked: Insights. Facebook Insights is a tool available to page administrators that gives you tons of information about your friends and their activity on your page.

Getting Started

When on your business page, you can look on the left hand column and see a quick overview of four insights, including monthly active users, daily new likes, daily post views and daily post feedback.

Facebook just started posting Insight numbers underneath each post, as well. After a post has been up long enough for Facebook to collect data (no longer than a few hours), you’ll be able to see how many people actually SAW your page and what percentage of them interacted with it (by clicking “like”, commenting, etc).

This can help you figure out what types of posts get the most views and interaction so you can tailor the content of future posts, as well as what times your friends are most active.

For the More Advanced

If you’d like even more information about your page and friends, simply click on the “see all” link in the Insights box. Here you’ll see all the pages you have admin access to on the left.

Under each page, there are two sets of Insights: one focused on user statistics, and the other on interaction statistics. The user statistics show you information on new likes or unlikes and friend demographics, including age, gender and location. The interactions page breaks down all your recent posts and compiles the impression (views) and feedback (number of interactions) information in one table. You can also view daily mentions, reviews and posts.

If you’ve been using Facebook Insights for sometime, then you may also be familiar with, and even prefer, the old Insights page. Both sets are available, and when we put together reports for our clients, we use graphs and statistics from both versions. You can access the old Insights page from a link at the top of the new page that says “View Old Page Insights”.

The old Insights page offers similar information, but it’s shown in different graphs. One of my favorite graphs is the “interactions over time” graph, which is very helpful when showing a new client the increase in interactions since we took over managing the page.

Spreadsheets and More!

Now, if that’s still not enough data for you, you go a step further and export more stats into an Excel spreadsheet. Just click on the “export data” link at the top of the page. I usually download the friend and interaction data, as that has most of the information needed to keep clients up to date and to keep your social media approach fresh.

The Excel data gives you information about the Facebook page all the way back to its creation, allowing you to easily compare months and years. To me, the most interesting numbers are the page views. Many clients are surprised to see how many page views their Facebook page is receiving.

Following Facebook by the numbers will help you do a better job managing your page, ultimately helping increase your page’s friends and thus improving the brand’s presence and success on Facebook.

Do you use Facebook Insights? What’s your favorite stat?

Travel & Social Media Go Hand in Hand

Sixty percent of us use social media when traveling to communicate with our friends and family when traveling instead of picking up the phone or dashing out an email. This is one of the amazing results from a survey about people’s travel habits conducted by the hotel group Sheraton and released this week.

I pulled a few more key stats from a USA Today article about the survey that I thought were powerful:

• Even when there’s happy news to share with friends and loved ones back home, 36% say they’d rather log in than make a phone call to spread the word.
• 77% say they access social media sites such as Facebook throughout the day, with 33% saying they log in multiple times each hour.
• 39% say they “could not live without” social media sites.
• When traveling, 20% of respondents say they still manage to check social media sites multiple times throughout the day.
• When it comes to planning trips, 64% said they use social media to make their plans; within the 25-34-year-old age group, however, the figure’s 76%.

So why don’t people want to pick up the phone or send an email? I think it boils down to it’s not as convenient or efficient and takes up too much time. Why have to try to remember everyone’s email and attach bulky files or upload the photos to another site and send a link when you can post them to Facebook with little hassle and share with everyone who needs or wants to see them at the same time? Picking up the phone is too disruptive and certainly not at all efficient. You have to do it person by person and it will likely take time out of your vacation to have a full conversation.

This is one reason why I think Facebook Messages is so smart. People want a simple way to communicate, ie type, hit enter, share with lots of people. Done. If it delivers what it promises and is user friendly like the rest of Facebook, I think it will catch on.

How do you communicate when traveling? Do you post photos each day to Facebook or wait till you get home? Do you tweet where you are? Check in on Foursquare or Facebook Places?

Share with us how you use social media when traveling and if the results of the survey surprised you.

Hubspot Study Suggests Blogs Best Social Media for Leads

A new study from Hubspot, who canvessed 167 small to medium sized business owners and executives,  is both encouraging and confusing.

The percentage of leads from each source was broken down as:

Other (including public relations and print and online display advertising) 25%
SEO 16%
Email Marketing 14%
Pay Per Click 13%
Telemarketing 9%
Blogs+Social Media 8%
Trade Shows 8%
Direct Mail 7%

I find this very encouraging – particularly as we offer services for PR, SEO, email, PPC and Social Media, that’s 76% of the leads right there! – it’s certainly good to know that more and more businesses are trying a variety of methods to generate leads, rather than sticking to whatever they have done in the past. That has certainly been my feeling from talking to clients in all kinds of businesses lately.

However, I’m also slightly skeptical of the accuracy, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, if you’re in are a small or medium sized business yourself, you know the difficulty in pinning down exactly how a lead found you.

If they remember you from a trade show, but Google* you to find your contact info, does that count as SEO or a trade show?

If you send offers via both email and direct mail, as many of our clients do, which one gets the credit for the sale?

And Mike Volpe, Hubspot’s VP of marketing, even goes on to say that there are additional benefits to blogging,

“Not only are you creating a community around blog articles, but all those articles get indexed by search engines, so blogging has elements of search engine optimization (SEO) as well”

So how can we accurately claim that SEO is 16% vs Blogging’s 8%?  I don’t feel that we can. But I also don’t see that as a problem.

One thing we try to stress here at Step Ahead is that your marketing efforts, particularly onlne, will help each other. Being active on Twitter can drive traffic to your blog, which can help with your SEO, which can get people to sign up for your email marketing, which can inform people about your trade show appearances, which, well, you get the idea.

One final thing which jumped out at me from this was this statistic:

Companies with less than 50 employees earmarked more than three times as much of spending on blogging and social media than larger ones, and 36% more on SEO.

On the Internet, there is no reason the small companies can’t compete with the Big Boys. In fact, the lack of barriers to getting things accomplished, which plague many a large corporation, can be to your advantage. If you aren’t already blogging, tweeting, facebook-ing, etc, you can start right now. You don’t need to organize all the different departments, have a bunch of strategy meetings, get the lawyers to overlook things, and waste months of everybody’s time. Just sign up for an account and jump in.

So, what are you waiting for?

*I really don’t like using Google as a verb, but everyone else does it!