Written by ContentPowered.com
With so much analytical data readily available at your fingertips as a business owner, it’s easy to feel privileged. You’re privy to vast amounts of information about every fan who visits your page or clicks one of your links. Sure, a lot of it is accumulated; you may not see what an individual had for breakfast, but you can see how many people viewed your page during breakfast hours.
The question is; are you special? How much of that information is really available only to you, and how much of it is publicly visible to everyone, and just presented to you in a fancy dashboard?
What You Can See
As a business monitoring your own Facebook page, you can see a lot of specific information.
Likes. You can see a lot about the likes your page receives, particularly over a given time. Set a start and end date and you can see how your page grew in that time, if it grew at all. This tab will also show you where your likes come from; the referral page, whether it’s another FB account, your website, a newsletter or what.
Reach. Every time you post, it shows up in the news feeds of a selection of users. You’re never going to have 100% engagement unless you only have a single fan; as soon as you have two or more, Facebook will begin making a judgment about who should see your posts based on EdgeRank calculations. In the reach tab, you can see how many of your users actually see your post.
Reach also shows you the number shares, comments and likes each post receives. If any, it will also show you how many times your post was blocked, hidden or reported.
Visits. The visits tab shows you what users are doing when they’re on your page. Do they scroll through your feed and leave? Do they click to your photos tab? Do they check in? This is also where you see external referrers; sites other than Facebook that refer users to your Facebook page. It’s a complicated looking chart, but it’s very informative when you zoom in to have a closer look.
Posts. The posts tab shows you when your users are most active as a whole. It will also show you the engagement and reach statistics for different types of posts, such as photos, links and videos. You can click through to display, rather than general statistics, the statistics for each individual post you’ve made.
People. This tab shows you complete demographic information about your audience. You’ll be able to see the gender breakdown of your page compared to Facebook as a while, the age ranges and their associated engagement statistics, and a number of other interesting tidbits about your readers.
With all of this information available to you at a click of the Insights button, it’s easy to wonder; what can your fans see?
What Fans See
The answer is… nothing. That’s right; for once, you really are in a special position. Your fans can click the Insights button on Facebook, but all it does is take them to a page where they’re asked to create or link their business page. Your business page, because it’s linked to your account, is not available for them to see data about so easily.
Okay, so that’s not strictly true. For example, use a personal account and visit a business account. Click on the tab that shows the number of likes that page has. This shows you the total number of likes, the number of social mentions, the age range, most popular week and most popular city. It’s not incredibly detailed, but it’s some basic information. That’s about all fans can see; basic information you wouldn’t mind sharing yourself.
Really, that’s okay. The vast majority of your fans won’t care about any of the statistics you find through Insights. They’re valuable to marketers, but how much does the average user care about the age breakdown of their fellow fans?
Competition Monitoring
Perhaps the real question is; what can other businesses see? Fans don’t have business accounts, they can’t see anything. What can another business owner see about your performance, and what can you see about theirs?
Pages to Watch. The new Facebook Pages to Watch system has been fully ironed out and is ready to use. In a business account, you can click through the Posts tab and begin to monitor posts from competitors, when you assign those competitors a spot on your watch list. You can see how often they post, what fan interaction they get and even a comparative ranking of how strong they are as competition.
You can watch a couple types of pages. First, you can monitor your competition, those businesses overlapping your audience in your same niche. This is obviously valuable to know what your competition is doing at any given time.
You can also watch similar businesses in your area, those that aren’t direct competition. If they’re successful, knowing what they do can help you create your own strategies.
Other Tools. Your competition can’t see a lot of what you do for one simple reason; you need to link your Facebook account to view information in most other tools. That said, there are some tools outside users can use to get a detailed view of your Facebook page and performance. These are not limited to business competitors; fans could use them if they wanted as well. Very few ever would, but that’s not the point.
- Fanpage Karma is a free tool that runs a scan and shows content type, fan posts, growth and some other interesting publicly available information. Most importantly, it can show which industry influencers engage with the target page, which can reveal who you have on your side.
- Social Bakers is a very detailed competitor analytics tools that monitors several profiles and up to a quarter million fans at a time. It’s unlikely a fan would ever use it against you, however, as it’s a premium service and few fans are likely to pay for such information.
There you go. Fans have a few sources of insight into your brand, but very little of it actually comes from Facebook. Anything more detailed is only available to businesses monitoring your page, or to your page itself.
