UPDATE: Facebook Insights – how it works and whether it's any good for you

This is a quick update to our post yesterday 10 Tips on running a great Facebook Page, by Facebook, just clarifying one important point – Facebook InSights.

What Facebook offers brands is
1) Traffic – people share your content with their friends, getting you more visitors
2) Engagement – chance to hear from and respond to your
3) Insights

And the insights are significant.

Facebook Insights is very similar to Google Analytics: more limited in the respect that it only covers content that ends up on Facebook; but more informative in that it can tell you lots of information about the people who share and like your content. Things like their age, location and gender.

Just a few words on how Facebook InSights works…

There’s an “Insights dashboard” which combines information about fans on your page as well as stats on any content of yours that has been uploaded to Facebook.

On a post in the Developers’ Blog section, Facebook explains how InSights works:

1) Websites: Fully-integrated sites and those that use social plugins, or add a non-integrated domain in one easy step
2) Applications: Including canvas, mobile, device, and desktop applications
3) Facebook Pages: Including Pages created on Facebook.com and those that are part of the Open Graph protocol

For example, you can now view analytics around specific stories liked on your website, or how many users commented on posts made on your Page (note that this is anonymized aggregate data and does not include personally identifiable information). From there, you will have a better idea of what your audience finds most interesting and capitalize on that content.

Basically – you can see what people share and what people like, and that helps you produce more of the good stuff…

It’s free of course – the only catch seems to be getting Facebook to recognise that you are truly the domain administrator, and have the right to see that information.

See FAQ on Facebook Insights here