Facebook Insights is an analytics tool similar to Google Analytics but for your Facebook fan page. It is Facebook’s tool for analyzing and optimizing your Facebook page and can assist you in figuring out what works and what doesn’t.

The Insights Dashboard
When you access your Facebook Insights, you will see a dashboard overview of your Likes and active users. Your number of Likes are important but so are your user activity and demographics. Anyone can Like a page and never return, users that visit your page and share your content are the ones that are actually consuming your content and passing it on to their friends.

Likes
The first thing you will see when you look at Facebook Insights is your total and new Likes. You will also see how many Likes you got on specific content. This will help you determine what your users want to consume and what they don’t. Take a look at your Likes and Shares for specific posts. The ones that outperform are the ones you should consider creating more of in the future.

The one time you want to pay attention to your Likes (and “Unlikes”) is if you suddenly have a big spike or drop. You should figure out why this happened and try to replicate it (if it’s a spike in Likes) or avoid anything of the sort ever again (if it’s a spike in Unlikes).

Targeting Users
Facebook Insights contains a Users and Demographics page where you can see gender, age, location, and language of your users broken down into easy-to-read graphs. If you have a product that caters to a specific gender, age group, or geographic area this is where you can see if you are doing a good job matching your content to the profile of your customers.

Let’s say you own a store in Westchester County, NY. Facebook views in California or China are likely not very valuable to you as these users are unlikely to become customers. You need engaged fans in your immediate surrounding area. Facebook Insights will actually show you down to the level of cities where people live that are viewing your content. You can then adapt your content to try to pull in more local viewers.

Getting Users to Your Facebook Page
Facebook allows you to see how users Liked your page. Did they Like the page on Facebook or right on your site? This helps you figure out if your Facebook Like and Share buttons on your website or blog are working effectively.

Facebook Insights isn’t as sophisticated an analytics tool as Google Analytics but because it’s Facebook’s own tool it captures data that is not available anywhere else. Any business that has an active Facebook page needs to know how to use Insights. Without the data it provides you will only be guessing what your Facebook fans and potential fans want to see. That’s not a good way to use Facebook to obtain future customers.