Facebook Insights Demystified (well kind of)
17/04/2011 by Richard Wright
I have done a lot of thinking, reading and listening about web and social media analytics over the last few weeks. This has been part of the development of a website analysis product that is being developed to assist our clients to better understand their online presence and provide a action based metrics framework for them to continuously improve this offering.
One thing that has come to the fore in this process has been 1: Facebook Insights raise more questions than they answer and 2: how limiting they really are in understanding the effectiveness of your brands Facebook presence.
Here's why.
Towards a non baffling definition of Monthly Active Users of Pages
Facebook provides a statistic in its Insights interface and provides a statistic and a definition for Monthly Active Users.
Monthly active users
The number of people who have interacted with or viewed your Page or its posts. This includes interactions from fans and non-fans.
OK - this seems reasonable. Interactions must include:
- page likes (when they become a fan)
- comments
- likes on comments
Page or post views include:
- page views (actual visits to the Fan page) (including tab views)
- post views (a Post is a status update made by your page)
These all must be unique for the month (a user has only seen it once in a calendar month). What I don't understand about this is what a unique Post View is. After a lot of pawing over the numbers I have come up with this definition of a Post View as it relates to the Monthly Active User.
Unique User Post View is: A Facebook page's status update is in the first page of a logged in Users stream at least once in a month while the said User is logged in.
That makes sense.
So if I check this against the stat's for a popular page that we administer for one of our clients as a sense check.
- page likes (when they become a fan)
- comments
- likes on comments
- page views (actual visits to the Fan page) (including tab views)
- post views (a Post is a status update made by your page)
Watch this space...