Forget the 1-800 numbers, the info@ email addresses, and don’t bother hooking up that fax machine anymore. Facebook business pages are an essential customer and business/brand communication tool that are beginning to replace traditional mediums of customer service and communication between brands and businesses.

The ability to keep an audience engaged, updated, and responded to so consistently and easily is a tool that many are, and if not they should be, taking advantage of.

However, using the page is one task, but monitoring that use and the users is quite another and can be a bit overwhelming. Knowing what to look for and how to use Page Insights is not only valuable, but can definitely prevent a headache.

The Insights page on Facebook allows a page administrator to look through data pertaining to their page. This is a valuable resource for an admin because it holds the current and past analytics of a page and allows them to utilize the data to increase fans and engagement.

Here are some general things to look at on the Insights page, and how they can be used to help your page:

• Users
• Interactions
• Demographics
• Activity

Let’s break these down a bit and see how each one can be used to increase your fan count.

Users

This is an invaluable category. The Users info will show the number of active users, daily, weekly, and monthly. Also, it will show their breakdown, how they’re viewing your page, what they’re liking, commenting on and posting on your wall. This is a great way to examine the user base and see how they react to posts, and use the info to create more engaging and interesting posts, giving incentive to interact to both current and potential fans.

Interactions

This shows page interactions, such as how many wall posts or comments the page receives each day. Using the Interactions function, one can narrow down the best times to post content based on when a page typically gets the most interaction from its fans (Page Activity). This is a direct insight as to what type of content is best along with the best time to post it and keep fans coming back for more.

Multi-hundred percent green numbers are always a good sign!

Demographics

Being able to see exactly the people that are viewing your page makes aiming content at them way easier. With demographics, you’re able to use the data to look at gender and age as well as where they’re from and what language they speak. This helps you as an admin because you get a better sense of what you can post as far as content to truly engage your page users.

Activity

Activity shows you what type of activity you get on your page from your users, By activity, we mean posts, likes, comments, unsubscribes, and other forms of feedback that lets you keep up on your posts and how many impressions they get. More impressions equals more fans!

On that note, impressions are definitely the way to keep not only your current users interested, but gain new fans as well.

Did you know that posting an update on your Facebook Page doesn’t guarantee that the post will always appear in your fan’s news feed? There are different variables for this of course, but generally, the more interaction your post gets, the more impressions it will get you. For example, take a look at this post on one of the pages I admin:

With 46 likes and over 11 comments, that post got over 5,000 impressions, obviously that’s going to be high up on the news feed due to the algorithm Facebook uses to arrange news feed posts by amount of interaction.

There are some pretty good ways to ensure interaction on a post. First off, make sure the post has engaging content. Ask questions, opinions or advice from your fans, every comment and like helps. Also, post content that is naturally engaging, images and videos always seem to get a lot of likes and comments.

And there you have it, now you have a better idea of how to analyze your page and use that information to engage more fans, growing your numbers, and getting more people following your business!