Web analytics tools are a great way to evaluate the performance of a website and the effectiveness of the various online marketing activities that go into making it more visible and popular. This includes marketing activities undertaken on search engines as well as social media. And while gauging the performance with respect to search is a relatively hassle-free task, the same does not hold true when it comes to assessing social media analytics.  This is largely because many of the existing tools for measuring social media analytics are limited in their scope of measurement. While they determine factors like number of likes, share, comments and re-tweets, a more in-depth analysis has never really been made available.   

But recently, social networking monolith Facebook has stepped up the ante by ringing in significant improvements in its analytics tool ‘Facebook Insights’ with an aim of providing a comprehensive look into a pages’ reach and other important metrics to support better Facebook marketing efforts. The most significant upgrade is that from now on web marketers will be able to gauge their ‘overall reach’ on Facebook. This can be seen through the newly introduced features like ‘Friends of Fans’ (a metric which outlines the number of prospective people you can reach out to if each of your fans were to share your content), ‘People Talking About This’ (a metric which determines the number of unique people who have shared your content over the week’s time) and ‘Weekly Total Reach’ (a metric which identifies the number of people who have seen the content your fans have shared on their respective pages over the week).

Another upgrade in Facebook’s social media analytics is the introduction of ‘Post Frequency’ graph which reflects the correlation between the frequency of posts and how it influences fans (with respect to ‘People Talking About This and Weekly Total Reach) in a line graph format. Similarly, a tabulated representation has been made available which accounts the level of engagement of posts. It displays every post that has been made on your page along with its reach, number of engaged users, number of people talking about this and its virility.

Such insights are definitely welcomed by marketers to understand better the reach and impact of their social engagement activities. The purpose of any web analytics is to estimate better steps for future efforts and this upgrade in Facebook Insights is one step closer to better measurement of social media activities.