Tracking Facebook Interactions

What kind of status updates get the most comments on your Facebook page? What links get the most clicks? Do your fans like quizzes and questions or music recommendations and videos. What kind of language or humor do they respond to? Do they like your first album or your second album better?

Monitoring your successes and failures in your Facebook interactions is the key to learning, tweaking and making major improvements. 

Insights is Facebook’s main tracking tool, where you can view or export stats about your interactions, likes, usage, and the success of your posts. You can break it down by week or month. Insights also lets you see the demographics of the people who view and engage with your Facebook Page, such as gender, age, countries, cities, and languages.

To use Insights, go to your Facebook Page’s main profile page and click “View Insights.”

From there, use the left-hand tabs to select:

1) Page Overview– A bird’s-eye view of general trending stats such as-

* User activity by day, week, and month

* New likes and lifetime likes (with percentage gains or losses over the previous period)

2) Users- Detailed user information by day, week, and month, including-

* unique page views

* Post views

* Post likes

* Wall posts

* Post comments

* Demographics (gender, age, geographic location, city, language)

* Media consumption and activity

3) Interactions- An overview of your Page activity including likes, comments, and unsubscribes

Some ways to use Insights in your music promotion

1. Use geographic location and city demographics to determine where you’ll have more success in terms of touring, physical CD distribution, street-team investment, and media coverage.

2. Check your media consumption and activity stats to see what kinds of content are most popular amongst your fans. Do you get more comments when you post pictures? Do you get the most views when you post videos? More fan engagement likely means more sharing, so focus on generating the content that performs the best.

3. Cross reference the types of posts on certain dates that coincide with the spikes in new subscriber or unsubscribe stats. What are you doing on those days that makes the people say “Hellz yeah!” or “Oh, hell no!”

4. Stay motivated by checking Insights once a week or so. There is usually an obvious correlation between your Page activity and your Page engagement. That makes sense, right? The less you post, the less content you’re giving your fans to interact with. So if you’re looking at a graph that shows your interactions steadily declining over the last month, maybe that’ll be a good kick in then pants to double your Facebook efforts. If you see that same graph on an incline, you’ll feel that warm, fuzzy glow you get from a job well done.

Lastly, when you spend some time digging through all the statistics that Insights and Bit.ly have to offer, you will be able to strike a good balance between posting too little and posting too often. You don’t want to annoy your fans with a constant stream of content flowing down their News Feed, but you don’t want them to forget about you either. Looking at the analytics will help you find that point of equilibreum.

-Chris R. at CD Baby

Sell music on Facebook, iTunes, Amazon, CD Baby, Spotify, Rhapsody, and more!