Facebook Insights is one of the most effective tools that an artist can use to track how their fan base is interacting with their Facebook Page.
Artists can gather data and use it accordingly. The information collected from your Facebook Page can help you create better content, understand when your fan base is most active and provide your team with a view point of how your Facebook Marketing Strategy is working out.
Facebook Insights is essentially an analytics tool that helps measure data points such demographics, reach, engagement and Likes. These Facebook Insights will help you to understand how your fan base interacts and consumes your content.
No matter it be music videos, streaming, merchandise or polls. Having a strategy in place will help you establish a greater understanding of how Facebook Insights can help you achieve your goals.
Anything that can be measured can be improved.
Now lets deep dive into 10 facts that make Facebook Insights a great tool for every artists to use.
Facts About Facebook
- The Undisputed Champion of Social Media — Facebook is the leading social media platform. Reaching 60.6% of Internet users. (Facebook, 2018)
- Facebook has 2.45 billion monthly active users, 1.62 billion active users visited the social network on a daily basis. (Facebook, 2019)
- Facebook has more than 80 million small businesses around the World using Facebook pages. (Facebook, 2018)
- Seven out of ten, 69% of adults in the U.S. claim that they use Facebook. (Pew Research Center, 2019)
- 65% of Facebook users are under the age of 35. (Statistica, 2019)
- 96% of active Facebook users accessed the platform via mobile devices. (DataReportal, 2019) That means that only 4% of Facebook active users logged in on desktop devices to use the social media platform.
- Users spent an average of 58.5 minutes on Facebook each day. (Recode, 2018)
- 86% of U.S. marketers use Facebook for advertising. (Emarketer, 2018)
- 78% of American consumers have discovered retail products to buy via Facebook (Kleiner Perkins, 2018)
- Facebook is the most popular channel for businesses to share video content at 81%.
The social media giant is showing no signs of slowing down. Although other platforms like Twitter and Instagram have their uses. Facebook has cornered the market with Facebook Pages, Groups and its Events features.
As Facebook continues to add to their growing social media and advertising empire. Tools like Facebook Insights will only create more value for artists and musicians who are looking to tour, promote releases and engage with fans.
Artists need to take full advantage of the growth that is being presented with Facebook Insights. No matter if you’re independent or a major act. There will always be room to expand on Facebook.
Check out my article below that I wrote on the $5 Facebook Strategy and how artists can add to their fan bases by executing these simple tactics.
Related: How To Build A Fan Base In 3 Months — The $5 A Day Facebook Music Marketing Strategy
Your Facebook page allows you to have a centralized hub on the platform, while also participating in Facebook groups which can be utilized for networking and aligning with like-minded individuals.
Devin McKnight, a guitarist who has performed with Grass is Green, Speedy Ortiz, and produces his own music as MANEKA says,
“I don’t really want to be on Facebook at all, but I feel like I have to because of my band. I don’t know how much it helps, but I do know the event invites kind of have that market cornered. No other platform really offers that.”
From the outside, people view Facebook as a place for family, friends and keeping up with co-workers. For artists, Facebook and it’s many features can give you access to data and allow you to reach every city, town or college in the World.
That is why the social media platform has created this love ~ hate relationship. The value that artists can create is undeniable and unmatched.
Ivy Gray-Klein of corey flood, a band based out of Philadelphia says,
“I might make a post on my personal account about needing a show in a certain city and make it public,” she says. “Then friends of mine will tag their friends who may have resources or connections in those cities. It may sound kind of trivial, but having that more personal connection really helps, like recognizing you have a lot of mutual Facebook friends with that person… Especially within DIY, leveraging that community can be helpful. I don’t have a professional booking agent who has established relationships with venues.”
The Facebook events feature — in my eyes — presents the most value. No matter what city you go to, Facebook can offer up an audience that will ensure a Return On Investment for every ad dollar spent.
Morgan Schaffner, the marketing manager for AdHoc says,
“People’s decision to attend a show is often based on social reasons, and Facebook does truly make it very easy to see which of your friends are ‘attending’ a show… I think it’d be very challenging to as easily find such a large target audience.”
Facebook may have a 50–50 split on its branding with artists and musicians but the value the social media platform creates continues to provide a premium brand affinity.
7 Steps To Help You Ace Facebook Insights
Facebook Insights is a great way to figure out how your Facebook Page is performing. It can help you track the number of fans that are engaging with your page on a day-by-day basis.
The tool also helps you determine which type of content is most popular with your fan base. As well as, the best day of the week to post (new music) and what time will be most beneficial for driving engagement.
You can download Facebook Analytics on mobile so you can stay up to date with your current data-points or Facebook ad campaigns. Facebook Insights is also updated on a regular basis to reflect any developments and to present any patterns that may help you better understand your fan base.
Below I have listed a step-by-step guide for artists that are new to Facebook Insights:
1. How To Open Facebook Insights
Go to your Facebook Page, click on the gear wheel and select ‘View Insights’
A graph like the one below will show up.
The Facebook Insights dashboard will display your total number of likes (gaining or losing), the total number of friends of fans that are available to your page and the your weekly total reach. Which is the total number of people talking about your page in real time.
2. Likes
Included in ‘Likes’ are your fan’s demographics: location and age group. In the case below, you can see that the page has a high female fan base compared to a male fan base.
The location, coupled with gender allows the Page moderators to customize their content appropriately.
Under your ‘Likes’ dashboard you’ll see another graph like this one:
The dashboard allows you to search unlikes and new likes. Displayed in the above graph, you can see that the Facebook page had some unlikes.
You can use this information to go back and see what posts were distributed on that specific day. It may help you to take a look at some previous posts on that day to determine what can be improved.
You and your team will want to gather information and ask the right questions if the issues continue to arise on your Facebook Page.
Don’t get disappointed or lead astray from your ultimate goal. Because you will for sure lose fans along the journey to building your brand. The secret is to continuously take the data that you are presented with and use it to improve your Facebook Page’s performance.
Takeaway: Acquiring information about your fan’s demographics allows you to create personas of your target audience. This is essential when it comes to creating long-term marketing messages, Facebook copy and landing pages for your website.
3. Talking About This
Displayed below is a great example of how Facebook advertisements — when implemented correctly — can effectively help grow a brand.
The graph shows that before March 14th the Facebook page did not receive any notable interaction, after deploying Facebook ads the page spiked to 537 people ‘talking about this’.
The ‘Talking About This’ branch of Facebook Insights can produce a plethora of beneficial data about the users that are talking about your page — this includes demographics, as well as the percentages of people in different age groups.
Takeaway: The significance of this data is to perceive how your content progresses over time. For artists, you may notice that it may take a duration of time for your content to resonate and reach a number of users.
This can be beneficial when creating schemes and promoting other marketing objectives.
4. Reach
Reach is essential when it comes to building a brand on Facebook. Once you have built your Facebook Page. It’s time to focus on your content reaching the right people. Two of the most important questions concerning reach are:
Who is talking about your Facebook page?
Are any of your fans recommending your page to others or sharing your content with their friends?
This branch of Facebook Insights allows you to see unique visitors and page views (users who searched for your page vs. clicking on a Facebook advertisement).
These graphs will also display your reach in terms of viral, paid and organic searches.
Takeaway: The crucial aspects surrounding the ‘Reach’ branch of Facebook Insights is the access to see what avenues (viral, paid and organic searches) are more efficient. History has shown us that if you’re building a brand, you’ll want to focus more attention on increasing the viral segment of your content.
5. Check-Ins
For artists this branch of Facebook Insights can be relevant when it comes to events and performances. As friends of those fans will see activity in their newsfeed.
It presents a sense of loyalty. Included in the check-in section you’ll be able to view the number of people who have checked in, where they’re located, and if they are male or female, etc.
Takeaway: Check-in data is immensely valuable for artists, music professionals and venues that are involved in the touring aspect of an overall operation.
It allows all parties involved to have the ability to measure the social media impact on ticket sales, to monitoring your busiest tour stops — given the value created here, you’ll definitely want to drive this data.
6. Virality of Posts
At the bottom of your Facebook Insights dashboard, your latest posts will be displayed. This is where you will see which notable posts and gain a better understanding of virality.
Posts are organized by the following types:
- All Post Types
- Posts
- Photos
- Links
- Videos
- Platform Posts
- Questions
This is beneficial if you want to know how a certain post is performing (videos, photos, links, etc.) This allows you to sort by category instead searching through all your recent content.
Your latest posts will be listed by the date, the title, reach, engagement and how many of your followers engaged with a specific post. The virality of the post will be displayed in a percentage format.
This will give you a clear idea of what you’re working with and what content you will need to give more attention.
Takeaway: Virality directly aids in branding, having this information allows you to create more content that is tailored to your audience with hopes of increasing traffic, reach and engagement.
7. How To Get More Detailed Data
If you’re interested, you can export your data. Just click on the top right button on your Facebook Insights page. This block section will pop up:
The overall function of Facebook Insights provides you with an overflow of beneficial information about your Facebook page. The trick is to take the data and create something purposeful with it.
The remaining crucial aspect of Facebook Insights is tracking your page performance and developing patterns for your benefit.
Checkout this video from HubSpot for a deep dive into Facebook Insights and how to improve your content marketing strategy.
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