(Just a sidenote: this may be the last Facebook-related post we make for a while – explanation at the end)
If you have over 30 followers of your Facebook Page (for your organization,etc.), you can start following your Insights, which are the statistics of the Facebook Page.
And once you are there, you can export the data of those statistics, going back to July 19th of 2011 (don’t ask me why you can’t get earlier but I’m not sure it would be that valuable anyways since it may be comparing apples to oranges in what the traffic is telling you).
To export and download into a spreadsheet format, click on Export Data and follow the instructions. Set the beginning date to 7/19/11 if you want ALL the time that can be covered.
Data you can review for each date includes the following about your Page and your Page’s posts:
Daily People Talking About This
Weekly People Talking About This
28 Days People Talking About This
Total Likes
Daily New Likes
Daily Unlikes
Daily Friends of Fans
Daily Page Engaged Users
Weekly Page Engaged Users
28 Days Page Engaged Users
Daily Total Reach
Weekly Total Reach
28 Days Total Reach
Daily Total Impressions
Weekly Total Impressions
28 Days Total Impressions
and so on.
It’s a lot of data, and unfortunately it’s not provided in a particularly eye-friendly way, such as Google Analytics is. But it’s worth the review for trends for your Facebook Page, and considering the value assessment of your effort (or non-effort) there.
One of the things that we have noticed in the past year for OUR page is a reduction of activity by those who like us. We see this in engagement, we see this in impressions, we see this in reach. At the same time our number of Likes of the page have never been higher. So we have a conundrum – more potential audience but less activity. We have a gut feeling about this.
And that gut feeling is this: we’re all a bit Facebooked out. 21st Century Information Overload. And what we do is add to the overload, as we post a web-based tidbit every day. So we’re going to cut back from daily Facebook posting to something more like 2-3 times per week, and we’re going to watch our Facebook Insights statistics for a few months and find out if Less really is More. After a while we’ll report back here. But in the meantime, we’ll be blogging about web and Internet related items other than Facebook (and social media in general).