Tees In A Pod: An Insight into Facebook Fanpage Insights

Friday, May 14, 2010

An Insight into Facebook Fanpage Insights

There are between 400 million to 500 million people on facebook but out of those continental size figures you really only need to concern yourself with your hopefully growing fanpage fans (or "likers"). Facebook has gone out of their way to make it easy for you to get useful information on your fanpage fans and this post will give an insight into facebook fanpage insights.

Fanpage admins can access their fanpage insights by pressing the "See all" link in the insights section in the left hand panel. Amanda has created a very useful video below which gives useful information and explains all the graphs and statistics available in the insights - everyone likes videos so enjoy it.

I will now try and explain how the insights can be used to improve your fanpage. One of the key ratings for a fanpage is the Post Quality Rating. This rating is expressed mathematically in the following:

In words this can be represented as the No. of Interactions divided by the No. of Posts Made all divided by the No of Fans in the fanpage then divided by Other Fanpages of similar sizes. This last division is used to create a comparison to other fanpages.

I have formalised Post Quality Rating in the above in the hope that those who read this will share their ratings so that we (fanpage admins) can get a fuller and more precise understanding of the Post Quality Rating.I believe the above equation may hold true and from it the following theories can be derived:

1) to get a better post score don't post updates too frequently. The more updates you post the more interactions required. For example one update which gets 12 interactions is better than 2 updates that get say 15 and 7 interactions respectively. Too many updates may result in "fan fatigue" which causes lower interactions and some fans may leave.
2) as your fanpage fanbase increases the number of interactions you receive should increase relative to your fanpage growth. Mass fanpage expansion with non targeted fans who may never interact with the fanpage will lower post quality rating. When it comes to fans for post quality rating an interacting fan is better than a mass of uninterested fans.
3) keep an eye on other fanpages with similar amount of fans. If possible find fanpages of similar stature and gauge how you are doing compared to them. If they are getting more interactions than you then try to up interaction count as ultimately you are in competition with them.

I believe the Star Rating gives an estimate of how your fanpage post quality score stacks up against other fanpages. It is a 5 star rating and one could make the assumption that:
***** = Top 20 percentile for fanpage post quality score
**** = 60 to 80 percentile for fanpage post quality score
*** = 40 to 60 percentile for fanpage post quality score
** = 20 to 40 percentile for fanpage post quality score
* = Bottom 20 percentile for fanpage post quality score

The benefit of having a 5 star rating and high post quality score is that your updates persist longer in fans news streams.

The reason for this is that facebook wants to give their users the "top news" and they use the star rating and post quality rating as a metric to determine what is "top news". With a 5 star rating your content will be exposed to more people for longer which may result in more interactions which can become a self perpetuating cycle. It is important to note that "top news" items also include status updates which receive a lot of interactions even if the fanpage has a low post quality and star rating.

Understanding what influences the post quality and star rating is key to fully utilising insights. In the video below Amanda details all of the different statistics which are available but it is the post quality and star rating which give the snapshot of fanpage health. I hope this post coupled with the video has provided and insight into fanpage insights. If you have any tips for insights that you would like to share we would love to hear them.

I would also urge you to share some of your ratings either privately or publicly so that I can conduct further analysis on these key factors which affect fanpages. If interested please leave a comment or e-mail teesinapod[AT]gmail.com and give details regarding: fanpage size, star rating, post quality score & no. of interactions. There is no need to give fanpage name if you don't want to. With some more ratings it should be possible to fully understand post quality rating and star rating system.