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With over 300 million users worldwide, Facebook is by far the King of Social Media. Facebook’s popularity and reach makes it a prime outlet for businesses to promote themselves. As we all know, they can do this by creating a Facebook Fan Page – and as of November 2009, there were 1.3 million active Fan Pages on Facebook. So in assuming that you are keeping up with the times and already have a Fan Page for your business, do you know if it is doing any good? How many fans do you have? Do they interact with you? How old are they? Where are they from? What language do they speak? This is where Insights are extremely helpful.

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This free service basically allows the administrator to analyze the performance of their Fan Page through post quality, fan exposure, demographics and behavior. To begin with, Insights allows you to analyze your fans. Ideally you would like to gain, and retain fans over time. You can do this by posting relevant, meaningful content on your Page. Insights provides administrators with a complete, comprehensive breakdown of their fans including how many new and removed fans you have, their age, gender, city, country and language. This will help you understand your target market. By knowing who your fans are, you will have a  greater ability to post content that is relevant and meaningful to them which will help you gain interactions over time. Below is a sample of what a typical Insights page will look like.

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That’s not all. Insights also shows you the number of interactions you have had with your fans in the last week – and which type of interaction it was. Interactions can be comments, likes, or wall posts. If you have very few interactions, your post quality score will be low. If this is the case, little alarm bells should be going off in your head – you are not engaging your audience! But why are interactions important?

Interactions on engaging posts will spread your posted content virally throughout Facebook as the post is more likely to appear on their friends’ News Feeds – and if you have hundreds, or even thousands of fans, your company name, along with this interesting post, will be viewed by more people. And who knows, maybe those people will become a fan and interact with you. As you can see, you get out of it what you put into it – if you spend the time to post quality information and content, you will see the benefits. Post frequently, but beware – do not bombard your audience with “spammy” content. People are a fan of you because they like your brand – don’t change their mind by annoying them.

Furthermore, Insights allows you to see the demographics of these interacting fans. Of the fans that have interacted with you in the past week, you can see how old they were, if they were male or female, what country they are from and what language they speak. This is useful because Facebook has a new feature that allows administrators to customize a post by selecting a country, province, state, city as well as a language in which you would like this post to appear. For example, you can post certain items in French to fans in Paris, France. Or others in Mandarin to fans in Beijing, China. Either way, this customization allows administrators to target specific fans.

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Finally, Insights has also made it easy for you read. All of these statistics are conveniently provided on graphs, for those of us are are more visual learners. And you even have the ability to export all of this data as an Excel File or in Comma-Separated format.

Have you been using Insights to optimize your Facebook Fan Page?