We know how important social plugins are now (specifically the Facebook social plugins such as the 'Likes' and 'Comments'). Their usage is constantly increasing with over 2.5m web sites now using them since early 2010, and with 600m consumers in Facebook, it represents a huge source for creating awareness about your brand and traffic to your site. This week Facebook just made visualising, monitoring and managing that a whole lot easier with an upgrade to Insights for Facebook - see this post from the developer blog for an explanation of the analytics and how to set it up. We've done this and it's relatively easy - just adding a Facebook specific meta tag to the header of your home page.
Insights (Facebook's analytics tool) isn't new, it's just been a little limited until now, this update lifts the lid so you can really see what's working in content terms and make better use of the plugins that you may or may not have dotted around your web site. Going forwards, you can demonstrate the attributable value of those plugins to your web site.
The usage of Facebook social plugins (i.e 'Likes') are demonstrations of engagement and interest at the content and brand level, yet ultimately you want that engagement to manifest itself in a steady stream of traffic to your web site from Facebook, right? We'd suggest that's the most obvious way to see what Facebook interactions actually does for you at the commercial level, so understanding how that traffic is created is paramount to optimising it.
The short answer is that Insights offers anonymous analytics on how people interact with your content and to help you optimise both your website and your content, in real-time. Here's an example:
Facebook Insights for Likes
So what insights can you gain:
One thing to note for existing Insights users: The Facebook Developers Blog comments that "Many of the metrics included in this version of Insights are new, so historical data is not available. We will continue to provide access to the old Insights for the next two months, but we encourage you to export your data for future reference". So if you want access the old - export it quickly!
We certainly expect that the updated Insights will see more marketers start trying social plugins for their brands. What do you think?
By Danyl Bosomworth
Dan helped to co-found Smart Insights in 2010 and acted as Marketing Director until leaving in November 2014 to focus on his other role as Managing Director of First 10 Digital. His experience spans brand development and digital marketing, with roles both agency and client side for nearly 20 years. Creative, passionate and focussed, his goal is on commercial success whilst increasing brand equity through effective integration and remembering that marketing is about real people. Dan's interests and recent experience span digital strategy, social media, and eCRM. You can learn more about Dan's background here Linked In.
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