Using Facebook Insights to Your Advantage

Use Facebook Insights to see what your audience thinks about your posts.

Until a couple of years ago, Google Analytics was a search engine optimization professional’s best — if not only — friend. Microsoft later introduced its own set of Webmaster Tools, and Facebook followed with Page Insights. Of all the traffic analysis and metric tools available to legal practitioners, Facebook Insights is one of the most elucidating since it offers a glimpse about people’s reactions to certain social media activities.

The metrics provided by Facebook Insights can be as useful for law firms and solo attorneys as mock jury trial evaluations. In essence, Facebook Insights measures engagement among followers, meaning page owners can get substantial information about the real impact of their presence and actions on the social network.

More than just analytics

Let’s say a car accident lawyer in Brooklyn decides that it’s time to inject a light-hearted mood into his or her law firm’s Facebook Business Timeline. After checking the social media policy guidelines of the New York State Bar Association and updating the firm’s status with something like “Happy Friday!” and a fun picture, the lawyers can access Insights from the sidebar, right under the Info and Friend Activity tabs. This will launch the page overview screen.

The overview screen presents four statistics: Total Likes, Friends of Fans, People Talking About This, and Weekly Total Reach. These figures will have green upward or red downward arrows next to them; these arrows indicate the general trend of engagement. If red arrows are pointing down within a week of the traffic accident joke, it means it fell flat as a pancake.

Drilling into the data

Facebook Insights also offers the option to export data to a spreadsheet application like MS Excel for further analysis. By exporting Facebook Insights data into a spreadsheet, a law firm can check how many times a shared item or status update was seen by followers and outsiders. Another useful metric is virality, which refers to how far an item was shared outside of the immediate social circle of the law firm. With these metrics, the law firm mentioned above can decide if they should continue posting the occasional nice message to their fans or stick with professional posts.

Social Media Mondays is a CaseDetails.com series covering different topics in the social media world on a weekly basis. Check back every Monday for more news on social media and useful information on how law firms can use social platforms to their advantage.