Are you measuring your activity on Facebook? Do you know how?

Facebook fan pages include a built in tool called Insights to help you visually see what is happening on your page. Insights provides metrics on “likes”, “Friends of Fans”, “People Talking About This”, and “Weekly Total Reach”.

Next to each of the metrics is an indicator showing an increase or decrease in the activity from the previous week for each of the metrics.

In breaking this down:

  • Total Likes are the numbers of unique people who like your page.
  • Friends of Fans are all of the unique people who were friends with people who like your page.
  • People talking about this are the number of people who created a story about your page (creating a story means someone likes your page, writes a post on your wall, answers a question about your post, responds to an event, mentions your page, tags your page in a photo, checks-in, or recommends your page). Basically any Facebook call to action you can imagine.
  • Weekly Total Reach is the number of unique people who have seen any content associated with your page.

The chart directly beneath depicts the people talking about this and weekly total reach numbers in correlation to the number of posts for the day. The number of posts is represented by various size circles so you can see with no posts, there is typically little interaction, the more posts you have on any given day, the more interaction you typically see.

Breaking down the activity even further shows the reach, number of engaged users, people talking about this, and virality (percentage of people who created a story from your page post out of the number of unique people who’ve seen it).

The “likes” option shows you see a graph that breaks down information about people who like your page, including the demographics and location, the gender and age, what countries and cities they came from, what their language settings are, and where your likes originated from:

The “Reach” option shows information about people you have reached during the time segment. Again showing demographics and location:

The “Talking About This” option shows information about people who are taking action on the posts from your page.

The “Check-ins” are statistics about individuals who have checked in at your location.

It is important to monitor these stats from time to time. When you are putting together your pitch-lists or campaigns, this information can be very instrumental in helping you determine who you are talking to and what sorts of messages are people more apt to take some sort of action on.