Recently LinkedIn launched some long awaited analytics for their groups.  So it's interesting that this week saw Facebook roll out an upgrade to their own Page insights service.  The new version is available on the left hand side of the page for admins of that Page, with the old version set to be phased out by the middle of December.  I've been playing around with the new Insights this week and thought I'd share my thoughts thus far.

So what does the new insights package mean for you and your Page?

A number of new metrics were added to Page Insights.  For instance:

• Reach – This provides you with the potential reach of your Page if all of your followers shared your updates.  In other words it multiplies your total number of followers by the number of friends each of them has.  This is interesting in a nice to know kinda way, but not all that practically useful.
• People talking about this – This metric is much more useful and provides the total number of unique people (that is unique in the past week) that have interacted with the page.  Obviously the higher this figure the more engaged your followers are.  This metric was available before the main Insights upgrade and is a great addition to your toolkit.  For most big brands that I've seen this figure is between 0.5 and 2%.  For CMI we're currently at 4%, so that's not too bad.  The Guardian however currently stands at 8% so something to aim for.
• Weekly total reach – This is the total number of people that have seen content.  This is calculated by adding all the people ("friends") each shared post has reached.
• A breakdown of each wall post – Another nice feature is to see a breakdown of each wall post you've made.  How many people did it reach?  How many interacted with it?  How viral was it?  You can tell very easily and quickly which posts users liked the most.  Very handy indeed because as previous research has shown, sooo many big brands stink the place out on Facebook, with their fans not at all engaged.  This new feature should really drive home the positive deviants in your content that people do like and show you the need to do more of that.
• Greater demographic information – Sure you could see the demographic breakdown of your fans previously, but now you can see the demographic of their friends as well, ie your entire total reach.  That is nice, but even nicer is the demographic breakdown of people that have engaged with your Page.  This is fantastic stuff as you can see the kind of people that like what you do, and with the previous metric the kind of posts they like.  Very, very powerful indeed!

All of these new features offer marketers and Page owners great new insight into who is really digging what you do, and what it is about your page that they're digging. 

Oh, and don't forget to make use of the export function to use this data to wow your boss.