Facebook Insights and How To Pull Them Offsite

Earlier this week I attended the Community Managers Meetup here in NYC, which I highly recommend checking out if you live or work in the greater NYC metro area. The topic of this month’s meetup was “Facebook in Focus: Best Practices and Insights” which is something we here at fbadz.com now a thing or two about.

At the meetup Vadim Lavrusik, Community Manager at Mashable, went over the information available through Facebook insights and some things to consider when analyzing the data. In addition to sharing the presentation (above), I also wanted to review a few ways to record and export the data. It’s important to have your data stored somewhere besides Facebook so that you can easily share it with others without having to give them admin access to the page. Not to mention, if Facebook is having a particularly glitchy day you’ll always have the information on hand.

Here are a few different ways you can pull your data off Facebook:

1. Export

The export button is located in the top right-hand corner of the “Page Overview” section of the Insights. When you click on the “Export” button you’ll see a prompt box allowing you to choose to export an XLS or CSV file and set the time frame for the information you want to download. What you’ll get is a comprehensive spreadsheet with all the data points presented in the Insight graphs. The spreadsheet isn’t the easiest to interpret, but it is a great way to keep a backup of all the Insights data from your page.

2. Print

While this certainly isn’t the greenest way to keep your data, Facebook does give you the option of printing each graph individually. Remember that the default view gives you the past month’s data so if you’re looking for a broader range then make sure to adjust the dates before you go to print. Then simply hover over the top right-hand corner of the graph and three icons will appear. The middle one will allow you to print out the graph.

3. Save Image

Gone are the days of having to screen-cap and cropping the Insights. Facebook allows you to simply save each graph as an image (PNG file), which you can easily add to your reports. Again, just hover your mouse on the upper right-hand corner of the graph and click on the right most icon. Remember to adjust the dates accordingly. If you’re planning on resizing the image, be sure it remains large enough to see the numbers on left, otherwise you’re left with some squigley lines that have no context.

4. Manually Record

Facebook provides a lot of data points that are important to analyze so that you can grow your users and interactions. However, when providing reports to “the powers that be” there are probably only a couple of numbers that they really care about. Especially if you’re pulling data from several social networks, all that information can be overwhelming and it’s certainly not all relevant. If you’re providing weekly or monthly reports then you can simply plug these numbers into a spreadsheet that has the relevant data for you (or your client) with information from all the platforms that you use. Remember Facebook usually takes 48 hours to publish daily stats.

How do you prefer to backup your Insights data?

Post written by Biana Bakman aka @bianalog. To learn more from fbadz.com, become a fan!

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