This morning as I was making the rounds to all of the Facebook pages I manage, I noticed a new tab under the profile picture of each. Facebook finally rolled out the new insights tab that I had been hearing so much about. Here are some of the highlights and my thoughts using Netplus’ Facebook page as an example.

The main insights dashboard has a few new numbers -

Friends of Fans - The number of unique people who are friends with people who like your page.

People Talking About This – This is a number that popped up on pages several weeks ago, but it is finally explained on the insights page. It represents the number of times a story has been created about the page in the past week. A story is created when someone interacts with the page, whether it be commenting on the wall or liking a photo.

Weekly Total Reach – The number of unique people who have seen content from your page in the past week.

On the bottom half of the main dashboard there is detailed information about every page post. It includes the reach, number of engaged users and the number of people talking about each. There is also a new number, Virality. The Virality percent is calculated by dividing the number of people who have seen the post by the number of people who created a story about the post (commented, shared or liked it).

Under the main dashboard tab, there are sub-tabs.  The ‘Likes’ tab, has the same information that the ‘Users’ tab had in Facebook’s old insights. The second sub-tab has some new information about the page’s reach.

Rather than showing the demographics of the people who merely like the page, this shows demographic information about the people who have seen the pages content. This is very valuable for clients and also gives us as marketers insight into who we should be targeting.

The bottom half of the reach tab also has some very useful statistics. The chart on the left shows where people found content from the page, whether it be organically on their news feed, from a friend or through Facebook advertising. The chart on the right shows how many times each unique user saw the content on your page.

On the third sub-tab, People Talking About, there is information about the people who are interacting with your page. Again, this is very valuable for future targeting and learning about the engaged fans.

The chart on the top half of the page shows demographic information for those creating stories about your page.

On the bottom half of the page there is a chart showing the number of people talking about the page on the left and the viral reach on the right.

Because Netplus is a place, there is a fourth sub-tab that doesn’t appear on product pages. It shows the demographics of the people who have checked in and what they used to do so, a mobile device or the Facebook website.

Something else that is new and great for gathering quick insights about wall posts are the numbers that appear at the bottom of the content 24 hours after it’s been posted. You can quickly see how many people the post reached and how many people are talking about it.

Overall, Facebook’s new insights are valuable and an improvement over the old ones. They include numbers, statistics and demographic information that clients have been asking for. This will also help us better understand our audiences and who is interacting with the brand.