The Value of Facebook Real Time Insights
Much of the reason that marketers have an an interest in social media is the immediacy of the feedback that they get from consumers through this channel. Many forms of marketing involve a large investment of both time and money before the company will get solid feedback about whether what they are doing is working and having an impact on how people feel about the brand. In contrast, interactions over social media can bring immediate responses from real consumers that can guide further decisions before a campaign has gone too far off track.
While Facebook has long provided page owners with the opportunity to view valuable demographic information about who was visiting and connecting with their pages, for a long time they undermined the value of the data that they were providing by not updating it as quickly as they should have. Even people who were trying to watch what was happening with their pages very closely might not get a meaningful update for days at a time, which was a tremendous source of frustration.
What is the New Facebook Real Time Insights?
The company has finally taken action to correct this by implementing Facebook real time insights. Where social media marketers might have previously had to wait as much as four days to get access to information about how a post was performing in terms of engagement and addition, that same information may now be available in as little as 5 to 10 minutes. After making a post, it is now possible for a marketer to get almost immediate feedback on how much attention the post is attracting and how much people appear to be engaging with it. Based on this, they can take actions like deciding which posts to pin to their timeline as highlights while the content is still fresh and meaningful to their fans. On the other hand, something that does not appear to be getting the desired response can be changed.
The key to the value of Facebook real time insights is that it offers marketers the chance to access analytics at a time when the data is fresh enough to allow them to make decisions that are going to have an immediate impact on their relationship with the consumers that they are attempting to engage with. They have never before had the opportunity to tweak their posts within minutes of putting them up based on whether people appeared to be taking an interest in clicking on them or sharing them with their friends and family members.
For social media marketers who are willing to invest in fully taking advantage of the platform for creating connections with users, Facebook real time insights can be called a game changing addition without any exaggeration. Whether they want to know how many people have seen a post, how many people have shared it, who was sufficiently drawn in to click on it, or even who responded negatively (with actions like unliking a page or reporting a post as spam), marketers have never had access to this much feedback about the results of their efforts and been able to get at it so quickly.