Facebook Timeline Reveals new Insights for Businesses

The push for all pages to have the new Facebook Timeline on April 1st brought a surprising change in the information Facebook shared about pages to all Facebook users. The new Facebook Timeline allows for all Facebook users to see any page’s basic Facebook insights. Facebook insights available to users are for the last month, and include a graph showing daily likes, the most popular week, the most popular location, the most popular age group, the number of photos tagged with the business’ location,  the most visited week, and the largest group that checked in to the business.

This information was previously only shared with owners of a page, but is an exciting development. Allowing all Facebook users to see a page’s insights on the new Facebook timeline doesn’t do much for the average Facebook user, but  it does for marketers and business owners. It means that businesses can keep an eye on competitors and their progress on Facebook. It gives marketers general demo data about a business, and the graph of likes is extremely useful. A spike in a graph likely means the brand was utilizing a campaign that drove to Facebook, and an even pace means they’re likely not doing anything to promote the page.

I’ve yet to find a tool that keeps track of this data, but this would be a great opportunity for businesses, as it only keeps data for the last month. If anyone knows of a tool, please let me know as I’d be very interested in learning more.

So go on and check out some of your competitors. What are they seeing compared to your results? Do you need to increase your marketing? How does your demo look compared to theirs? Very useful!

-Bryan Nagy