From the Perspective of a Facebook page Administrator

It's time to explore the other side of Facebook, the side of Facebook that gives feedback to page administrators. For this activity, I have been given admin access to look at  the various options admins are given on two different Facebook pages. 

• Administrators have the ability to see how many people  their posts have reached.
  
  
  This post for example has reached 24 people

• Administrators have the ability to improve how many people see their posts. Administrator can "boost" posts by paying a small fee to Facebook.
  
  

    This post was boosted and reached 4,066 people.

• In another example, you will find that  hovering over the orange bar on Facebook, shows that the organic reach was 0 people, and that the paid reach was 10,199 people.  Clicking the number of people reached brings up more post details

The NPOEx post above was boosted. It should be clear at this point, that just because you posted something on your Facebook page, it doesn't mean that everyone ( or even anyone) is going to see your Facebook post. Does that mean you should be spending money to boost Facebook posts?  My answer would be maybe. It depends what kind of outcomes you want.

If you want more people to see your page, spending money to put the link in their feed will surely do that. What you can't control is whether they choose to interact with the content put into their feed or just casually scroll past it. Engagement is harder to come by, particularly if your post is not interesting to a person.  The NPOEx post above reached 9,948 people, but it only accumulated one like, 1 share, and 15 total clicks.

For the NPOex admin, using Facebook to reach people interested in the page was not all that sustainable, particularly if advertising was required. For this reason, an e-mail list was created to send people updates. For this method, the admin is able to make sure an e-mail ends up in a person's inbox.

Administrators can do more than just quantify how many people see a post. Facebook is somewhat magical because it is always collecting data on users and their interactions within the larger website. Administrators can quantify when your "fans," or people who like your page are usually online. This may be  useful in deciding what time a post should be made.  There's much more detail than just how many "fans" are being reached and and at what time of the day.

•  Administrators have the ability to quantify location, age, gender, and various other demographics. By clicking on "People" under the Insights tab, a male to female demographic analysis can be found.

Each bar is broken down into an age range. 44%  of the fans of this page are between 18-24 years old with 24% being female and 20% of the fans being males.





Administrators can also see the country and city fans are from. Most of the fans (as you can see in the picture above) are from Egypt. More specifically, 775 fans are from Cairo, Egypt. In addition to location, Facebook breaks down what language fans speak. 1,114 of people who like the Freedom songs page, speak English.

Facebook pages are valuable because they allow for an in depth demographic analysis as well as a better understanding of how many people a page is reaching. Data is collected on  people visiting a page, seeing a post by a page, and liking a page. This is helpful because a company does not have to survey their customers personally, but instead use the data Facebook pulls on people that like their company's page.