Measuring Facebook: Some Users Have Real-Time Insights Now

Facebook brand page managers, along with their agencies and analytics firms can expect full availability of real-time Facebook Insights very soon.

“We hope to be fully rolled out by the end of the next two weeks or so,” said David Baser, product manager at Facebook. “We want to be sure it’s very reliable,” he said.

Baser also said Facebook is working on a system that will allow marketers to link engagement metrics with individual Facebook ad campaigns.

Some users are already seeing the real-time data. The much anticipated real-time metrics for measuring post interactions such as comments and likes are available to a very small percentage of users – “in the low single digits,” said Baser.

The company announced its plans to enable real-time tracking at its fMC event for marketers in February in New York.

According to Baser, real-time People Talking About This data, as well as the number of likes and check-ins will be provided on a page level every 5 to 10 minutes; all post level metrics will be available in real time. That’s a momentous leap considering Insights data availability has lagged as much as a week in recent months. For instance, the most recent data available today to users without real-time data access is from March 19.

Brand page watchers will be notified on their Insights pages when they have real-time data enabled. Baser said Facebook expects the more immediate data to help marketers determine the best times of day to post to their pages.

“There’s much more to it than just data coming faster,” he said. The meaning of the metrics changes because the data are “much more actionable than they used to be.”

The company believes real-time data will allow brands to maximize the value of a post that’s generating good engagement rates, for instance, by pinning it to a prominent position on their timelines. According to Facebook, tax software firm TurboTax has seen good performance from pinned posts recently. A TurboTax post linking to updated tax information garnered 257 percent more likes than the average post and 100 percent more comments than the average, according to Facebook.

According to Facebook, “Pinned posts are Page posts that admins have chosen to display prominently at the top of their Page.”