How to Understand Facebook Insights (Step by step)

In 2016, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told BuzzFeed News that he expected a majority of the content on the platform would be video within five years. Today, video makes up about 11% of the content on Facebook, which is not the majority, unfortunately. But that hasn't stopped the social media giant from prioritizing video in a big way. That's because users engage with Facebook videos at nearly twice the rate of other content like photos, links and status updates, which makes video a key ingredient in your inbound marketing mix on Facebook. What's up? It's Jamal from HubSpot. I'm going to guide you through the key insights that Facebook provides about the performance of your videos, including one metric that is, for some reason, really hard to find at the end of this video. By understanding all these insights, you'll be able to evaluate the success or failure of your video content. More importantly, you'll be able to use these insights to improve future videos for marketing your business. If you find this content valuable, be sure to give it a like and subscribe to the HubSpot YouTube channel. Sounds good, all right. There are a few places you can find video insights on Facebook. Most marketers know to look at the video section of the usual Page Insights tool, but a better way to delve into your metrics can be found in the Facebook Creator Studio, which you can find by going to business.facebook.com creator studio. Once there, click on Insights in the left hand column and you'll see a list of four video Performance, Loyalty, Audience, and Retention. Each one of these categories offers a different view on how your video content is performing. By combining the info, you'll see the complete picture of your Facebook video campaigns. The first category, performance, tells you how many users watched your video and for how long. There's a graph showing several key metrics along with a list of your top video posts below. One thing you might notice is that you don't see the total number of views anywhere in your metrics, even though Facebook displays that number publicly on every video objectively. Strange, but I'm not here to defy the will of fathers Up. That's okay, though. All you have to know is that in the world of Facebook, watching, three seconds of a video equals a view, which is a nice number to know. But given Given that three seconds just means that a user stopped scrolling for a moment, it's not a great indication that someone actually watched your video. For example, I wouldn't say that I did my math homework just by looking at the textbook for three seconds, but that didn't stop me from trying. I'm sorry, Ms. Johnson. So you want to look at the one minute views, which no surprise is a lot smaller than three seconds. Funny enough, Facebook gives you an in between metric, the 15 second video view, but only if you click on a specific video post. What can you learn from these numbers? Well, the three second video view shows that your videos are catching people's attention in their feed, which is a Good start. The 15 second video view indicates that your content is interesting enough for the viewer to begin watching, and the 1 minute video views lets you know that people are really digging into your content enough to stop what they're doing and properly watch your video. Holding onto viewers from 3 seconds to 15 seconds to 1 minute is the goal of every Facebook video. To do this, you want a video that starts with an eye catching pedal card or captivating footage that gets the user to stop scrolling on their feed. Now that you've converted a scroller to a viewer, you have about 15 seconds to give them the key message of your video. That way, even if they stop watching, they've already taken away the most important information from your video. If you get past the first 15 seconds, use the rest of the first minute to build excitement for your viewer or offer secondary revelations that will keep satisfying the viewer's initial entrance. And don't feel bad that your viewers drop off drastically between 3 second, 15 second and 1 minute marks. It happens to me all the time, and not just with videos. Despite the drop off, Facebook says that it prioritizes videos that are three minutes or longer, but as the insights show, you want to make sure that first minute really hits. Next up is loyalty. The first metric you see on the loyalty page is net followers, which according to Facebook is the number of new followers minus the number of people who unfollowed. How is that directly connected to Facebook video? No one seems to know. Low Net Followers is Returning Viewers. Now that is a hot insight. Returning viewers tells you how many of your one minute viewers go on to become returning viewers. Of course, any video view is valuable, but having people that actually come back for more? That's big clap. The next category of Facebook video insights is audience. Audience tells you who is watching your video based on age, gender, and even interest, but it doesn't reveal this info about everyone who is watching your video. Facebook only gives you this information on people who engage with your video, either by liking, commenting or sharing, or by watching one minute or more. This means it can take time before you've accumulated enough audience audience info to access these insights. Once you have a good data set, Facebook will start telling you what interests your viewers have. It will start telling you what other Facebook pages they follow and even what popular videos they're watching on the platform. Imagine being able to plan future video content based on what other videos your viewers are enjoying. That's some precog level stuff. Smart brands can also leverage this data when running ads on Facebook, reinforcing the importance of sharing analytics between teams. The final set of video insights is called retention. Retention starts by telling you where your video traffic is coming from. Recommendations means that the viewer doesn't follow your page but found your video on Facebook. Watch as an autoplay after another video or via search results after that. Is Followers who are the folks who follow your page and most likely saw your video in their newsfeed? Last is shares, meaning people saw your video because one of their Facebook friends shared it. There's also a category for paid views which will appear if you boosted any of your video posts. Well, that is your average minutes viewed, which inevitably will seem low because so many 3 second views pull down the curve. Much like me in my calculus class. Ms. Johnson, why didn't you just give me a good grade? To illustrate that fact, here's a graph that shows the painful fall off between 3 second, 15 second and 1 minute views. You're probably asking yourself why Facebook bothers with the three second view at all. Research has shown it takes two tenths of a second to make an impression online, and Online features take 2.6 seconds to process. So not only can your brand make a valuable impression under three seconds, it's enough time for the user's brain to act on that impression. In this case, maybe watch more of your video. So far we've talked about Facebook insights in terms of overall performance of your videos, but sometimes you might want to check the metrics of a single video. At the bottom of each insight page, you'll see a list of your video posts so you can compare how each one performs. You can also click on the individual video to get specific metrics for each one. Most metrics for individual posts don't tell you much. A video metric is only useful when in the context of other videos. But one individual metric that's super useful is the audience retention chart that tells you simply where your viewers dropped off. Watch the portion of the video when people left Is someone talking for too long? Did someone start playing some weird music and they started dancing? You know what I'm saying? Stop that, all right? That's why they're leaving be better now the part we've all been waiting for the Secret Metric Start by clicking Content Library in the left hand column of the Creator Studio. You'll see a list of all your posts. Go to Post Type and select Video. Then look over at the fourth column called the Distribution. Hover over the source and a window pops up showing you where various metrics increased or decreased compared to the rest of your content. It even tells you which metric is having the biggest impact on your score and therefore how well your content is being distributed by the Facebook algorithm. Pretty neat. Combined with all the other data Facebook makes available, you can really start to understand how your video content is performing to achieve your goals and start to intuit like some kind of God what sort of video content you should be making in the future. And hey, you know what? I'm looking forward to seeing what you come up with. Good luck. Should get back out there with dancing on Instagram. I should do that again. It's been a while.