The new dashboard will give us a much better insight into how our posts are performing and actually help us to justify which content is working depending on individual page objectives. For example we can now build a much bigger picture and see how many people are actually talking about our content, what types of things they might share with their friends, or just generally chat and get excited about.

Additionally we now have access to a lot more information about reach, making it really easy to see how many people have been exposed to our content. You can also take this one step further and break it down by post, which helps build a comprehensive view of what channels the content is consumed from (Paid, Organic or Viral).

Another welcomed improvement has been made to Like Sources and the removal of the ‘unknown’ category, which let’s face it was very frustrating! We can now build an accurate record of where our fans have come from including sources such as mobile (hurrah about time), third-party apps, Facebook recommendations and when a page has liked another page. Sensibly it now groups likes that have come from the Page, the News feed and Ticker as one.

The not so good bits:

The Questions function has been around since June and it’s a useful addition to the page, offering insight into fans behaviour and what they like/want to see. Annoyingly other than the number impressions we couldn’t gather any info off the back off them in the old Insights, meaning we had to manually work out the feedback rate. What’s even more annoying is that this still seems to be the case in new Insights, despite Facebook saying that you should be able to see who has “answered a question you’ve asked”. Maybe it’s just me (and it would be good to know if anyone has seen different), but I haven’t come across this anywhere in the new Insights section and it certainly doesn’t pull the Question poll into the page post info.

I have listed a couple of other annoyances below:

• The post insights figures are only available for the first 28 days after it has been published
• Data is only available for posts published after 19th July 2011
• The new dashboard only allows you to see a maximum of 35 days at a time. You can however download the raw data from 19th July onwards.

One final thing I will point out is that Facebook are still unsure if the historical data from the old insights will be pulled into the new version, but I’m assuming that this won’t be the case. If not they must surely provide us with some sort of archive, but I will downloading all the raw data just in case and I suggest you do the same.

The good bits in more detail:

If you want to find out more about the changes to Insights you can find a detailed reference guide from Facebook here.