Facebook has just confirmed my scoop from last week, announcing its business performance metrics tool Page Insights will start reporting data with a latency of 5-10 minutes, not two or more days. It will open new tactics for marketers such as amplifying a well-performing post’s reach with ads, or deleting one receiving negative feedback before it can trigger Unlikes or a PR crisis.
Insights Product Manager David Baser tells me real-time Insights will roll out globally over the next two weeks, and I think the way it ties to Sponsored Stories ads could boost Facebook’s revenues. Impressions, clicks, negative feedback instantly. Data wizards rejoice!
Baser explained to me that the old Insights product was:
“pretty slow for optimizing based on real-time feedback from your audience. You’d make post, then a few days later the data’s available, you download it, performs analysis in Excel, look at charts, come up with a theory about how the post did, share that data with the people running social strategy, then maybe for their next post 4-5 days [after the original post], heres something we can do next week.”
Frankly, Insights kind of sucked. Users were viewing posts, clicking on links, watching videos, and marking posts as spam seconds after a post was published. However, you couldn’t measure, amplify, or mute a post until it was largely too late.
