Social Insider is a Facebook analytics platform that addresses a need for Social Media Marketers, and in particular, Facebook Marketers to be able to understand what’s happening on their Facebook pages in greater depth.

If you are spending time and money on marketing a business with Facebook then you will know that it is perfectly possible to put in a lot of effort and get back absolutely nothing in terms of increased business – Social Insider will help to fix that.

Yes, you might increase your number of followers and that is always nice but how much of it actually translates into business at the end of the day?

Facebook Engagement report from SocialInsider.io

Social Insider will certainly tell you how many new likes your page(s) have received but it goes much further than that. In reports on levels of engagement that your site enjoys with thoese followers and it is an engaged audience that every business needs, on social media and elsewhere.

Just some of the KPIs and metrics reported by SocialInsider.io include:

Page Posts – how many posts are you making compared to your competitors? No matter how many you are doing, if your competitors are doing more then you may still come out second best, or worse! Social Insider tells you exactly what your competitors are up to on their Facebook page(s) so that you can work out a strategy to deal with it.

Gender analysis in comments & reactions – once you know what level of engagement, (people interacting with your pages) you and your competitors are getting, you can drill down and find out much more about them, including their gender.

When is the best time to interact with your Facebook fans? – the users activity grid clearly shows when most of the action takes place and when you should concentrate your own efforts to take advantage of this knowledge.

Social Insider “When People Comment” Grid

Data History – you get up to 6 months of historical data with Social Insider, good but more history would be better.

So far, so good. I like Social Insider but, I’m afraid, there is a but!

They want to charge you $59/month for this data but provide little by way of data export, except as a .pdf report, and there is a distinct lack of a report writer. Not so good.

The other point of course is that most Social Media Marketers will be active aross multiple platforms of which Facebook is just one – how many other packages will it be necessary to subscribe to in order to fully monitor a social media marketing campaign? By the time you’ve added all of that up you might just as well have subscribed to a platform like RivalIQ or Simply Measured, which will do them all.

On the plus side, they do provide a free account option which may meet the requirements of some very small businesses.

On balance – try it for free and, if most of your social media marketing activity is on Facebook then it may be all you’ll need. Don’t box yourself in though – Facebook is big but it isn’t right for every campaign.