If you've been managing a Facebook "Fan Page" for your brand, you'll know about the insights and stats that Facebook give you. Although, you'd be forgiven if you haven't been able to find access to them for a while. Fan page administrators used to be able to click "view insights" from the edit fan page facility, but it has disappeared. If you're still looking for it, just login to your Facebook account that has administrator access and enter the url http://www.facebook.com/insights and "hey presto" you'll see how to access the stats.

What you will also see is the new way to view activity. Of course, if you are the type of person who is a little set in their ways you are able to view in the old format, but we'd recommend being somewhat adventurous and saying "what the heck" and taking a peek at the new format. All the good stuff is still in there and our opinion is, it is easier to make sense of various factors.

What is most excellent is as well as seeing the number of likes and "dislikes; the type of interactions; the type of media used and demographic information; there is a chart which shows the referring url to the fan page. The image below shows some real charts, with names removed to protect the innocent, which you can expand by clicking on.

Even cooler than this is now the ability to track the interaction with the Like button on your own domain. If you haven't already, you should seriously consider including the Like button on your own domains as there are a number of benefits. Facebook now gives you the ability to track activity....and so they should. Their previous Facebook Share button analytics were a little bit ropey and now we can see why, as they were focusing their efforts on the Like stuff.

First, on the insights page you have to enter your domain and then add the code provided to your domain html, in the same way you'd add Google Analytics code. Fairly easy, and very clever...in our opinion. Here's what it looks like:

The stats provided show the number of likes on a daily basis from your domain and the associated demographics. 

The data for all insights is downloadable in CSV format and hence can be correlated with your own website analytics against the same timeline. Very powerful indeed.

All we need now is for Twitter to offer the same for their new Tweet button, especially having stomped all over Tweetmeme's business!!