Facebook Insights have long been a source of frustration for developers and marketers alike.
Often days would go by that Facebook Insights would not update. Complaints were heard, websites were built, all in frustration with an unreliable Insights platform.
Josh Constine (of TechCrunch) released the scoop regarding the improvement of the reliability of Insights along with “real-time” analytics.
Today, it appears that “real-time” Insights are coming through to Page Owners.
Approximately 15 minutes after we announced the data appears to becoming live on our Facebook Page, we saw the following:
Facebook’s previous Insights updated relatively consistently after 48 hours had passed.
This improvement in recency will allow analytical providers such as EdgeRank Checker the ability to provide incredible new abilities to help marketers gauge what is happening now, instead of reflecting on the results 48 hours later.
It currently appears that other areas within Insights may not be expanded at this time (e.g. Likes Breakdown, Reach Breakdown, Talking About This Breakdown).
However, the value to marketers (at least short term) is much more impactful understanding Post Performance in a near real-time analysis.
The data will not pour into the API in actual real-time. The data will be delayed to about 5-10 minutes, which is still a vast improvement to the previous 48 hours.
The coming weeks will be interesting as Facebook Analytics Providers attempt to capitalized on these new changes. Regardless of the innovation in the coming weeks, this new change will deliver consistency to a previously inconsistent platform.