Facebook has made some recent changes to the information they report on each of your posts. While the release of these stats has led to some controversy about whether Facebook has started only showing fans your posts if you pay (they haven’t), the new statistics are by and large a boon to Facebook fan page admins.

The most notable feature is a note at the bottom of each post telling you how many people viewed this post. Need proof that Facebook is not only showing your status to fans if you pay? This page that has 370 fans had this post seen by more than 900 people according to Facebook Insights.

That’s far from the most interesting thing about these statistics though. You can also take it one step further by hovering your mouse over the text on each post that says “xxx people saw this post.” When you do, the following box should appear:

This breaks down for you the number of people who saw your post in their News Feed, ticker or on your fan page wall (organic) and those who saw it because one of their friends liked, commented on or shared the post (viral). The ability to see these statistics can really highlight the compound affect that viral sharing can have.

You can also find some additional statistics on a post by post basis. To do this, you need to be signed in as the page admin. From there, click on the See All link above your Facebook insights graph in the admin panel.

From there, you can see how a variety of statistics including:

• Reach– the number of people who had your post show up in their feed
  • Note: If you want to see how many of those people were reached through viral, organic or paid means, simply click on the number in the table above for any post.
• Engaged Users – the number of people who clicked on your post
• Talking About This – the number of people who created a story based on your post by liking, commenting on, or sharing your post or responding to your event
• Virality – the virality shows the number of people talking about your post out of the number of people reached (Talking About This/Reach)

These Facebook Insights numbers are calculated over the first 28 days a after a post has gone live on Facebook. These can help you better understand what type of material is popular with your audience as well as get an even better feel for what and when to post.

Do you use Facebook Insights more now that they’ve rolled out these updates? Have you learned anything about your audience with them?