Yesterday Facebook began sending page stat emails to administrators of pages. The emails will be sent weekly and include information on the number of fans who have joined that week, the number of wall posts, comments and likes as well as the total number of visits to the page. All figures are compared to that of the stats from the previous week.

This is a handy new feature offered by Facebook as it automatically creates a record of stats for your page and sends them directly to your inbox.

The logical development to this feature would be to add a wider variety of stats and also the option to add or remove separate stats so that you only receive the stats your interested in.

The new automated emails are an extension of Facebook’s existing analytics system – Facebook Insights.

As with everything else Facebook adds, you’re automatically opted in so if you don’t want to receive these weekly updates you’ll have to opt out yourself. You can do this in one of two ways – by clicking on the link at the bottom of the email or by going into your Facebook privacy settings and un-checking the relevant box.

There’s also been an improvement to Facebook’s search engine. You can now see instant results from your homepage.  However, this is (rather disappointingly) the only improvement.

Facebook search still has a long way to go in terms of functionality, with no option to filter search results by anything other than ‘page type’.  Hopefully we’ll see some further improvements to both the search function of Facebook when the social media giant introduces location features next month.

Related post: Facebook Next in Line for Location Features