Article first published as Real Time for Real Insights on Technorati.

Are Facebook Insights going to real time? That is what the rumors are saying. Often times when Facebook has huge glitches on their site, it means they are doing updates. The bigger the glitch, the bigger the update. At least that is what we have come to expect.

For the past month, insights has been struggling to report accurate data. Many pages, and by many I mean nearly all, were experiencing huge holes in their data. Not only was the data more than a week behind, but when you would get the report most of the information would not be reporting. This massive hole in their data reporting system has taken a tole on businesses trying to run analytic on their social media strategy. However, does this glitch a portend for something coming? Maybe so.

Currently Insights, when running properly, reports information about your Facebook page with a 2 day delay. Honestly, 2 days is not that big of a delay. Most of us can get a strong picture of what the trends on our page are with a 2 day delay. Plus, likes, shares and comments are shown in real time. You just have to look at your page, and through your posts to see them, instead of going to insights or downloading their CSV file obscene amount of data.

One of the benefits of insights, besides the snapshot of activity on your account, is that you get to see your growth patterns. You can see how much activity you have had in the past week compared to previous weeks. You can see how much exposure a post is getting on the news feed and see your actual reach. Glimpsing your live time fans, like, comments and shares, gives you a very limited understanding of what is truly happening on your page.

Live time reporting would be very useful for seeing the real time exposure of your posts. This would be a very useful tool for marketers running time sensitive post campaigns.

Most page owners will not see a huge benefit from live time Insights. But this is not to say that we don’t still want it!