Analyzing your Facebook Insights
In a previous blog post I discussed the benefits of merging your personal Facebook page with your business Facebook page making it easy to manage just one account. An awesome but sometimes overlooked feature of Facebook business pages is the ability to view how fans and visitors are interacting with your page.
Insights are Facebook statistics displaying things such as; how many people your post reached; how much and what type of engagement your posts have had; and what time of the day your followers are typically online.
The Posts tab in Insights gives you three different areas to select from: When Your Fans are Online, Post Types and Pages You Watch.
When Your Fans are Online
Analyzing this data can help specify the best time of the day for you to post, or schedule a post. First, you’ll see a set of boxes representing the days during a one week period, these boxes represent the number of users and time period in which users saw your posts that day. Highlighting over the boxes changes the timeline below, displaying the times during that day your fans were online.
Still under the Posts tab, is the All Posts Published table displaying; the date and time your post was published, the published post, the type of post, and post reach and engagement.
A quick study of my own data shows one post reaching 50 per cent more users and a significant increase in clicks and likes, comments or shares, than received by other posts during the same timeframe. What differentiated this post from the others? A photo was contained in the post, whereas the majority of the other posts that week were links to external websites.
Post Types
To dig deeper into the different types of posts that have an impact on your fans, visit the Post Types section. Here, you’ll see a summary of all your posts engagements; Video, Photo, Status and Link, showing the average reach and average engagement of each. Determining what type of posts receive the most reach and engagement will help you shape and strengthen your social media strategy.
Pages to Watch
One of my favourite features in Facebook insights is Pages to Watch. Located under the overview tab, this section allows you to keep an eye on other pages of interest, and see how they’re performing on Facebook.
Of particular note in my own “pages to watch” section is a business with over 2,000 likes, (a decent amount for a small organization), with this many connections you’d expect their engagement rate to be far higher than similar businesses with over 600 likes. Surprisingly, the page with the most likes has very little weekly engagement. My own page, at just over 300 likes and other pages with less likes all receive more weekly engagement, and that’s what being social is all about! It’s not a tally of who has more likes, the important factor is who has the most engagement. Viewing these statistics will show you where you rank amongst other Facebook pages of a similar nature.
There’s a lot more to Facebook insights than discussed in this column, but as you can tell from the above analysis, simply checking your Facebook insights each week will help you determine how to change your Facebook strategy to further your social reach.
