Data is one of the best ways to determine if what you are doing is working. Luckily for marketers, Facebook provides a wealth of free data metrics in their Facebook Insights section. Looking at data is important but looking at the right data is even more important.
In this post we will look at a few ways to use Facebook Insights to find the most revealing metrics and expose how they can benefit your social media strategy.
Dive into the Posts Tab within Facebook Insights
Before accessing the Posts tab, we must first click the See Insights tab at the top of your admin panel.
This will take you to the Overview section. We want the tab called Posts a bit to the right of the Overview tab.
When Posts is selected, you will see the sub-tab Where Your Fans Are Online.
This data tells you two things:
- The days of week your fans are most active
- The times of day your fans are most active
In the above screen shot we see that on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays our Facebook fans are the most active and Monday is the day where they are the least active. We also see that over the course of one week our fans are most active at about 9 p.m. A quick look at this data reveals that the weekends are the best times to post and that we have the best chance of reaching our fans at night, around 9 p.m.
Breaking Down Days of the Week
The above screenshots revealed Insights from an entire week but it may also be worthwhile to gain information on the details of each day of the week. By scrolling over the days of the week you can get more specific information on the activity of your fans and may come across particular days and times that present your brand with significant opportunity. Some brands may have more activity on certain days of the week at certain times. We see in our graph below that this particular day is fairly consistent with what we saw in the overview for the entire week above.
Analyzing Post Types
Now that we know (and have made note of ) the days and times that present the most opportunity in terms of activity we can now look at another important metric – Post Types.
There are several different types of Posts including status updates, photos, links, offers and more. By taking a look at your Post Types metrics you will be able to determine the content that your fans tend to enjoy the most. In the above example you see that although the Average Reach of Status posts is the most, it takes a back seat to Photo type posts in terms of engagement.
Diving Deeper into Post Types
Facebook has again provided data on the overall reach and engagement of our posts and provided more in-depth data of each post specifically. This information is important because it allows us to sort each tab to see the impact they have had. Below you can see that by clicking on the Reach tab it sorts the posts with the most reach at the top. This allows us to see the posts with the most influence very clearly.
By sorting the individual tabs – by Reach or Engagement – you have the opportunity to see the types of posts your fans like most.
Final Thoughts
Marketers should always have a goal of determining what is working best for them and how to improve upon it. With Facebook Insights we can clearly see what days our posts are performing best, the times of day our fans are most active, and the types of posts that get the most reach or engagement. With this information we should be able to arm ourselves with the empirical knowledge of what our fans like to see the most and when we can deliver it to them.
For more information on using data to improve social media strategy contact Success Agency today.
