Simply Put: How to Really Use Facebook Page Insights

With Facebook Business Pages, unless you are running ads, you don’t get a ton of data to work with. However, Facebook is starting to deliver more analytics (called Insights) on status updates for Page owners. Here are some tips on how to use them:

Create an Editorial Calendar: Since I recommend that brands and businesses shouldn’t post Facebook updates more than once per day, it’s pretty easy to create a calendar.I usually plan updates 1-2 weeks in advance. That gives me something to post every day without having to create updates on the fly, but it’s a short enough time to be able to react to something in the news, great content I may find, or changes in the business.

Expand the Editorial Calendar into a spreadsheet. Your spreadsheet should contain these columns:

• Date
• Update (the content you will post)
• Post Time (i.e. 1:00pm)
• Impressions
• Likes
• Comments
• Total Feedback (what percentage of people who saw your post, actually engaged with it)

After about 24 hours, you will see analytics of each post such as Impressions, number of “Likes”, number of Comments, and total feedback. Then just plug those numbers into your spreadsheet.

Impressions: Of course, you are looking for the greatest number of impressions (meaning how many people see your update) and after a while you are going to see some patterns in what time each day you are reaching the most people. Compare weekends to weekdays and mornings to afternoons and evenings.

If some of your posts have links to your website or blog, you should add a column for those and get the data from your Google Analytics.

Make sure you take note what will affect your numbers, such as time of year, for example. If your goal is to reach teens, during the summer they’ll be on Facebook more during the day, whereas during the school year on weekdays, they’ll be on Facebook more at night. So, plan your posts accordingly. The analytics will tell you if you’ve guessed correctly.

“Likes” and Comments: Why is it important that your updates get lots of “Likes” and Comments? The obvious reason is: engagement with your brand or business. But there’s another really important reason! Stay tuned and I’ll explain in my next post!

Related: Why Businesses (Should) Love Facebook

Tags: Facebook, Facebook Pages, Social Media, Social Media Marketing

This entry was posted on Monday, August 16th, 2010 at 10:59 am and is filed under Facebook, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.