As marketers and business owners, we know it can be a huge struggle to get results from your Facebook marketing efforts. It seems like every week Facebook is changing features and tweaking their algorithms. Thus making it harder for us to reach the fans of our pages. Thankfully, Facebook offers a robust set of tools, called Insights. Insights allow us to measure what it working, and what isn't working. We are going to show you how to use Facebook Insights to get a greater return on your digital marketing efforts.
To see your Facebook page Insights, login and click "Insights" at the top of your Page:
Once you are in your page Insights, you should see a general overview of your page. You should see the number of Page Views, Page Likes, Reach, and other metrics for the last 7 days. If you look on the left sidebar, you'll see several other options to really dive deep into your metrics. For the case of this article, we are going to focus on the "Posts" tab.The Posts tab gives you an overview of what days and times your fans are generally online. As you can see by the image below, our fans are online seven days a week and are most active between 8:00 am and 9:00 pm. The actionable steps here would be to use this information to ensure that we are sharing our content during these times. The data that we have gathered from our Insights is on par with the general best time to post to social media.
If you scroll down a bit on the Posts tab, you'll see all of your published posts. This is were the true data is found. Here you can sort your posts by the Published date/time, the Type, Reach, Engagement, etc. Depending on your marketing goals, you would sort by different metrics. For us, often times we are trying to raise brand awareness, so we like to sort by Reach. It's important to note, that if you're boosting your posts your metrics may be skewed a bit.
From here, you can then determine if there is a certain type of post that is constantly getting more return over other types of posts. You can also look at each post individually, and see if you can determine certain content types that are getting more reach. For example, we have found that when we make our posts more community focused, we get a greater reach. This makes sense, because part of our strategy is to be more involved in the local community, thus raising brand awareness.Also, we are incorporating more video into our social media strategy. Our Facebook Insights shows that our videos also have a much higher reach and user engagement. We are not surprised by this as research shows that a video on Facebook gets twice as much reach and up to seven times more engagement. Just look at the below image for actual numbers. By using our page Insights, we are able to confirm that research and thus will be incorporating more video.
With any strategy you need to evaluate whether it's working or not. You can easily use Insights for that evaluation. But you must continue to expand beyond just what your analytics are telling you. Use the data to test new strategies. Perhaps you need to try to incorporate more videos into your marketing mix? Or, try sharing those videos at off peak times? Use the data you gather from your Facebook Insights as a foundation of your marketing. But don't paint yourself in a corner by only posting one type of content at the same time everyday.If you have any questions on how to use Facebook Insights, please feel free to leave a comment below. You can also contact us directly with any questions you may have. We love all things social media and love helping others.
