In this blog series, our resident girl geek Mel, will be delving into the ‘exciting’ world of data and analytics. You may think this isn’t relevant to your business or ‘yawn’ as many people do, but a few minutes now and then can make a huge difference and it doesn’t need to be drawn out or boring.
How do I get to them?
Facebook’s analytics can be found in the Insights tab on your Facebook page. You can largely ignore most of this information so don’t be overwhelmed.
Increases in follower numbers are great, but it’s about how many of those followers engage with your content. Five minutes of your time, once or twice a month can tell you what kind of posts your audience enjoy and when best to post them.
Once within insights, scroll down to find what we really need. You’re looking for the section that shows your five most recent posts.
Hit See All Posts at the bottom of that section to, well, see all posts. With me so far?
What does it all mean?
As you can see, we’ve reached a list of all your recent posts. From here you’re looking for:
Type – All of these have images and so should yours to ensure maximum impact.
Promote – Here you can see which posts have been boosted (paid for) and hit Boost Post to promote the best ones to be more effective. This doesn’t have to cost the earth either. See more about advertising here.
Reach and Engagement – These are the ones you should be most interested in.
Here we can see that the post about Brownies (CAKE!) on Friday 8th June had the highest reach. However, the one about the upcoming Race for Life on the same day had the highest engagement. Interesting eh? (Go on, at least pretend to be interested!)
To explain further. Reach = the number of people who scrolled over your post. And Engagement = the number of people who clicked the link, commented, reacted to it or shared it with their friends.
So where do we go from here?
Once you know which posts get the most reach and engagement, you can easily note the type of post and make more like it.
You should also look at and make note of the day of the week (sadly missing from Facebook itself, but only a calendar click away) and time that your successful posts went on. It’s not rocket science that continuing to post around this time is likely to yield similar results.
The only way you can be sure is to try. But do keep checking your analytics. Social media can be a fickle beast and what works brilliantly one week may flop the next. Seasonal shifts, holidays and other factors can all play their part.
Did you use a hashtag?
Did you tag someone’s profile or another page?
What works and what doesn’t work?
Constantly asking yourself these questions can only make your posts more powerful. Good luck and don’t forget we’re here to offer help if it is all still Greek to you! (Have you spotted Mel’s surname?)