Social media is a powerful tool, which all businesses should be using if they want to prosper in the digital age. However, it’s all very well using platforms like Facebook, but without tracking what works and what doesn’t, how can you be sure that you’re using social in the best way possible? As Facebook is the largest social platform in the world, we take a look at how the network’s Insights tool will help you to maximise this channel.
What Is Facebook Insights?
Facebook Insights tracks user interactions on your own business Facebook page and allows you to view which type of content is performing well on your page. Access to Insights is given to all of the admins who are permitted to view and/or edit your profile.
Why is this information so valuable? Because it allows you to establish:
- The posts that have received the most likes, shares and comments
- The exposure and reach of all your updates
- The percentage of males and females who follow your page
- The city and country your fans are located in
- The most popular times/days to post content
All of this information can be used to work out what type of content you should be sharing from your Facebook page and when’s best to share it.
Accessing Facebook Insights
When you log into your Facebook account, you’ll find the ‘Insights’ button at the top of the page next to ‘Notifications’ and ‘Publishing Tools’, as shown highlighted below.
Click on the Insights option to take you to an overview of your data. By default, the range of information displayed usually spans the last week.
This time frame can be extended by clicking on some of the individual tabs at the top of the page, such as, ‘Likes’, ‘Reach’, ‘Visits’ and ‘Videos’.
So now you know how to access the data, let’s get stuck into what Insights can offer.
The Best Time To Share Content
Navigating to ‘Posts’ will allow you to work out the amount of active users online on a given day and also the amount of users online at a specific time.
In the example below, we can see that the most popular day in the week was Sunday, with 8pm being the most popular time across the whole week.
What the data tells you: Understanding when the largest proportion of your users are online, as well as which day and time they’re most active will allow you to target your posts to the widest audience possible.
You should monitor this on a regular basis so that your social media posting plan and strategy can be adapted to meet any changes you spot.
The Type of Content to Share
The ‘Post Types’ button under ‘Posts’ (as displayed below) will also give you some decent insights into the type of content to share in order to maximise exposure and engagement.
Once you click through to this section, the following information will display:
Here you can see which form of content has the widest average reach; in this case, the running order from top to bottom is shared videos, photos and links.
This doesn’t mean to say that links should be neglected. It depends what you are trying to use social media for. As an example, you might want to draw attention to a particular news story on an external site and build relationships with specific sites, so in this case links would be worth investing your time in.
However, if you want the widest number of people to see and engage with your content via likes, clicks, comments and shares, shared video content would be the best approach in the example above. If you’re after post clicks, the same content type would also apply based on the data we can see.
What the data tells you: Viewing this information allows you to use social media to meet the goals of your campaigns – so if you want comments in the future for example, you’ll know which content type is best for this.
Demographic of Your Users
Finally, to work out the percentage split of male and female users who like your profile, the most popular age categories and where your followers are from, click on ‘People’ and ‘Your Fans’.
This section in Facebook Insights will also show you the countries and cities your users are from and the languages they speak.
This provides you with in-depth and interesting information that can be used to target a particular audience based on gender, age, city and more.
The data you view is easy to analyse and will be displayed like so:
Using this data as an example, you could determine that in order to gain the most interaction you should share content with females aged 35-54 who are based in London and speak English.
Alternatively, if you wanted to increase male followers, you could create social updates aimed at those aged 35-44, again who are based in London, as this is the majority male audience.
What the data tells you: Having access to these insights allows you to work out which demographic, or segment of a particular demographic, you need to target in order to maximise your Facebook activity.
Final Thoughts
Start using Insights on your own Facebook Business profiles and you’ll soon discover how accessing this knowledge will make your social strategy more targeted and successful than it’s ever been before.
If you need more advice on creating a social media campaign or you’d like a professional Digital Marketing Agency to manage your social accounts, speak to Koozai today.
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