Are You Using Facebook Insights?

Here’s a quick riddle for all the small businesses on Facebook: If you have 800 fans, how many of those fans will a post actually reach? If you said 800, you would be wrong. Thanks to Facebook’s new algorithm, the social networking giant has put an increased emphasis on paid promotional posts, therefore limiting the number of fans you can reach on a single unpaid post. The reality is, if you want to reach all of your fans and beyond, you are most likely going to have to pay. However, there are ways around this, and it starts and ends with viral content. But, how do you know which content will go viral? The answer, is in the past.

Measuring Reach, Likes and Post Clicks

Facebook Insights, is an invaluable tool at the disposal of all small business owners that can tell you how effective your past posts have been. As an example, I’ve included a small sample size of some of our recent posts.

It’s no coincidence that images perform better on Facebook when it comes to engagement. It shows a different side to your business and offers a more share-able type of content, which is why post reach is directly correlated with engagement. Simply put, when a fan of your page “likes” or “comments” on a post, all of their friends will see that activity and in turn, see your post. This reason, is why it is incredibly important to post content that has a chance to go viral if you want to avoid going down the paid reach route.

Facebook makes it incredibly easy to sort through the most liked, reached and clickable posts, so you can determine which types of posts work best for your fan base. Including hashtags can also give your posts a slight boost in reach, but so far the effectiveness of hashtags on Facebook have been inconclusive.

Measure Your Most Effective Posts by Type

Facebook also allows you to break down your posts by type, which include photos, videos, links and status updates. Using this breakdown, you can effectively analyze which posts get the most engagement on average, and plan your future posts on this data. Based on this data, we should focus more on photos, followed by statuses and finally, links. A simple 40-40-20 breakdown, would be an efficient way to break down our posts for the week based on the aforementioned popularity of posts.

As with anything, trial and error is paramount in finding out what your fan base will respond to. Once you accumulate a couple hundred fans, try posting a variety of content to see what gets the most engagement, post clicks, etc. After you have that information, all that’s left to do is to give your audience what they’ve told you they want. Just be sure to keep your eyes on the Insights page to see anything changes over time!