How to Grow Your Fan Page with the New Facebook Insights

Insights into Facebook’s Insights

Do you know that Facebook recently made some big changes to their Insights area? Or maybe you didn’t even realize that your fan page had a section where you could monitor your analytics.

With all these changes came all the articles to give you a breakdown of what the new Facebook Insights mean. There are new numbers, new areas for new stats and yeah, when you logged into that feature, it looks all cool and shiny.

With all these new features Facebook is measuring, what area should you look at to help you grow your Facebook presence?

First things first … to access this treasure full of information, go to the admin panel of your fan page. Look for the middle section that says Insights and click on that button.

Click around for a few minutes to get a feel for where all the good stuff is located. There’s quite a bit of information so if you ever get confused about what each feature is, just hover your mouse over the area and a description will pop up.

Focus Your Time

As small business owners, our time online is limited. No one wants to sit and analyze all these numbers every day and try to figure out what they mean. Take a look at my suggestions about how best to use your time when you’re looking at your Insights.

First, do a full review of all the tabs and get the complete picture of how your fan page is doing. Make some notes, copy some of the pages, whatever you need you to give you a baseline of where you are at this point in time.

Next, I want you to schedule in 30 minutes every week and focus in on these three areas.

1. All Posts

Click on the Posts tab on the top area of the overview. You should see a screen that looks like this:

Take a look at the messages you recently posted on your fan page, especially the ones with the highest REACH and ENGAGEMENT numbers. Those are the posts that have reached the most number of your fans when they were on Facebook.

These posts have the highest numbers because the content connected with your fans and caused them to take an action by liking it, sharing or posting a comment.

Be sure to note the specific days of the week that received the highest reach as well the time of day it was posted. There’s a lot of information about certain days and times that will give you the most engagement but I firmly believe that everyone’s fan page is different.

We all have a different set of people who make up our fans and to say that a generic formula works for everyone doesn’t take into account what YOUR fans do when they’re online.

You may find that most of your fans are on Facebook Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 8pm. If you see a trend in the All Posts section of your Insights, use this as your guideline. Follow your own posting times based on the information your fans have given you when they show up to your fan page.

2. When Your Fans are Online

This section is located in the Pages tab. Instead of clicking on All Posts, click on the When Your Fans are Online link next to it. Your screen should look like this:

These numbers are going to show the days of the week and the times of day most of your fans are on Facebook every day. The number actually shows you the average number of fans who saw your posts during a specific hourly time period.

To get more details of each weekday, just mouse over each day on the top row of boxes. You can also mouse over the times graph to see the average number who were online at that specific time of day.

Now compare those numbers to your top posts from the All Posts section. Do you see any cross-over days and times between when most of your fans are online and when they engaged with your top posts?

3. Types of Content

There’s a section called Best Post Types in the Posts area but I want you to take this a step further. We can all appreciate knowing that your photo posts are doing better than just a status update with text.

But what you really want to figure out is what was the content message in these top posts. What was the topic of the post that ranked so high? Was it something funny or a behind the scenes look at your new product? Did you ask your fans for their opinion about something?

Create a Tracking System

Think about how you can start tracking your Facebook posts. You can set up a spread sheet, a table in a word document or just write it out on a piece of paper. Use whatever is most comfortable for you as you’ll need to pull this information together every week. It needs to be easy or if you’re like me, you’ll find every excuse not to do it.

Log into your Facebook fan page every week and make note of the following information:

• What were your top 5 posts for the week?
• What time of day were they posted?
• What day of the week were they posted?
• What was the topic or message of these posts?
• Did you add a video, photo or ask a question?

You’ll need at least a month of tracking before you start to see a pattern emerge. I actually recommend you monitor everything for 3 months to give you a solid base of your fans Facebook activities.

Now, here’s the fun part: Take this information and use it to figure out what day to post, what time to schedule your posts AND what topics you should focus on that will connect the most with your fans.

Just one more thing … don’t lock yourself into this schedule and list of topics. As your Facebook presence grows, your LIKES will increase adding new online behaviors from new fans. Don’t forget to make adjustments accordingly as you see changes in your Insights.

Monitor > Track > Rinse > Repeat

Are tips like these helpful to figure out your social media marketing? My new Strategy Builder workbook is an easy to follow marketing strategy workbook that will give you more marketing secrets to create successful social media campaigns. Click here to enter your email and get notified when we launch the Strategy Builder workbook.

Photo credit: The Thinker