Using Facebook Insights - How effective are your facebook posts?

This is our second video on Facebook insights. In our first video, we covered an overview of what Facebook insights are and how to navigate them. You can see the post here.

In this article we are going to cover Using Facebook Insights – How effective are your Facebook posts? I’m about to dive in and show you about posts and what you can learn from the analytics and the stats that you get from Facebook insights about the posts that you’re posting.

Using Facebook Insights – How effective are your Facebook posts?

If you want to follow along, you can head over to your page in a new tab in your browser and watch what we do.

Now over on the left-hand side, I’m going to zip all the way down to posts. I’m not going to go through too much of these other items on the menu here because it’s really one of those things you can play around with, you’ll understand it pretty quickly. But I do want to show you a couple of things inside posts. So here we are in our posts section.

Now at the top here, it tells you that it’s a one-week period and these insights are for your local time zone, generally.

So depending on where you’re at, you’ll see the time zone in your own area. Now, this gray graph you see below, I like to call it the whale graph, it gives you an indication of WHEN your followers or your fans are online, and most of the pages that we deal with look like this shape.

So you can see on if 1 above, that there’s a dip overnight, in the middle of the night, and then as we ramp up throughout the day it gets busier. Usually, the busiest time for most Facebook pages is somewhere between the seven o’clock and the nine o’clock p.m time slot, at the head of the whale I like to call it.

Because people have finished work, they’re coming back from their day, they’re doing what they’re doing, they’re kicking back on the couch, they’re watching TV, they’re reading their Facebook feeds.

What time of day is best to post on Facebook?

Now, why is this info important? Well, if you notice that you’re posting at a time when it’s not real busy, let’s say you get up early in the morning at five or six o’clock in the morning and you’re posting stuff it may not be getting into people’s newsfeeds or getting seen by anybody because most of the people are not awake yet or are simply not logging into Facebook at that time of day. Whereas the activity for most pages is around that seven to nine o’clock, so maybe you want to schedule your posts out for that particular time of the day.

You can see in figure 2 above which days are the most popular. So if you hover over each one of these, you can see that there’s a little bit of a difference like 1,861 on a Thursday versus 1,840 on a Saturday. Not a real big difference in this case so I really wouldn’t worry about it, but I get the question all the time, what day is best to post? What time of the day is best to post? This little graphic will answer those 2 questions for you.

Which Facebook posts worked best for me?

So now if I scroll down a little lower, and we touched on this in our first article, but what I do want to show you is this section gives you a whole lot of posts that have been published.

What it’s showing you is the type of post that works. Now, this may be a good little insight for you to be looking at. In the 3rd column, under the heading of type, it gives you a little icon. These icons represent either a photo, a link, a video, and sometimes other options like a poll, etc. By looking at these different types, you can see if this is a photo, how was my reach? How was my engagement?

If I scroll down a little further, I can see a post that was a video, and you can see that video icon in there Fig 1. Now, this one here is a video from December 23rd and you can notice that the actual engagement was a little higher than the other image posts.

If I scroll down further, there’s another video and there is some more engagement there. And as I scroll down, looking, further along, I can see that each of these videos is a bit more engaging than the actual image posts. So, if you’re looking for engagement, then maybe video posts could be the way to go.

The other type of post here that we can see is a link post, which usually doesn’t get you a lot of traffic. I’m not a big fan of link posts, but you can see on your own page metrics which one’s working for you. If you notice that videos are working for you, go and do some more videos, I would highly suggest you do that.

What are Facebook Post Types?

The one thing that I do want to also show is at the top here, is another sub-menu item called Post types.

This gives you a quick overview of which posts, which types, get the actual best reaction. The Videos type post has an average engagement of 26 post clicks (the blue bar), you can see the purple bar is for reactions or comments.

Photos are the next best successful metric for this business, followed by links and then status updates.

Watching your Competitors Facebook Analytics

The final tab along the top of this page is the “Top posts from pages you watch”.

If you go to the top posts from pages you watch tab, once again, this is your competitors again, and we’re looking at the best posts for all of the competitors that you have listed. It is important to note that you need to manually add these to your watch list.

So in this case here, General Air had three of the top five posts that had the most engagement, and then A1 Service Heros had two engagements, and Comfort Air had three engagements.

This page is good for giving you a little indication just to see what’s going on in your competitive area. So you can see what you need to do in order to get on top of those competitors.

I want to talk about video stats next because we’ve noticed that video is working well. Let’s have a look at the video stats in the next post and show you what to look for in that section as well.

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Using Facebook Insights – How effective are your facebook posts?