IMMedia Editor Rashida Arsiwala shares some useful data insights for organic content on Facebook and LinkedIn.
I’m sharing some insights below that are gained from organic posts on Facebook and LinkedIn. While these will of course vary by client, the idea is to showcase how we can experiment with the available options to try and maximise our engagement on social channels.
1. Posting time
Under FB (Business Manager) page, there’s a tab called “Insights”.
When you click in, you can get data for the past 7-28 days. If you click in to “Posts” it’ll show you what times your audiences are online.
You can correlate days with highest visitor numbers to the timing that the majority of them are online by hovering your mouse over the day of the week. The corresponding timing graph will be highlighted and you can pinpoint at which time you had the most number of visitors online.
For one of my clients, it was 9pm most weekdays. So I started scheduling my posts for that time. Here are the results (hint: everything green is good!)
2. Character length
My client’s website doesn’t pull up the preview without the link, so I need to keep the link in each post (as opposed to others where we can remove it and FB pulls up the preview anyway). To make up for this, I started creating longer posts (3-5 sentences), with typically a question or invitation to comment / give suggestions at the end. This seems to have improved engagement rates as well. So this means it’s not necessary to have short posts only (as most online sources would have us believe). It really depends on your audience and when they are seeing the content (at 9pm at night, they are likely to be at leisure and can go through posts that pop up on their timeline in detail, as opposed to their mid-morning coffee break at work or even early morning commute when they might want to do a lot of browsing in a limited amount of time).
3. Negative and positive feedback/actions
Also under “Posts”, you can filter the results of all your posts by the following:
Just as you can gauge which articles were useful in getting more interactions (likes, shares, comments), you can filter by “Post hides, hides of all posts, reports of spam, unlikes…” to gauge what kinds of posts are losing you visitors and fans.
The same insights can also be gleaned from the “Followers” and “Likes” section. When you click in, you’ll see a chart like this:
When you hover on any of the data points, it’ll tell you on which dates you gained (blue) or lost (red) followers in the case of “Followers” (or your page was unliked in the case of “Likes”)
Once you’ve seen this, you can go back and see what posts / other updates went up on your page on that day. As a standalone reference point it may not give you any insights, but after you’ve managed to collect this data over a period of days/times, you may begin to see patterns which can then be addressed.
1. Positive feedback/actions
On LinkedIn as well, you can gauge positive reactions by going into the “Analytics” tab on the company Admin view. Click on the dropdown in “Analytics” and click on “Followers”.
Within this section, you’ll see a “New Followers” graph. When you hover on the data points, you can see when you got new followers. You can then go back and see what was posted on the day you got the new page followers and try to emulate that in future.
These are just some ways of tracking effectiveness; there are many others. The idea is to get this process of applying your knowledge of your consumer’s behaviour to what the data shows, and draw correlations.
Hope this helps some.