Image via CrunchBase
UPDATE: October 2011
Seems that with the new Facebook Insights that you can now export all the data that you need to make the below work again without using Export.ly. Plus there are some new metrics too, individual users who have seen each post as well as reach.
Good times!
UPDATE:
Export.ly seem to have been taken over by Simply Measured and don’t seem to offer the same, very cost effective, solution as what we did below. Hoping to find out more, but as you can imagine, I’m very keen to keep using them!
I was having a chat with a colleague last week and she asked me why we update our Facebook page twice a day and how do we make that decision? Was it just a guess or a hunch?
The answer to both was by using data.
At the BHF we have a very healthy Facebook community with lots of engagement, take a look – I am very proud of it. We have worked very hard to make sure that we are talking to our ‘likers’ every day and engaging them in conversation not just broadcasting at them, using our top class content to build better relationships.
But how did we make decisions about when we should post a Facebook update?
In April, we used Export.ly to export the previous 12 months Facebook data to a huge Excel file.
Our Analytics Executive Dan manipulated the Excel file and in a few hours we knew:
- Time of our updates
- Amount of likes per post
- Amount of comments per post
- Whether posts included a video, photo or if they were just a text update
- Our top contributors to our page
- Lots more treasures…
Now we had all that data we could cross reference the time of our updates by comments and likes and find out when updates had higher levels engagement – allowing us to make decisions on when we post using data rather than just a hunch.
We are due another data mine soon and due to the substantial increase in ‘likes’ that we have had since April I think that our timings may change slightly. I’m keen to find out whether our updates with a question are more engaging with our ‘likers’ than one’s without too as well as some more extensive work into what topics get more engagement (if you’re reading this Dan then that’s what I’m going to ask next week..).
For the record, our highest engagement came between 11:30-13:00 and 18:30-19:30…
N.B We had to pay $50 dollars for our Export.ly file due to the size of our Facebook page, but if you’re managing a page with less ‘likes’ then you may not have to pay at all. (We have 100,000+ likes now).
I came across SoloCo during Social Media Week Scotland and was immediatlely intrigued.
