Can New Facebook Insights Determine the Best Time to Post on Facebook?

Earlier this summer, Facebook revamped the analytics section of their Page Insights to be more visually appealing and easier to consume. Previously, most of this data was hidden within two hard-to-navigate, exported spreadsheets containing numerous tabs and columns. Even a veteran online marketer would find it difficult and time consuming to make the most of these clunky analytics.

With new Facebook Insights, it’s much easier to track the performance of your business’s Facebook Page.

In this post, I’ll discuss the updates to Facebook’s Page Insights that could help you improve your Facebook marketing strategy.

1. New features in the “All Posts” tab

Within the “Posts” tab sits the analytics for “All Posts.” This section has been upgraded with new colors, a slightly new layout, and most importantly the various ways to filter reach and engagement.

With the old Facebook Insights, the overview of your Facebook content analytics simply displayed the date, post, reach, “engaged users,” “talking about this,” and virality. These metrics were confusing and made it difficult to determine which factors contributed to the success of your content.

Now, metrics are easy to navigate with added advanced filters and much more detailed. This significantly helps marketers create and publish better content.

Engagement metrics you can choose to view with new filters:

• Post clicks/likes, comments & shares


• Likes/comments/shares


• Post hides, hides of all posts, reports of spam, unlike


• Engagement rate

The Engagement Rate metric is new and makes understanding the success of a post quicker than ever. Facebook calculates the official Engagement Rate as follows:

The outcome illustrates the portion of your audience that is engaged with your content, consequently indicating the quality and success of your posts.

If one post is reaching a significant amount of people, but not producing much engagement, the News Feed Algorithm marks the post as low quality. Too many low quality posts hurt your chances of appearing in your fans News Feed in the future. By regularly reviewing the metrics related to the posts you publish, you can begin to understand what content your audience is most responsive to and work toward creating quality, engaging content.

With new “Insights reach” options, you can simply review one number for the total reach that includes viral, organic, and paid reach. Or you have the ability to track organic versus paid reach and the impact shares have on your page’s reach by viewing non-fan information. A simple drop-down menu in the “All Posts” section of the “Posts” tab alters the view effortlessly.

Previously, Facebook only provided Facebook Page owners with fans-only data. Non-fan reach data is completely new! This is an important metric for understanding the type of content that can help expand the reach of your posts and potentially grow your page. It’s clear to see that the more shares a post receives the more non-fans you can reach.

2. New “When Your Fans Are Online” tab

Within the “Posts” tab, you’ll discover a completely new section of insights that have not previously been available in the “When Your Fans Are Online” tab. The content of this tab includes two graphs that illustrate the average number of fans who saw any posts on Facebook by day of the week and the average number of fans who saw any posts in an hour. It’s important to note that these metrics do not indicate fans who see only your content, but any Facebook Page’s content.

This tab could be the answer to the one question so many page managers speculate about: When is the Best Time to Post on Facebook? If knowing when your fans are online is truly the key to the perfect posting time, this long-debated mystery just may be solved. Personally, I’m not convinced that these two graphs are the definitive solution to discovering the optimal posting time just yet. Yes, aiming to schedule your Facebook Page’s content when the majority of your fans are online is important for increasing engagement, but the peak fan rate may not be the optimal time. I still believe that you should try to find your engagement sweet spot by determining the intersection of time when the majority of your audience is on Facebook and the time when the least overall posting is occurring.

During the most popular hour your fans are on Facebook, you’re likely to face heavy News Feed competition. Competing with the hundreds of friends and the other brands your fans follow is a difficult task.

To further explore this hypothesis, I took a deeper look at the data in this tab and the results of our recent Facebook content. According to “When Your Fans Are Online,” the most Constant Contact fans were online on Thursday at 9:00 p.m. (during the previous 1-week period). Interestingly enough, during that same period of time, the peak of our engagement was Monday between 2:00-3:00 p.m. This was the day with the second lowest average number of our fans online. When I looked at the peak day and hour for engagement by each week of the last six weeks, I discovered no two weeks with the same day and time engagement peak.

The data in this tab is interesting and worth keeping an eye on, but don’t completely adjust your Facebook posting strategy overnight. If your current strategy is working, continue to post during the times you’ve had success with and try experimenting with new times based on “When Your Fans are Online.”

3. New “Best Post Types” tab

This new section within the “Posts” tab called “Best Post Types,” displays the type of content that produces the highest reach and average engagement. The type of post you publish matters when it comes to creating better Facebook content. Depending on your social media marketing goals, use this data to understand which type of post will help you succeed.

Across the three sections within the “Posts” tab, Facebook made several improvements with the goal of helping marketers create and publish better content.

“Historically, Page Insights has reported on posts’ performance, reach, and engagement in three distinct places. In the new Page Insights, we aggregate all these metrics into a post-specific score card, so marketers can evaluate positive and negative metrics together. This will help Page admins better identify content people interact with, produce more of it, and enjoy increased reach and impact on Facebook.” – Facebook

4. New “People Engaged” analytics

The “People” tab contains three sets of demographics, including an overview of your fans, the fans you’ve reached, and engaged fans. The “People Engaged” set of data is new to Page Insights. These analytics allow you to view who engages with your content by gender, age, location, and language. The interactive graphs within all three of these sets of demographics allow you to hover over the segments to display more information.

Don’t ignore your Facebook demographics! You might find them surprising.

While writing this post and reviewing the “People Insights” for the Constant Contact Facebook Page, I was surprised with what I discovered. Although 51 percent of our fans are between the ages of 35-54, 40 percent of the fans we reach are between 25-34 years old, and 29 percent of people engaged also fall within the 25-34 age bracket. If you don’t take the time to understand who you’re interacting with, how will you create content that will be most effective!

It’s important to review the demographics of your page to get a better understanding of who your audience is to improve your Facebook marketing strategy. You do not need to monitor these insights as frequently as the success metrics for your content, but it is important to be aware of these insights.

The ease of reviewing these analytics is a significant enhancement for Facebook Page Insights. Taking advantage of these upgrades is an easy way to achieve Facebook content marketing success!

Have you started to explore any of the new Facebook Page Insights yet? What do you think? Leave your comments below.

via Business 2 Community http://www.business2community.com/facebook/can-new-facebook-insights-determine-best-time-post-facebook-0602977?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=can-new-facebook-insights-determine-best-time-post-facebook