How to use Facebook Insights to ensure you’re not talking to an empty room

If you have a Facebook Page for your business, you’re probably constantly trying to increase the number of people who see your Facebook updates.

There are several ways to do this.

• Create awesome content so that people comment, like and share your posts
• Ask lots of questions; you’ll find that people want to give you an answer
• Make sure you post when people are most likely to be looking through their newsfeed

Today I’d like to show you how to find out when your Page Likers are actually using Facebook. You’re going to do this by utilising Facebook Insights – a tool which remains a mystery to most business owners.

First of all, go to your Page and click on Facebook Insights. You can find the “See Insights” button right at the top of your admin panel. Click on that and your Insights Dashboard will appear. This is where you can measure the impact your posts are having; what posts are most popular with your audience, which posts get the most engagement etc

I would encourage you to play around with your Facebook Insights and see what you can find to help you, but for now, you will see a row of tabs at the top, click on “Posts”.

A graph will appear – this is what mine looks like…

Across the top you will see boxes representing each day in a recent 1 week period. If you move your cursor over the boxes, the graph will alter to show when those people were on Facebook. So I can see that my Likers use Facebook pretty much all day, but slightly more in the evenings, with a peak at around 8-9pm during the week and earlier at weekends.

So how can you use this information to your advantage? I would post just before your peak so it’s waiting in your Likers newsfeeds. If I was an early riser I might be tempted to post straight away, but I’d be better off scheduling my posts (using Facebook’s own scheduler) for mid evening. Even better, I could get in the habit of being on Facebook at the right time and posting when my potential clients are actually there. That way I could respond to people immediately and Facebook would show my posts to more of my Likers as it prefers a real time posts – I like to see it as a thankyou for spending time at Facebook.

If your audience is worldwide, then you may find you have several peaks and will need to post accordingly. You could even target your posts to the audience that you will have at that moment in time. To help you with this, go back to where you have the tabs at the top of the Page and click on people – there you can find out what countries your Likers are from. At the other end of the spectrum, if you market to a very local audience, you can also see which town your Likers are from.

I’d love to hear how you’re using Insights to help you to maximise Facebook for your business. Please comment below.