The waiting days are over. No more wondering for two-to-three days whether or not your page post was a hit with your fans. Facebook recently announced some great changes to pages, with one being real-time insights. This has a significant impact on pages, as social marketers can now watch post performance as it happens in real-time– and then make adjustments accordingly. Facebook-er Louis Eisenberg said, the new iteration is designed (it’s about freaking time) to ‘turn insights into engagement’. This will shed light on areas of improvement for page owners, who have been accustomed to receiving post data far after their posts were relevant. As TechCrunch’s Josh Constine said, “Data wizards rejoice!”. Insights become immediately actionable in this up-to-date format, which is pictured below.
Real-Time Facebook Insights for Facebook Studio - facebook.com/facebookstudio
So the big question now, as a social marketer or page owner, is how do I use this influx of real-time insights data to my advantage? Simple answer– use the data at hand to maximize the impact of great, engaging posts and minimize the impact of posts with a higher rate of negative feedback.
Maximizing the Impact of your Best Posts
So you created a post, and it’s getting a crazy amount of reach and engagement just minutes after being posted. Now what? Actually let’s rewind first. Before posting on Facebook, you need to consider limiting the characters in your message– much like Twitter. Why’s that? Well the answer is two-fold. First, Facebook recently released a statement that said posts with less than 3 lines of text receive 60% more likes, comments, and shares than those with more than 3 lines of text. Second, and more importantly, Sponsored Stories are limited to 90-characters.
CNN Heroes Sponsored Story - facebook.com/cnnheroes
“But who cares about Sponsored Stories? I thought this was about posts?”
Fast forward to that post mentioned above with an incredible amount of reach and engagement, just minutes after being posted. It’s clearly a gem, the most successful post you’ve ever published. Now what? Supplement your reach and engagement by making it into a Sponsored Story minutes after you see that it’s a hyper-engaging post. Then, friends-of-fans who are targeted through Sponsored Stories are able to consume this high-quality post while it is still making it’s way around Facebook virally and the content is still fresh and relevant. With that comes more engagement and reach, which results in more engagement and reach– and it keeps going full circle. This is a huge opportunity to maximize value from great posts– and that’s why that 90-character limit is oh-so-important.
Minimizing the Impact of your Worst Posts
Before real-time insights, a ‘bad’ post polluted the Newsfeeds of fans because page owners had no idea that their fans were giving negative feedback on a post until a few days later– when it was much too late. Now, page owners can take immediate action, removing and revising ‘bad’ posts so they avoid negative feedback. This is so crucial because negative feedback on a post will prove detrimental to a user’s EdgeRank (link to article about EdgeRank) and ultimately result in that user no longer seeing updates from that page in their Newsfeed. If page owners and social marketers don’t reach their fans through the Newsfeed, they probably won’t reach them at all, because a vast majority simply never go back to the page for updates. While most will likely use real-time insights solely to maximize the upside of engaging posts, those who minimize the downside (as well) by removing ‘bad’ posts quickly will see better overall results.
Learn more from Facebook about Real-Time Insights and Sponsored Stories here (FAQs).
Mike
