I rarely say this, but Facebook has knocked it out of the park for business pages lately!  So often Facebook is a struggle for businesses.  It’s a great marketing tool for sure, but the rules change constantly and paying for advertising doesn’t guarantee better results.

I’ll be the first to admit that I sometimes stick my head in the sand, and I totally didn’t realize there’s an awesome feature that tells you exactly when your fans are online.  In the past, I’ve seen that one company will get great results with a certain time, then others will follow suit.  But the truth is, we all have different clientele who are using the internet and Facebook differently.  So to see your audience graphed out is killer!

Below I’ve taken some screen shots from my Facebook business page.  I clicked on Insights, then Posts, then When Your Fans Are Online.  One of my goals from the very beginning was not to have a zillion followers (although that would be great), but to focus on quality followers.  I’d rather 2,000 true fans of our work over 10,000 people who clicked ‘Like’ to enter a contest and don’t care at all about us.  There are advantages to both, but our method more closely lines up with our business model.  We had right at 2,000 fans when I saved these images.

Here, you can see that most of our people are online from 9am to 10pm.  So if I’m prepping a blog and it’s not ready until 11pm, then it’s probably a good idea to set it to go active in the morning rather than at 11pm.  However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that I want to only post during the peak times.  After all, if everyone is online at the same time, they’re also posting, which means there’s more competition for my work to be seen.  So basically, it’s still a guessing game, but at least you’re guessing based off of your unique data.

Above the graph, you can hover over each day and see how that day compares to the rest. It surprised me that we have more viewers Thursday-Sunday.  However, it isn’t a huge jump or anything from my weekday crowd, so I don’t need to make any dramatic swing in my posts or anything.

The top two pieces of information I can derive from that: 1) My people are online from 9am-10pm  2) They’re on every day of the week– not just while they’re at work.
Next, I clicked on Post Types.  This neat feature goes through the posts from my page and categorizes them and gives me feedback.  Links are leading the pack right now.  They reach the biggest audience from my fans.  However, when I post a picture, I get about the same amount of engagement.  So although the picture barely reaches half the audience, it’s still having the same effect.

Videos and status updates are pretty low, which makes sense.  I only use those methods once every couple of months.  That also makes me wonder if the more I post in one of these categories, the more that post type will reach?  Even though links and pictures get the same amount of interaction, I share far more links than I do pictures.

And there you have it… it’s not fool proof, but it is great to have additional insight into how your particular Facebook world is interacting!  Facebook also has a great blog for businesses that keeps them up to date on things like this and more!  What are your favorite insights in the world of business Facebook pages?