Creating “good” content is pretty much THE biggest challenge for every community and social media manager. “Good” means in this case, that it converts the right target group into fans and keeps these fans engaged with the facebook page.
Knowing the likes and dislikes of these fans would make this job a lot easier, save time and reduce the amount of annoying experiments with “new” content. Even the biggest fan looks for the “Dislike” button after the 100th failed attempt to woo him with some new “let’s try something different”-posts.
But how can anybody predict what works and what not? Is there no other way, than making cautious assumptions and test them super carefully?
Of course not. With our Dashboards and Benchmarking you’ve got the perfect tool to conduct your own, individual and cheap target group analysis for your facebook page(s). Here’s how:
1. Who’s your “superfan”?
If you want to work with social media professionally and successfully you have to set clear goals. Otherwise how do you know if your efforts are worth it? It’s the same for your analysis. If you don’t know, which “kind” of fan you want to attract/engage you won’t come to a proper and helpful conclusion.
So get out that old legal pad, sharpen your pencils and give your “superfan” some clear features. Why is he supposed to like your page? Which demographic profile is important to you? What is he supposed to do (buy, recommend, create content for you etc.)?
Of course you can have multiple “superfans”. For example a bakery could define “people who like to eat and buy bread” as “superfan 1” and “people who love to bake and are interested in recipes” as “superfan 2”. Of course this depends on your social media strategy and should be set accordingly.
2. Who’s got them?
The next step is to create a dashboard for each superfan you just defined. To these dashboards you add pages that already cater to that specific kind of fan. These pages don’t have to be your competitor’s. The only important thing is if they have the same superfans as you.
The list of pages should be as long as possible and doesn’t necessarily be limited to local/national pages – seeing beyond your own nose can be very inspiring (Also take a look at our “Pages with same active fans” table in our insights).
3. How can you get them?
Now that you converted your superfans (aka target groups) into dashboards you can start your analysis in the benchmarking area. Here are three interesting insights that you should look at:
Post History/Top Posts
The Top Posts give you a good first impression of what kind of content engages your superfans the most. Which ideas can you adapt? Is there a pattern you can use? What do you think is clever/funny/interesting?
Tagging
If you want to dig deep into the content analysis, our new feature “Tagging” ist the right tool for you.
With Tagging you can assign tags to facebook posts and see for example that pictures with chocolate cake and full recipes yield a lot interaction. Of course it’s a little time consuming to set up, but it’s definitely worth it.
Times
Here you not only can see how many posts are raining down on your target group to a certain time, but also when said target group is very active. You should choose a time period of at least 90 days, because the timing is super sensible to external influences (holidays, weather, big events etc.).
Don’t stop trial & error
No analysis no matter how detailed will guarantee everlasting success. It’s more like a good starting point from which you can and should build your own basic content strategy. To explore and use your whole potential though, you’ll have to try something new once in a while.
If you stick to your data and publish stuff only on saturday afternoons, you’ll never know if maybe sunday morning is a better time for a certain kind of content. It’s the same with the content itself. Of course you can “copy” proven material and have regular success with it, but maybe you can take these old recipes, turn them into awesome videos and thusly create something new, something YOU?!
Analytics aren’t boundaries, set in stone to show you how limited your possibilities are. They’re more like a safety net that allows you to do new and maybe risky stuff from time to time.
Wrap up
To analyze your target group(s) on Facebook doesn’t have to be complicated. With some easy to use tools and some time you can get a decent idea of what will work for you and your superfans. It makes your and your fans’ life way easier.
