Collecting behavioural data to support your Facebook news feed strategy
Posted on: June 23, 2011
Josh Constine wrote today that if you are an organisation hoping to engage with an existing Facebook page fan base, executing a successful news feed posting strategy is the most important thing you can do. This is because fans typically only interact with Pages through the news feed.
To develop such a strategy, it first helps to really understand how people interact with Facebook news feeds. Your own, your competitors, and relevant affinity brands. This is where you need useful, insightful behavioural data, which can be collected by carrying out a Facebook ethnography.
In terms of the newsfeed, what you can expect to learn from this is:
- Which type of post leads to most likes / comments / positive sentiment
- Which time of day gets most likes / comments / positive sentiment
- Running themes on what people are happy / unhappy about regarding the product / service
Note – developing post categories can be the hardest bit. Only by reading lots of posts can you determine which categories will be most useful (you probably don’t want more than four to avoid over-complicating the analysis).
Another pointer – ensure that your sample goes back for a sufficient amount of time, to ensure data is as representative as possible, e.g. don’t analyse the last 12 wall posts, but every third post back in time.
