Facebook Page Insights - Use Them!

   When trying to measure just how well your Facebook campaign or daily posting efforts are doing, it can get really confusing listening to all the different acronyms and conflicting advice about what days and times to post are best, and what not to do or do. Who should you listen to? The answer is simple: Your online customer or page’s fan base.

   Yes, there are some great tips about Facebook and what works for businesses. Photo posts are king, while plain-jane html links, or long videos are usually shunned. But where’s the best place to get information as to what works? All you need to look at are your page’s own Insights. Everything you need to see about what’s really working on your page is available within your Admin tools. All the advice in the world is useless without actively checking to see your page’s “health.”

   On the basic screen shown below, you have a lot of information available to you. You’ll be able to see how everything is going on your page, with the only drawback being a two-day backlog with some of the data.

Facebook Insights Graph

 
   Here you can see just how many likes your page has, your potential reach of content, how many people are sharing or talking about your content, and even how many people actually saw content from your page. There are two ways you can get this information. Either use the basic view with the charts available (shown above), or you can download even more detailed information into an Excel spreadsheet so you can really drill into your page’s worth.

   There are a few things I like to look at. One of them is the information on each individual post, which is shown below the graph that is depicted in the screen above. This will show you the virality measurement along with the amount of people who talked about the post. This is really what is connecting your fanbase on a day to day basis. You may notice that photo posts work better than video posts or vice-versa. Did that funny quote you posted to your status really hit it off with your fans? Now you can actually see if it fell on deaf ears or not, and make adjustments to your plans for future posts.

Facebook Page Demographics

    Another good pair of insights to work with are your Demographics and your Reach pages. These insights will show you the age ranges and sex of your fans, as well as the geographical locations, browser types used, and a whole host of other information to use. That, my dear reader, is the whole point to all this information: USE IT! If you find that your page is mostly being viewed by males ages 18-25, it makes no sense to post something about tips for expectant mothers, unless that’s what your page is about. If it is, then you’ll be able to see that whatever you have been posting is attracting the wrong audience.

   The bottom line is, blindly posting random statuses and links, or constant spam about your business won’t win you a huge fan base. Facebook is about building a community for your page. You can’t do that if you aren’t speaking its language. What works for your page that goes against conventional wisdom? Please comment below if you’ve found some other information that has helped you hone in on your fanbase, and visit our Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/VSBrooksAdvertising

 By: Stephen Kish - Social Media Coordinator/ VSBrooks Advertising

The Inevitable Need for Advertising.

By: Alejandro Barreras-Creative Director

 Written in response to The Miami Herald's June 6th article on Cuba's next step on the capitalist road: http://goo.gl/1jDTP , our own Alejandro Barreras offers his personal insight into how Cubans are adopting the advertising methods we take for granted to improve their lives and businesses.

 When I lived in Cuba, plain paper bags lined the shelves, with barely legible scribblings to mark whether they contained sugar, rice, or beans. Oil and vinegar – even beer and rum – were dispensed in unlabeled generic brown bottles. Toothpaste came in bare aluminum tubes, and you had to bring your own carefully preserved cartons for eggs.

 Magazines and newspapers carried no ads, TV and radio were uninterrupted by commercial breaks, and outdoor boards and posters, were used mostly for political propaganda. Niches such as publishing and movie posters while justly renowned as innovative, were the only oasis in an otherwise bleak and anodyne graphic landscape.

 That was the reality of Cuba as I was growing up. One of the most vivid impressions I have of my first few days outside the island was enjoying the graphic and aural onslaught of advertising. For a graphic designer, it was an amazing demonstration of the ubiquity of our craft. Everywhere I looked there were images and messages, written, photographed, art directed and designed. And this was Cancun –imagine if I had landed in Times Square!

 So reading this news coming out of Havana, I can't help but marvel at how Cubans are once again pushing the envelope of economic reforms with inexorable capitalist logic. You want customers, you want your business to grow, you need marketing. Cuban entrepreneurs have quickly realized it's not just about setting up anonymous businesses, but creating differentiated and stand-out brands, and communicating compelling messages.

 And it works! When I went to Cuba last year, after 18 years, the presence of incipient advertising and marketing efforts for the nascent private economy was one of the biggest contrasts with the island I remembered. I visited one of the private restaurants mentioned in the article, Cafe Laurent –great cuisine and exquisite service– precisely because I was handed a flyer on the street. I saw the banners and t-shirts, and spoke with designer friends about their desire to do more, to exploit the ability of our profession to help all Cubans improve their lives.

 Ads in the yellow pages, private business printing banners, web and mobile commercials, entrepreneurs setting up pseudo-legal marketing agencies, all grown organically in a country that not long ago banned with disdain those "relics from the past." Advertising, despite its detractors, is an economic engine, fueling growth and providing jobs. I'm delighted to see my countrymen adopting it into their new reality with such gusto.