If you’re administering your Catholic parish Facebook page, spend a little time each week using Insights. Just log into Facebook, click on your page, and then use the “Insights” link at the top:
Then, using the navigation bar to the left, click on “Posts.” Once you’re in there, take a look at your most popular published posts. Are there any common themes tying them together? Was it the post time? The subject matter they covered? The type of post (link, event, photo, or video)? Get in the habit of clicking on Insights regularly, and if you need to get oriented, Facebook has some great tutorials here.
What’s the Benefit?
By using Facebook Insights for your Catholic parish Facebook page, you can learn best practices for your audience. Even typical nonprofit best practices won’t always work for your Catholic parish because your audience is likely most active on a Sunday. The same is not true for the Red Cross or the Salvation Army! Let this data drive your decision-making. Then you can start to up your game by using other powerful Facebook tools. (Scheduling posts in advance and running a small “like and follow” ad campaign are two of my favorites.)
One thing that’s easy to miss in Insights – make sure you are toggling between the right time periods. Almost every page as a seven day, 28-day, and annual view. On some pages, like the Followers page, you can enter custom start and end dates. This allows you to see spikes in followers over time and then investigate why that happened. Again, you can use all of this information to strike gold twice. (Not to mention you’ll look like a genius in the parish office!)
If you’re unhappy with the amount of engagement or reach you’re getting, it’s time to grow your following. You can learn how to do that here.
