The data you will see below is data for clients I have worked with, not for Spaghetti Traveller, however it should help offer a greater idea of how to handle marketing with Facebook.
I recommend making one post a day (any more and it can become frustrating, any less and you’re missing out on an opportunity), with a picture being very much the sole focus. The images can be sourced from paid sites such as I-stock or shutterstock, or alternatively you could use sites that allow images to be used for free as part of the Creative Commons act, such as Flickr.
The most successful posts are normally either a competition, special offers or questions that require one word answers. For example, a ‘country vs country’ or a ‘question on Thursday’ style post are normally the most successful, while they also share naturally without any requirement to incentivise financially as they gather interest and debate.
I try to choose specific days for each type of post, so that they do not become repetitive, meaning if I make a sales based post on Monday, I will try to wait a week before the next one so as not to lose fans who aren’t interested in sales.
You can check the success or failure of certain posts through Facebook Insights, where you will be able to see how many people liked and unliked on a specific day. You can check Facebook Insights through the admin panel at the top of the screen:
If you click on the graph, you will be taken through to Facebook Insights, where I would then recommend exporting the data to excel so you can have a proper look at the data. Remember that quite a lot of information can’t be shared for the previous 3 days as it will not be updated. Looking at the data, you can investigate further if there was a large amount of unlikes on a specific day, however remember if there was a large amount of likes on the same day then it might still have been worth the post. You can see an example below, where the day situated fourth from bottom had 8 unlikes, however the likes were around double what they normally are, therefore I would perceive this to be a very good day, whereas the day where we had 17 likes and 8 unlikes is a bit more alarming:
Another reason to check this data could be to see how many are ‘talking about this’ (a metric for judging interaction rate) for each day. Below you can see that we had the highest level of people talking about the post on the 22/05/2013 and 03/06/2013:
Then looking at our Facebook wall, we can see that the posts were both competitions (quite obviously, however it is still worth monitoring and also monitoring which posts failed to gain much traction).
The best times for posts are between 16:00-20:00 and over the weekend (however we should obviously make a post every day). You could also run Facebook ads, which run at the side of Facebook (as can be seen in the image below). I have been running the ads with a budget of £8 per day. The £8 is split over a few different ad campaigns, which need to be adjusted as offers change over time.
Once you enter the Advert Manager page, you will be able to see all your existing ad campaigns, whether live or paused, as can be seen below:
