I am an administrator on quite a few Facebook fan pages. I use the platform with some of my clients depending on whether the platform fits the client’s communications strategy.
There are good things and bad things about Facebook. A good thing is it is constantly improving and looking to make its experience better. A bad thing is it often doesn’t communicate its changes well with its users, which often results in groups springing up displaying their hatred of its latest version. I always wonder why it doesn’t supply a simple two-minute video explaining its new features like so many other applications.
In the earlier days of the platform we used to use groups to bring like-minded people together but these days I tend to use fan pages for clients. If you have a fan page and you 
are looking for some advice this post is pretty useful.
In my opinion, the key to a good fan page is to make sure you use it for conversation and not just broadcasting. Try to keep your fans engaged with interesting content, special offers and insights they wouldn’t get anywhere else. A fan page is not an advertisement, there needs to be something in it for the end user – we must remember that.
I was checking out the insights section of my fan pages the other day and I thought when do people use Facebook these days? Is this now changing with our internet culture as there are so many other platforms, groups and tools to use? In other words, what time of day do people log-in to Facebook now? I ask this question because the latest statistics from consultancy suggested:
Facebook claims that 50% of active users log into the site each day. This would mean at least 175m users every 24 hours… A considerable increase from the previous 120m.
If this is true, then the time when your fans log-in could be critical to getting them to see/read your latest news and competitions.
When is the best time of day for your client to write their page updates?
If I am guessing I would say 9am, 1pm and around 8pm if my friends are anything to go by but that’s all it is a guess.
So I am asking Facebook to add user times and a bit more insight to its INSIGHT section. There was a brilliant post last week by Webdigi on how to get around the insight section and use Google Analytics for your FB stats instead but that too had a few flaws.
So I guess until Facebook hears our call, I think we will have to use Google Analystics. What do you think should be added to fan page insights to make it more useful for communications purposes?
