1) Analyzing 3 years of data from Facebook pages shows that posts from humans perform better than automated posts in terms of impressions and interactions. 2) Posts made at lunchtime and on Mondays receive the most impressions and interactions. 3) Link posts receive the most impressions while picture posts receive the most interactions. However, frequent posting may reduce impressions per post if it causes Facebook to throttle the page. 4) Growth in new fans can temporarily increase post quality and interactions, but post quality is not correlated with gaining new fans long-term. Relevant posts related to the brand perform best according to the author.

1. Rock your Facebook Lessons from analysing 3 years of Facebook Page data Jon M Bishop Q3 2010

2. Needs managers Facebook pages 12K Manager 10K 8K 6K 4K fans No Manager months

3. Automated vs Natural Humans rock! Humans Bots Impressions Interactions Bots Humans

4. Lunch time posts are the most effective Morning Midday Evening

5. And posts on a Monday are the most effective So over this week Not ready to work yet Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun

6. Types of Media impressions interactions Link Picture Text Video Link Picture Text Video

7. No relationship between post and frequency unlikes I’ve always been told the opposite.

8. Over frequent posting may however affect impressions per post The Facebook algorithm may throttle pages that over post so as to not flood users’ news feeds *This is an assumption based on the trend of this graph

9. Why are important interactions Traffic spike has no effect on interactions Interactions Drive traffic And longer term traffic increase And no long term effect

10. Post quality is not a factor in a user becoming a fan Post quality New fans

11. Fan growth spikes can affect post quality New fans want to interact, so a lot of new fans create a lot of interactions which in turn pushes up the post quality. There is a delay in the post quality spike as it is averaged over 7 days New fans Post quality

12. Relevance is important There is no data to prove this but every time I try to post something not to do with the brand it bombs and I get abused by the fans!

13. Competitions Competitions on your page are brilliant at growing fans / like and interactions but they are against Facebook terms! You can’t give stuff away in a post no conditional entries: eg comment on this post telling us how much you love us to win a bicycle written You can only run competitions and promotions with written Facebook permission and they must reside on a Facebook app! Facebook App! Facebook permission But I have run ‘non-compliant’ competitions before and not been bust yet! http://www.facebook.com/promotions_guidelines.php

14. How to Facebook Get your Facebook / Social Media Manager to post a relevant Non-automated post that contains a picture at lunchtime on a Monday and or Friday afternoon But don’t post too often during the rest of the week

15. Word! Jon M Bishop Jonbishop.me Jonin60seconds.com @jonin60seconds