How do you know if your Facebook Page fans like what you’re posting?

It’s a good question, isn’t it? I mean, you’ve been posting status updates, links and videos for quite some time now. Are you posting too frequently? Are your connections sharing what you’ve posted? Are you losing fans?

Are you wasting your time?

For the most part, you know what you’re posting is the good stuff. And you know your that your connections will like it and share it. You know this because you’re one of them.

But still, it’s a good idea to take a look at your Facebook Page stats to confirm your gut.

How to confirm what you already know about your fans

Facebook Pages include a variety of reports on fan growth, engagement, subscriber drop-off, preferred content, and user engagement. Below are five ways to tell if your content is effective. Note that they provide meaning only when viewed in context of each other.

1. Daily Active Users

User activity in response to your content tells you how much they like it. According to Facebook, a user is active when they view or engage with your application or your application’s content. This includes:

Users that visit your Page
Users that view an application tab on a Page
Users that published to news feed (stream) from your Page
Users that “Liked” a stream story form your Page
Users that commented on a stream story from your Page

2. Total Fan Growth

If your total number of fans on your Page is growing, obviously you’re doing something right. Facebook Insights can show you total fan growth based on people liking your Page directly, or though a likebox.

3. Removed Fans

Like your parents told you when you were a child, not everyone will be your fan. That’s ok. Don’t take it personally. Try and correlate a spike in removed fans with content that was posted on or slightly before that day. If the content posted on those days has a high Daily Story Feedback score (next), the reason may not be your content.

4. Daily Story Feedback

The Daily Story Feedback graph shows you the prevalence of likes, comments and unsubscribes per day. The likes generally mean people like what you’ve posted. Comments can also mean they like what you’ve posted (but not always). And unsubscribes mean that your Page isn’t worth keeping in their news feed.

5. Comments

Duh, huh? Comments will show you how people feel about your content or the topic of what you posted. Sometimes comments are completely unrelated to the post. Sometimes comments related to a story is posted as a separate update by the fan.

Focus On The Spikes

If you’re like me, you try and avoid getting too deep into the numbers. Save yourself an aneurysm by focusing only on the peaks and valleys in the data. In fact, limit yourself to three peaks and three valleys for every two-week period. This will give you enough data to provide insights about your content.

And finally, if you haven’t already, please download “The Complete Facebook Guide For Small Nonprofits”