I’ll also be speaking at the CASE District V conference in Chicago, December 11-13, 2011. Let me know if you’ll be there. I’d love to meet you!

Ah, another Facebook change. But this is one to be excited about—an update to Facebook Insights for your Facebook Pages.

Insights, the analytics suite Facebook provides for page admins, is now more focused on helping marketers track fan engagement. If you can see which of your posts resulted in more engagement, then you can craft better posts to get your fans talking about you.

You can find Insights on the left side of the page under your profile picture. The overview is a great summary of how your page has been performing in the past four weeks. The four numbers across the top tell you your total number of fans, the total number of friends your fans have, how many people are talking about you this week, and the number of unique people who have seen your page’s content this week. A chart shows the number of posts each day, the number of people talking about you and the number of unique people you reached.

Two new stats to point out are “people talking about this” and “weekly total reach.”

• People Talking About This—The number of people who have interacted with your page in the past seven days. It includes likes for your page, likes for posts, comments, shares, tags and check-ins.
• Weekly Total Reach—The number of unique people who have seen content from your page in the past seven days. This may include fans seeing your content in the news feed or on your page, or friends of fans seeing that their friend interacted with your page.

These are important numbers for tracking fan engagement. The more people who talk about you, the more people you reach. When posting updates, think about how you can get people to talk about you. If homecoming is approaching, start asking alumni questions about their college days. Ask for photos of homecoming events and share fun school trivia. With the new Facebook Ticker, your fans’ friends will see when they comment on your posts, which means you reach more people.

The next chart on the Insights page shows you how your recent posts performed individually. It shows reach, engaged users, talking about this, and virality for each individual post.

• Reach is the number of people who saw that post.
• Engaged users tallies the number of people who clicked somewhere in your post.
• Talking about this shows number of people who liked, commented on or shared your post.
• Virality is the percentage of the people who saw your post and then talked about it.

This chart is a huge development in the tough task of trying to understand how posts compare in reach and engagement. The goal here is to look at which posts performed well and which performed poorly, and then work to optimize your future posts so that they are more engaging.

With Facebook constantly changing the news feed and keeping its EdgeRank algorithm a mystery, it’s always been a struggle for page admins to craft optimized posts to reach their fans and create some type of engagement. But now you can see for yourself which posts reach more people and get people talking. Looking at Park Tudor’s data, I see that sports updates and photos are popular. Interestingly, all of our links are at the bottom of the chart—they don’t seem to show up in the news feed and reach as many people as our status updates and photos. I’m curious as to whether other institutions have noticed this?

The new Facebook Insights should help you to create a better strategy for posting to your Facebook Page. You can better understand how your fans interact with your content and you can optimize it to encourage fans to talk about you. As with any analytics package, the goal is to use the numbers to drive your content.

For a more in-depth look, check out the Facebook Page Insights Product Guide, created by Facebook.

Original post link: http://case.typepad.com/case_social_media/2011/10/how-to-use-facebook-insights-for-better-engagement.html

Rule #1: Cardio
Do some exercises before the time comes to start working on the redesign. Start with some research – surveys, focus groups, analytics insights – and find out what needs to be changed. The entire redesign process should be research-based.

Rule #2: The Double Tap
Always re-read your content. A professional website should not have typos or spelling errors. Re-read what you’ve written to make sure that it is clear and will make sense to the reader.

Rule #3: Beware of Bathrooms
OK, bathrooms seriously have nothing to do with websites. But, let’s rephrase this one to say “Beware of being pushed into a tight space.” It’s inevitable that people in other departments will come to you and beg you to put their content on the homepage. Using your research, explain to them how you have decided what will be on the homepage and how the rest of the content will be structured. Remember, this is your area of expertise and you know what’s best for your visitors.

Rule #4: Seatbelts
Use restraint. Don’t copy word-for-word the entire class catalog into your website. No one will read it. Writing for the web means cutting down on text and keeping only what is necessary.

Rule #7: Travel Light
Similar to Rule #4, less is more when it comes to text. Write short, concise paragraphs and use bullet points for lists. Use headers to break up long pages and to help the user skim through the content.

Rule #8: Get a Kickass Partner
Find a web solutions company that understands your needs. Discuss your primary audiences, your goals for the website and your timeline for launching the redesigned site. Check out their portfolio and see if the designs and features they’ve developed for other clients are similar to what you are looking for.

Rule #17: (Don’t) Be a Hero
Let’s face it – your new website will not live up to everyone’s ideals. Your goal is not to design for these nitpicky people. Your goal is to provide the best user experience for the average user visiting your site. However, you’ll also want that ‘wow’ factor that makes people remember your site, so it’s OK to be a hero in that sense.

Rule #18: Limber Up
Every day will bring a new challenge while working on your redesign. Take a few deep breaths and some stretches to clear your mind before you start tackling each challenge.

Rule #21: Avoid Strip Clubs
Avoid flashy stuff. Remember back in the 90s when people tossed animated gifs, clip art and rainbow text into their HTML? Don’t do that! Use colors that are easy on the eye. Don’t use auto-play videos or sounds. Any movement on the page, such as a scrolling photo slideshow, should have at least a 10-second delay so it’s not too distracting.

Rule #22: When In Doubt, Know Your Way Out
Always have a backup plan. When the project is nearing its end, you’ll want to coordinate a launch date. Schedule Plan B on the calendar, too.

Rule #29: The Buddy System
Teamwork is key to a successful website redesign. It shouldn’t rest on one person’s shoulders. You need a good designer, developer, content manager and editor. The person responsible for all of the content needs a good editor behind their back – someone who isn’t afraid to critique and provide suggestions.

Rule #31: Check the Back Seat
Know what’s going on behind the scenes of your website. A good content management system is critical, as well as a robust analytics suite.

Rule #32: Enjoy the Little Things
Sometimes, the most appreciated features of your website are the most simple. A perfectly placed picture that tells a story can be more powerful than a professionally produced video interview. Tell stories of everyday life throughout your website.

Rule #33: Swiss Army Knife
Think of your website as a hub with many arms extending outward from it. Integrate your social media – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, LinkedIn, etc. – into your website. Use buttons and widgets to make your website more interactive with your other communications channels.

Use these rules as a guideline for your next website redesign project, and remember, you can always add your own rules to the list.

In the immortal words of Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Au revoir, Gopher.’
– Bill Murray

When we started using Twitter at Park Tudor two years ago, I immediately became curious about the types of people who were following us. I assumed that our follower base would be 90% Park Tudor families and alumni and 10% spam. I was completely wrong. Here’s the breakdown of our Twitter followers:

One-third of our audience is made up of people or organizations in our local community – Indianapolis or Indiana. Almost another third is made up of schools, teachers, education bloggers, and people who work in the education industry. Then we get to the 22% of our followers who have a direct relationship with the school – alumni, students, parents and faculty/staff. Only 2 out of every 9 followers are school constituents. The male-female ratio is evenly spread among our followers, excluding Twitter accounts that represent an organization or company.

So what does this mean for our Twitter strategy?

First, it means we have to adjust our messages to fit a wider audience. If we tweet a reminder about the kindergarten program that parents are invited to attend, it’s not going to matter to most of the people reading it. Instead, we’ve turned to Twitter as a tool for community outreach. It lets people in the community get a real glimpse at what life is really like at Park Tudor. We tweet photos and videos of everyday life on campus. And we listen. When someone talks about Park Tudor online, we want to know what they’re saying, and we want to have the chance to respond, whether it’s a positive or negative comment. (Most of the time, it is a positive comment.)

Second, it means we need to establish ourselves as a leader in the education industry. Whether it’s people in the community, in the education industry, or in our school community, they all are looking to us as a knowledgeable source for education. I will admit this is an area that I would like to improve in our Twitter stream. I think it would be beneficial to our followers if we shared more articles and blogs about news in the education industry, as well as parenting tips and learning strategies.

Finally, it means that we need to promote our Twitter account better among our school community. We don’t just want to increase our numbers by asking them to follow us on Twitter, but we want to increase engagement with our school community members.

Do you have an idea of how your Twitter audience is spread out? How do you tailor your content for your audience? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Liz Allen has started a series of posts on her blog, Adaptivate, about using student-generated content. It’s a genius idea, and it serves two purposes. First, it expands your creative department to an entire team of creative kids who love to share stuff online. Second, it helps with your marketing by providing the stories of your schools through the eyes and words of the students themselves.

Last week, our school celebrated Founders’ Day, and usually this means a boring all-school assembly with speeches from the Head of School, alumni association president and a board member. This year, we had students from our PTTV Club make an entertaining video. The guidelines were simple – make a fun video that somehow showcases the history of our school. This is what they came up with:

Student-Created Video: Park Tudor Founders Day

All the kids, from kindergarten to seniors, loved this video, and it’s something that us “adults” could never have come up with on our own. I can’t wait to start using more content – videos, photos, blogs, articles, etc. – from our talented students.