Facebook_likeI recently wrote about performing a Facebook A/B test on our consumer-facing Facebook pages. I decided to take my test one step further and look closely at the demographics of both the Superpages and DexKnows Facebook pages and then come to some definitive conclusions on content preferences for each brand.

I’ll cover DexKnows in this post. First, I’m going to break down the demographic for its Facebook page — I encourage you to do the same for your page.

  • 60% women
  • 35 – 44-year-olds make up the largest percentage for both men and women, totaling 29% of our audience
  • Nearly all fans are in the U.S., with Denver supplying the most followers from a single city.

Next, I went into Facebook Insights and exported post-level data for the last three months, then in Excel, I sorted it by engaged users largest to smallest, which indicates how many people clicked on the post. While likes, shares and comments are all well and good, not all your followers will be vocal. Engagement is the best way to see who has interacted with your post, whether or not they were vocal about it.

Here’s what I came up with.

Top performers

Reach: 615 Engagement: 64 Note: I posted this one on Superpages too, just to see if this was a one-off type of thing. It had a strong showing on Superpages too, though it hasn’t (yet!) broken into the top 10 there.

Reach 727 Engagement: 51

Reach: 468 Engagement: 38

I’m including three for the purposes of this article, but I recommend you examine your top 10 closely. You’re looking for trends. What does your audience consistently respond to?

There was nothing too shocking here when I broke this down. An audience led by a demographic of 35-44 year-old women responded most strongly to innovative landscaping, a cooking guide and kitchen mistakes. In fact, five of DexKnows’ top 10 posts were food-centric — six out of 10 if you include a #fridayfun cartoon about chicken — and three of the top 10 focused on outdoor spaces — pathways, pools and decks, which probably excelled partly because they were posted during the summertime.

Take a look at low performers too. Here’s one from us.

One Total Dud

The utter lack of interest in this post surprised me — it had an engagement of zero. As a demographic typically into landscaping, I thought these striking trees would be a crowd-pleaser. It may be that this post got lost in the back-to-school shuffle when it was posted, when numbers were generally low.

Again when examining low performers, look for trends. Ours were mostly scattershot, but I noticed a post specific to back-to-school time fared poorly, as well as a July 4th post. My guess: Our followers are busy with family during these times and aren’t paying attention to Facebook. If I want them to engage with holiday content, then I need to post it in advance of the holiday.

Strangely, three food items were in our low performers, despite being the most obvious trends in our top performers. That says to me, I need to break down types of food posts more. The items that performed best were more informative in nature. The items that didn’t perform as well focused on a single food, cookies or steak, for instance.

What have you noticed about your followers?