Strategy is a feature within PostAcumen that helps marketers begin to understand brands’ specific posting strategies on Facebook. This feature breaks down four main components: Overview, Best Metrics, Worst Metrics, and Page Strategies.

Overview

Overview is a text based summary of the Pod’s general posting strategy. This presents massive amounts of data into an easy to understand blurb. The Overview analyzes all of the pages within the Pod over the time period being analyzed.

Best Metrics

Best Metrics provides an opportunity to see what the Pod’s best posting strategies are as a whole. This section measures Post Frequency (the optimal frequency a page posts daily), Content Type (which content type performs the best), and Time of Day (what time of day performs the best). Next Best and Third Best metrics help provide another layer of analysis.

Worst Metrics

Worst Metrics examines which tendencies performed the worst. Post Frequency, Content Type, and Time of Day are analyzed as well. We recommend looking at Worst Metrics to help gauge which strategies to avoid for the Pod.

Page Strategies

This section starts the process of understanding each Page’s strategy, and provides context to how consistent the strategy actually is. This is done through examining the consistency of a Page’s posting structure based on logistical criteria such as when and what is posted.

The main components that make up a brand’s strategy are: Frequency, Length, Asked for Engagement, Content Type, Time of Day, Days of Week, and Overall Consistency. Each component can have different results, the full breakdown is as follows:

• Freq Post frequency, the number of posts per day
  • Low 1 post per day
  • Medium 2 or 3 posts per day
  • High More than 3 posts per day
• Length The length of the text content of a post
  • None 0 characters
  • Short 1-50 characters
  • Medium 51-100 characters
  • Long 101+ characters
• Asked Whether the brand asked for engagement in the content of the post—determined by question marks or “like”, “comment”, or “share” in the text content
• Type Content Type of the post
  • Photo
  • Video
  • Link
  • Status
  • App
• Time 6-hour time blocks adjusted to your timezone (UTC -5 hours)
  • Morning 6am-12pm
  • Afternoon 12pm-6pm
  • Evening 6pm-12am
  • Overnight 12am-6am
• Days Used to determine how much the brand is posting on the weekend
  • Weekdays
  • Weekend
• Consistent The percentage of posts the displayed values from the other six columns describe
• Score Average PostAcumen Score

Each strategy component may not be consistent. This issue is addressed by providing a consistency rating for each result. The colored ring behind each strategy component reflects how consistent this particular result is. The example below shows that Red Bull posts at a Medium Frequency (2 or 3 posts per day) 71% of the time.

By clicking into this result, you will be sent to Post Visualizer with these particular posts filtered to be analyzed. This concept is repeated for all of the results within Page Strategies.

Working Example

Pepsi’s Facebook strategy is displayed in the example below. Pepsi usually posts at a Medium Frequency. On average they post Short updates, but Post Length varies. Pepsi typically does not Ask for Engagement in their posts. They nearly always post a Photo. More often than not, their posts happen in the afternoon, and they post more heavily during weekdays than weekends. Overall, Pepsi has a fairly consistent strategy. This strategy resulted in a PostAcumen Score of a 4 (to learn more about PostAcumen Scores read this post).

What Do I Use This Data For?

Strategy can provide a quick and easy way to understand what a brand’s strategy on Facebook is. It can also provide context on how well these strategies perform. This type of information can be great for executive meetings when discussing potential strategies and competitive analysis.

Here are a few questions that can be answered in Strategy:

• What is a particular brand’s Facebook strategy?
• What strategy works best for this particular industry?
• What strategy should be avoided in this particular industry?
• What strategies have been tried and which ones haven’t?

If you have any additional questions about Strategy be sure to comment below, or connect with us on Twitter or Facebook!