Our previous post contained a comparison of the Facebook presence of five cultural institutions from major Polish cities, including the City Culture Institute of Gdańsk, Katowice: City of Gardens, Krakow Festival Office, Workshops of Culture in Lublin and Wrocław 2016. We were interested in determining the most popular content and gauging content popularity depending on the type of information published. This time we set out to visualise the results of slightly more detailed research done for each fan page.

Before committing ourselves to any analyses, it seems sensible to have a general look at the data at hand. This way, we may be able to notice some trends or detect any irregularities resulting from, e.g. errors while acquiring the data using the site’s API. Being able to view user interactions with posts on Wrocław 2016’s fan page in three different levels of statistical detail, makes it possible to more accurately assess its peak performance periods during last year. On a more general note, our charts reflect a seasonality of cultural activities, and more specifically – the idiosyncrasies of the European Capital of Culture celebrations with strong emphasis put on the opening and closing events during the celebration year.

In our case, data visualisation is not expected to provide ready-made conclusions, but helps to ask the right questions about the activities of each institution. The following chart clearly indicates an increasing number of events in relation to posts containing images. Is this fact related to the nature of the institution’s activities? Is the larger number of event related postings a consequence of the strategy adopted by the institution? Or is it due to general trend within the service to use event promotion as an effective way to communicate with users? Such questions should first of all be raised with the administrators of the Institute of Urban Culture’s fan page.

The admin panel provides access to statistics up to two years back. It would seem that several calendar months corresponds to light years in social media development terms. However, examining the stats in the context of several previous years provides valuable insights into the activities of an institution. For instance, in the graph showing median interactions with posts in the several years of Katowice: City of Gardens’ operations, the city’s bid for European Capital of Culture 2016, which came to an end in June 2011, can clearly be seen.

Comparing data from different years can also provide interesting information about the performance of the pages. Each administrator wonders what time of day they should post to provide the greatest possible engagement. Here again, one would be naïve to expect on any obvious solutions, which is confirmed by the following visualisations. The 2015 results do not correspond fully with the stats from the following year. Was this caused mainly by the changing preferences of users, who were more “click-happy” on particular days, or by the policies of the administrators, who deliberately posted attractive content on selected days of the week?

Finally, we can use the visualisation for some more sophisticated analyses, requiring a greater involvement of the researcher or page administrator. For instance, we are able to verify whether the length of a post affects the number of likes it receives, and whether the number of likes translates into other forms of interaction, such as comments and shares.

The above examples point to the explorative potential of data visualisation. Even relatively simple but skilfully applied methods are capable of providing valuable knowledge. The simplest solution is to generate and compare multiple charts broken down into years, categories, etc., using publicly available tools such as Excel spreadsheets or Google Sheets can be. Of course, there is no need to reinvent the wheel. First off, one might try getting acquainted with the statistical tools available in the fan page admin panel and start using them regularly.