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So you’ve set your Facebook strategy live and now you’re trying to report back on the S.M.A.R.T objectives you’ve set for your business. If you’re anything like me you could spend three weeks analysing one day worth of data and still be able to find further insights after that!
If you don’t have that kind of time, see below for my top 5 Facebook insights you should make time to track…
1. Page posts insights
Page post insights are a great way to measure the success of your content and community management strategy. Facebook charts the individual posts made to your page and provides insights around:
- The reach the post received i.e. the number of unique impressions the post has had (note, this is only tracked for up to 28 days)
- The number of people ‘talking about this’ i.e. the number of unique users who engaged with the post in some way which subsequently, created a story which may appear in their friends ‘Facebook ticker’. (Have you seen in your personal ticker.. “Kate Cook likes Reload Media’s photo” No – because you’re probably not my Facebook friend, but you see where I’m going…)
- The virality of the individual post i.e. simply the percentage of users who have engaged with the post out of the total number of unique impressions (talking about this divided by the reach)
- The engaged users i.e. the number of total users who have engaged with the post in some way, with a breakdown of how they engaged with the post and what feedback they gave (if any). This is what we’re most concerned with.
So what do you do with this data? You can monitor how many users have given negative feedback and on which kinds of posts. Ask yourself:
- Are there any similarities between posts where users gave negative feedback?
- Are there any similarities between posts where users gave positive feedback?
You’ll slowly build yourself a winning recipe for community management and content creation based on what your target audience wants to hear and and how they like to engage with you.
2. Percentage difference in audience demographic & geographic data
- Facebook gives a running total of the specific countries and cities your audience comes from. In order to track the percentage increases in this data, I’d recommend simply doing a little Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V into a spreadsheet you can refer back to.
- Make sure to include the date you obtained the data so you can keep track of your running total!
3. Spikes in page views
Just as you would add annotations to your Google Analytics account for spikes in traffic, make sure you do the same (in a spreadsheet or anecdotally) for Facebook.
Ask yourself what other marketing activity you were running that helped to achieve this spike in total/unique visits. Did you:
- Send an eDM out to your database?
- Send an SMS linking to your Facebook page?
- Run a TVC campaign that had a secondary Facebook call to action?
- Have QR codes and vanity URLs on your POS?
Facebook will also, where possible, track the source that your visits came from.
4. Unique users by frequency
- This metric, displays the number of unique users who viewed content produced by the page within the specified time period.
- Although we aren’t able to see the specific posts that received a number of unique user engagement, we are able to track overall return visit rates and thus, how many users within the audience are truly engaged with your brand.
- Track the number of users who viewed content more than 5 times in a month and try to increase this number in the following month through analysing the content that was produced and the engagement rates achieved (refer back to point 1).
5. Pages who ‘like’ you
This feature allows you to see which businesses or brands are endorsing your page on Facebook.
- Not only should you return the favour if the brand is relevant to your industry (social media etiquette) but keep your eyes peeled for any cross promotion opportunities.
- One of the easiest ways to gain relevant and specific followers to your page is to cross promote with pages whose existing audience is likely to be interested in your pages content.
Now that you have an idea of how your strategy is going, you can look to employ tactics to shake things up if you need to, or even just ensure you’re still on track with reaching your goals.
The next step is to start tracking against your competitors! But that’s a blog post for another day…
