Ask that question 50 times, and I am sure you’ll get 50 unique answers. Despite the wealth of data and measurement tools available, there still needs to be some clarity on what makes a successful business page, and how you optimize your content for success. Like Twitter and Google+, there are two key categories of metrics you need to understand:
- Engagement: Is your content being noticed; and when it’s noticed, does it influence audiences to engage with it, whether it’s a like, comment, share, or click? When people engage in your content, more people get to see those interactions (viral reach), which can build even more engagement, and build more page likes? The result? The total reach of your messaging increases and the more likely people will pay attention to any promotional messages.
- Traffic & Sales: As stated above, as the reach of your messages increase, the more likely audiences may respond to any promotional messages or clicks to your website or landing pages. If you have any special offers or promotions, that’s when you take advantage of promoted posts and advertising. You do want a portion of your posts directing audiences to your website as long as the post update is creative and compelling in order to give audiences a reason to click.
The purpose of this particular post is to not review all of the specific metrics available on Facebook Insights, but instead to showcase what to do with those metrics in order to create a metrics dashboard where you can evaluate the results of your Facebook messaging, and set the stage to making improvements.
As stated, there are many fine Facebook analytics tools you can pay for, and they give many insights into your Facebook business page management. However, I use my own custom dashboard (below) because it’s my preferred method of reporting results to my clients. My goal as a marketing consultant is to report on trends of KPIs, and recommend optimizations, for any media strategy. The majority of the data you have; just export page and post data from your Facebook Insights dashboard.
For my custom metrics dashboard, I export the last two months of data; the month I am reporting on, and the previous month’s data. I like to show trends and growth. Because I am measuring post engagement, it’s important to avoid paid reach data, because that can skew the results of your regular posting metrics. Promoted Posts and Facebook Offers are important paid strategies to utilize, but again, we’re measuring our overall content and fan page growth strategy, so when possible, exclude paid reach numbers.
I then gather the metrics that are important to me and my analysis. Ask any social media consultant, and they would probably pick different ones; it all depends on the goals of the page, and what metrics mean most to your clients. I gather for each month:
- New Likes
- Lost Likes
- Lifetime PTAT- the number of people who liked, shared, or commented on posts
- Lifetime Post Organic Reach- the number of people, page likes or non likes, exposed to your content
- Lifetime Post Viral Reach- the number of friends of page likes exposed to your content
- Lifetime Post Engaged Users- the number of total engagements with your posts, including clicks on links, images, or videos
- Lifetime Post Total Reach- the total number of people who saw your posts
- Lifetime Page Likes
- Total Posts
From this data, I can produce the dashboard with the goal to measure the trends of the Facebook post activity. This is what I measure:
Virality Rate:
Formula: People Talking About This/ Total Reach
Insight: Of all the people exposed to my content, what is the rate of the sum of post likes, comments, and shares. When people engage with the posts this way, their friends see it, and the viral reach increases. The higher the percentage, the more effective your posts are.
Engaged User Rate
Formula: Engaged Users/Total Reach
Insight: It’s one thing for people to talk about your posts; but if your posts are designed to attract clicks, that’s true content engagement. An engaged user can like, comment, or share, but can also click a link, or view a photo or video. Post clicks (or consumptions) are not seen by friends, but do give you clues to what kinds of content attract high engagement. When users are engaged, your content is working, your branding is emphasized, and you get more clicks to your website.
Post Engagement Rate
Formula: PTAT per day/Page Likes
Insight: Where the above metrics are based on reach, the post engagement rate is based on the number of page likes or fans you have. This metric gives you a measure of how engaged your fans are with your posts. If your post engagement rate is decreasing, your content is not engaging. Time to tweak the post strategy.
Numbers:
Sometimes you just like to see overall growth. Rather than tracking your growth of page likes (which includes advertising sources), I prefer to show reach growth, as reach growth is determined by the quantity AND the quality of your posts.
Organic Reach: The number of unique people who were exposed to your content on their news feeds, ticker, or your page. This number includes fans and non-fans. The more engaged your posts are, your edgerank increases, and that mean your posts show higher in newsfeeds, which also increases exposure.
Viral Reach: Very simply, when fans like, comment, or share a post, their friends see it; the ultimate word-of-mouth metric. Viral reach measures only friends of fans. The more compelling your content is, the more friends of fans see it, and your viral reach increases.
Website Traffic: Very simply, are people who are users of your page and content interested in your products or services by clicking to your website. Taken from Google analytics, you should always be monitoring website traffic from social media sources.
Here’s an image of my Facebook metrics dashboard, developed on Microsoft Excel. If you’d like a copy of it, please click the image and download it. At the end of the day, your goal is to continue to see growth in the metrics over the long haul.
Please let me know what you think of the dashboard. I am very open to comments, or other formulas people use to measure their Facebook business page results. How do you use Facebook Insights? Do you use your own dashboard? What’s your favorite tool?
