TheComplete Guide to Facebook AnalyticsHow to analyze themetrics that matter

Table of ContentsIntroduction

DefinitionsEngagement

Engaged Users

Engagement Rate

Reach

Impressions

Stories

Consumptions

Consumption vs Engaged Users

Like Sources

Paid vs Organic Likes

Facebook TacticsThe New Facebook Insights

How to Increase Your Reach

How to Increase Your Impressions

Basic AnalysesHow to Measure Your Facebook Audience Beyond Fans

How to Determine Which Posts You Should Promote With Facebook Ads

How to Measure the Impact of Visual Content

How to Deal With Negative Feedback

Advanced AnalysesHow to Optimize for Graph Search

How Graph Search Can Simplify Your Facebook Strategy

Analyze to Take Advantage of News Feed Changes

How Analysis Can Help Identify Opportunities

Perform a Competitive Analysis in Your Industry

Conclusion

Simply Measured Sample ReportsUnderstand the Performance of Your Brands Facebook Page(s)

Benchmark Your Brands Facebook Performance Against Competitors

Measure Your Customer Service Efforts on Facebook

Compare Your Efforts on Facebook Against Those on Other Social Networks

Additional Resources and Sources

3INTRODUCTIONChances are, your target audience is somewhere among the nearly 9.6 million users who log in to their accounts as least once per day. Thats good news because Facebook is a gold mine for marketers. Consider these Facebook numbers alone:

More than 1.26 billion registered users (1.19 billion of whom are active on a monthly basis)

350 million daily uploaded photos

4.75 billion average daily shared items

20 billion minutes of usage per day

But its not enough to know that your target audience is on Facebook the key is to reach and engage them and were going to show you just how to do that.

In this comprehensive eBook, we walk you through the most crucial Facebook metrics you need to gauge the performance of your marketing efforts. Then well outline specific ways you can use these metrics to create actionable Facebook strategies. Finally, because even the savviest marketers can find it challenging to make use of all that Facebook data, we share examples of how to use our tools to analyze and report on Facebook metrics yourself.

4DEFINITIONSYou cant measure what you dont know, so well begin by defining all the important Facebook metrics and how theyre calculated. As a social media or community manager, having a firm grasp on these Facebook metrics will help you deliver better results with your Facebook strategy.

The Facebook Engagement Megaphone is a tool we use at Simply Measured, which allows you to track the effectiveness of your post content throughout its life cycle. It will act as a helpful visual as we define Facebook metrics.

The engagement megaphone outlines your Facebook activity; from your posts and posts about your brand to engaged users, to engagement, to reach, and to impressions. You can use this to find out how many people are seeing your content, whether or not people are interacting with your content, and how many new Page Likes your posts are generating.

5EngagementContent is king, but engagement rules. After all, if no one engages with your content, whats the point of creating it? Thats why your number-one priority should be to get people engaged with your brand content on Facebook.

The good news is that Facebook isnt a network for syndication; its a network built for engagement, and recent feature additions show that engagement is more important than ever. The ability to reply to others comments, click on hashtags, and search the web were all designed to keep users on-site and discovering new content with which to interact.

How engagement is calculated

Three elements signify positive engagement with your posts:Likes The number of times people Like your posts, indicating how well your content resonates with people.

Comments The number of comments people make on your posts. While the number of comments is an important metric, the tone of comments can provide insight into how people feel about your content, products, or your overall brand.

Shares The number of times people share your content, measuring how much your content is amplified by those who see it.

EngagementLikes + Comments + Shares

Our calculation for engagement is different than Facebook's calculation.On Facebook, engagement includes clicks.

Why are our calculations different? Clicks are not available in the public Facebook API so we exclude them from total engagement.

6What does engagement mean to you?Engagement with your posts reflects three vital things:

Your brands ability to capture users attention

Your brands ability to create a connection with your content

How many people see your posts

Engagement plays an even larger role in who sees your posts, because it is a major factor in Facebooks News Feed algorithm. This algorithm determines which News Feeds your posts are displayed in and ultimately, how many users youre able to reach. When users engage, the actions they take appear in their timelines, making their connection with your brand visible to their friends. And that contributes to awareness for your brand.

Engagement tells you a lot about your audience - which types of content theyre interested in and whether certain segments of your audience interact more or less with content that is specifically tailored to them. Engagement on certain types of posts can provide insight into the interests of a particular audience for content targeting.

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Brand Post Engagement Breakdown

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7Engaged UsersWhen it comes to your audience on Facebook, there are far more important metrics than your number of Page fans. The engaged users metric is one of them; its a key Facebook metric that measures how many people are actively engaging with your Page.

How engaged users are calculatedThe engaged users metric can be found within Facebook Insights at both the Page and post levels.Engaged users arent just limited to your fans; anyone who engages with your Page is an engaged user.

What do engaged users mean to you?Measuring engaged users goes a step beyond your Pages fan count to tell you how many people are interacting with your Page. Out of the people whom you were able to reach, these are the users who took action on your Page whether as a Like, share, comment, etc. Monitoring engaged users as a percentage of fans over time can help you determine whether youre growing an active or a passive audience.

Engaged users as a percentage of total fans indicates how active your audience is and how valuable your fan growth is from month to month. For example, if the number of total engaged users is up each month as a percentage of total fans, then the quality of your audience is improving. Even the number of engaged users reflects how much your audience is choosing to interact with your brand.

Engaged UsersThe number of people who engaged with your page (including any click or Story generated)

8Engagement with your posts impacts your ability to reach a larger audience. If you cant continue to engage users, they wont continue to see your content. Those who engage on your Page are your most valuable audience segment, since they are the ones consuming and sharing your content across Facebook.

Engagement RateEngagement rate is a metric that you can use to measure your effectiveness at engaging your audience. It can tell you a lot about what content or which post types are the most successful and you can now access this metric in the updated Insights tool.

You can calculate engagement rate in two different ways based on the available data:

If you use public post data in a Simply Measured Facebook Competitive Analysis, you can compare your Engagement as a Percentage of Total Fans against other brands on Facebook.

If you work directly with the engagement rate metric within Facebook Insights, you can see your brands engagement rate, whether for a single Page or multiple Pages.

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9The first option allows you to compare your post or Page performance to other brands on Facebook. Again, this is using public data, not data from Facebook Insights.

The second option allows you to measure your own brands post performance as accurately as possible using Facebook Insights data.

Calculating engagement rate for posts using Insights dataEngagement rate is designed to measure the number of unique users who engaged with your content as a percentage of the number of users that were exposed to it. Facebook Insights data provides in-depth unique user totals for engagement actions on your posts, as well as the overall reach of your posts. This allows you to calculate engagement rate based on more than Likes, shares, comments and clicks.

Example:

100 unique users engaged with a given post and 1000 users saw the post

Engaged users = 100

Engagement rate = 10%

The number of engaged users serves as a valuable metric for measuring content performance and the quality of your audience.

Engagement RatePeople who liked, commented, shared, or clicked on your post / people who saw your post (post reach)

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Calculating engagement rate for posts without Insights dataWhen calculating your engagement rate in contrast to your competitors, remember that you dont have access to their Facebook Insights data. However, you can still draw meaningful insights by looking at engagement for both posts and Pages relative to total fans.

The Simply Measured solution is to perform a calculation for engagement rate called Engagement as a Percent of Total Fans. This is a simplified way to calculate engagement rate to compare competitor engagement rates to your own. So even if you dont have time to delve into the reasons for engagement or lack thereof this can provide you with the context you need to make informed marketing decisions.

What does engagement rate mean to you?Engagement rate on individual posts is a valuable metric for measuring the quality of content that you post to your Page. Specifically, it allows you to compare engagement between two posts. Knowing what share of your audience actually engages with content can indicate whether or not youre reaching the right audience as you grow fans over time.

Engagement as a Percentage of Total Fans allows you to compare engagement on your Page with Pages that have different audience sizes, making it useful for competitive analysis. Comparing your engagement rate to that of your competitors can provide insights about the quality of your audience and your content effectiveness compared to others in your industry.

Engagement RateTotal Engagement (Likes + Comments + Shares) / Total Fans

Sample engagement for Harley Davidson

% eng/total

total engagement

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33%

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ReachOften the first Facebook metric that marketers focus on is the number of fans for a Page. When it comes to measuring the value of your audience though, what matters most is how many people are seeing your content. Thats where reach comes in.

Overall, reach is the primary metric for determining how many people can possibly see your content. Its a powerful performance indicator for tactics that enable your brand to connect with users on Facebook.

How reach is calculatedThere are three types of reach: organic, paid and viral. Understanding and measuring each of these is important to gauge how and why your audience changes over time.

Organic Reach The number of unique people who saw your content in their News Feeds, tickers, or on your Page.

Paid Reach The number of unique people who saw your paid content.

Viral Reach The number of unique people who saw your post or Page mentioned in a Story published by a friend. These stories can include Likes, comments or sharing on your Page, answering a question or responding to an event.

ReachThe number of unique people who have seen content associated with your page

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Measuring reach by type can help you pinpoint the factors that contributed to content views. If organic reach increased, it might be the result of more fans or increased engagement with content. Changes in viral reach can indicate how shareable your content was, and paid reach can tell you whether changes in reach were due to ads on the network.

Reach can be viewed for your Page as a whole, or for individual posts. The difference is how many unique users saw an individual post versus those who saw other pieces of content such as an eBook or report associated with your Page.

What does reach mean to you?Reach measures your brands effective audience. Its a more accurate measure of your Facebook audience than fans, since not all your fans see your posts and many users who do see your posts are not fans of your Page.

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Reach Breakdown by Type

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ImpressionsThe largest challenge for brands on Facebook is making it into users News Feeds. Impressions are a solid metric for understanding how many times your posts are seen and how frequently users are exposed to that content.

How impressions are calculatedLike reach, there are three main types of impressions on Facebook: organic, paid and viral.

Organic Impressions The number of times your content was displayed in a users News Feed, ticker, or on your Page.

Paid Impressions The number of times your paid content was displayed.

Viral Impressions The number of times content associated with your Page was displayed in a Story published by a friend. Stories can include liking, commenting or sharing on your Page, answering a question or responding to an event.

ImpressionsThe number of times content associated with your page is displayed

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Its easy to confuse reach and impressions since both measure the visibility of content and both measure organic, paid, and viral content.

The key difference between impressions and reach is that impressions measure the number of times your content is displayed, while reach measures the number of unique people who saw your content. For example, if five people each saw a post twice, the result would be ten impressions (times displayed) and a reach of five (unique people who saw it).

What do impressions mean to you?Impressions measure your ability to expose people to your content on Facebook. This can help you understand not just how many users youre reaching, but how frequently those users are seeing your posts or content associated with your Page.

Sample impressions breakdown by type

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StoriesWhat is a Facebook Story? If youre active on Facebook, you see them everyday and probably create your fair share.

Facebook Stories are updates from friends about their engagement with a Page, person, event, etc. and they appear in your News Feed.

How are Stories created?Engagement actions that create Stories include: Likes on a Page, engagement on a post, posts on a Page, joining an event, tagging or mentioning a Page, check-ins at a location and other Page interactions.

By viewing trends around Stories associated with your brand, you can identify how effectively your posts are driving awareness for your Page.

Segmenting Stories by user wall posts and engagement on your Page can inform you of actions users are taking that drive awareness of your Page.

StoriesUpdates from friends about their engagement with pages, people, etc. that appear in News feed.

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For example, a high volume of Stories about a specific user post could indicate that an influential user posted or that an engaging discussion took place.

What do Stories mean to you?Stories created about your brand posts build awareness for your Facebook Page. The more people who engage with content on your Page, the better the chances that one of their friends will see a Story associated with it. When people engage with posts on your Page, a description of how they engaged appears as a message in their friends News Feeds. For instance, the message may say, Bob liked X Companys Page or Susie commented on X Companys Page.

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ConsumptionsWhen people think about Facebook engagement, most think of Likes, comments and shares. Thats because these are the primary actions we take as users, and its what we see associated with each post. Theyre also the engagement metrics most often used by marketers to assess performance.

However, Facebook Insights offers a broader measure of engagement that goes beyond Likes, comments and shares. Its called consumptions. How is it different? It includes clicks.

How consumptions are calculatedThe consumptions metric can be found within Facebook Insights at both the Page and post levels.

Within Facebook Insights, the consumption metric is broken down into four segments:

Link clicks

Photo views

Video plays

Other clicks (which includes clicks whether Likes, comments or shares that generate Stories)

Consumptions dont include liking a Page in the Timeline and they dont create Stories in the News Feed; they are limited to clicks on your posts.

ConsumptionsClicks anywhere in your post (whether the click generates a Story or not).

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Viewing how clicks on your posts are segmented can provide additional information about what types of content are engaging people on your Page. It can also put the volume of other engagement actions in context with the number of Stories created. For example, you could look at how many people viewed an enlarged version of a photo on your post versus how many people liked, commented on, or shared it.

What do consumptions mean to you?You might be wondering why you should care about clicks that dont create Stories in the News Feed. The answer is simple: clicks get factored into the News Feed algorithm. That means measuring clicks on your posts gives you a more complete view of engagement, and a better idea of whether your posts will continue to appear in users News Feeds.

When cross-referenced with other key Facebook metrics, consumptions can prove extremely valuable in measuring content performance. For example, by pairing consumptions with impressions, you can establish a click-through rate for each post or content type. And that allows you to measure the frequency of engagement with your content.

In addition, you can pair the number of consumers (unique people who clicked) with reach to measure the percentage of people who actually saw and engaged with your content.

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Consumers vs. Engaged UsersWe already reviewed engaged users, so lets go over consumers and how the two differ. Although the consumers metric is perhaps lesser known, it can actually offer more in-depth insight when it comes to content performance.

How are consumers defined?Consumers are people who clicked on your posts (anywhere within a post), while engaged users are those who clicked on or created a Story anywhere on your Page (this includes liking your Page). Since consumer engagement is limited to posts and engaged users can click anywhere on the Page, the number of engaged users on your Page will always be equal to or greater than the number of consumers.

While both metrics are available within Facebook Insights at the Page and post levels, the number of engaged users and consumers should almost be equal at the post level.

What do these metrics mean to you?Both metrics can be used to measure audience engagement and content performance. However, because of the subtle differences in how each metric is calculated, each has a specific use.

Since the engaged users metric includes Stories generated by clicks on your Page and not just within your content, it is a more complete measure of total engagement on your Page. This makes it great for evaluating how engaged the audience is on your Page.

ConsumersThe number of people who clicked on any of your posts (whether the click generated a Story or not)

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As mentioned earlier, consumers are limited to engagement with your content, not your entire Page. This makes consumers the most accurate metric for measuring post engagement. In addition, consumers can be segmented by the type of engagement action taken, including:

Link clicks

Photo views

This breakdown, found in the Simply Measured Facebook Content Analysis, gives a greater level of insight into how someone engaged with your content and what type of post it was (link, photo or video). Again, remember that clicks generating Stories (including Likes, comments and shares) are included in Other Clicks.

By comparing consumers to post reach, you can calculate the percentage of people who actually saw your content and chose to engage with it. In other words, you can determine what percentage of your audience was engaged at an individual post level. That means consumers is a better metric than engaged users for measuring content performance.

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Like SourcesA growing audience on Facebook is a sign of a healthy community. But you need to do more than measure the number of new fans to understand how your audience is growing and identify effective tactics for sustaining growth. You need to determine how users are finding your Page. To do that youll need to analyze your Like Sources.

How Like Sources are calculatedLike Sources can be found within Facebook Insights, via the Facebook Insights tool and the Facebook Insights data export.

The number of unique people who like your page is broken down by location. In addition, Like Sources within the Facebook Insights tool are broken out into five segments:

On Your Page

Page Suggestions

Ads and Sponsored Stories

Your Posts

Others

Like SourcesThe places where people can Like your page

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Within the Facebook Insights data export, Like Sources can be segmented even further. Dozens of sources exist; however, only the sources your Page was liked from will appear in your data export. Facebook provides the following description for some of the most common Like Sources in its Insights developer documentation:

This isnt the complete list. For example, Facebook further segments mobile sources into mobile ads and mobile page suggestions. This does, however, give you an idea of the granular breakout that is available within the Facebook data export.

Facebook Insights Tool

Ads & Sponsored Stories

Your Posts

Page Suggestions

Others

On Your Page

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What do Like Sources mean to you?Like Sources can help you understand how users are discovering and liking your Page, and provide context for how your other digital marketing components impact fan growth. For example:

Are external connects (e.g., clicks on social plugins) from your website effectively driving users to your Facebook Page?

When you make changes to better integrate social plugins, do you see more Likes?

What percentage of new Likes is driven by Facebook Ads and Sponsored Stories?

Is the third-party app from your latest campaign contributing to fan growth?

How many users liked your Page from a mobile device?

These are questions you can answer with data from Like Sources. From there, you can make more informed decisions about tactics designed to grow your fan Page and better measure the overall impact of your social strategy.

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Paid vs. Organic LikesFacebook advertising is a growing trend, with most brands devoting at least a portion of their social media budget to advertising on the network. According to Business Insider, 74% of survey respondents in August 2013 said their Facebook marketing budgets include spending on paid ads. That number is up from 54% in June 2012.

For brands that advertise on Facebook, its important to be able to segment social media performance by paid vs. organic activities. This includes measuring audience growth, also known as paid Likes.

How paid and organic Likes are calculatedPaid and organic Likes are broken out within Facebook Insights Like Sources, which we reviewed earlier. Like Sources can be viewed within the Insights tool or the Insights data export, where the number of unique people who liked your Page is broken out by location.

You can find the following three sources of paid Likes within Like Sources:

Ads

Mobile ads

Sponsored Stories

The sum of the three sources represents the total number of paid Likes for your Page.

Paid LikesThe number of people that liked your page from an Ad or a Sponsored Story

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Organic Likes are Page Likes that cannot be attributed to Facebook advertising. You can calculate organic Likes by simply subtracting paid Likes from total Likes.

To analyze organic Likes further, you can segment Like Sources to identify whether Likes occurred on your Page, or were generated via a social plugin, third-party app, etc.

What do paid and organic Likes mean to you?When you advertise on Facebook, it becomes more difficult to report on audience growth that is driven organically. Nevertheless, for social marketers, its important to both understand the impact of paid advertising and avoid attributing paid Likes to successful community management tactics. Segmenting paid Likes from total Likes allows you to do just that. By doing this, you can accurately report on community growth while still being able to identify trends in organic growth.

Sponsored Stories will disappear in April 2014.In its place, social context will be automatically added to all Facebook Ad types.

More information here.

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Organic growth trends can be used to identify successful tactics for building your audience. Segmenting fan growth also makes it possible to calculate benchmarks and set goals based on your Facebook advertising budget.

Measuring paid Likes against your advertising spend can provide a benchmark you can use to forecast future audience growth, depending on your Facebook advertising budget. You can also use this benchmark to determine how much you should allocate to your Facebook ad budget.

The challenge of measuring paid ads and forecasting performance isnt limited to Likes. Paid advertising also affects engagement, reach and impressions. Segmenting performance for each of these metrics can help you measure the impact of Facebook advertising on your Page.

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FACEBOOK TACTICSNow that weve reviewed how different Facebook metrics are defined, lets put these metrics to use so you can make more informed decisions, improve campaign performance and enable success.

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The new Facebook InsightsWere kicking off this section with an overview of the new Facebook Insights since its changed the Facebook metrics game quite a bit. In June 2013, Facebook updated its entire Insights tab for page admins. Here are the big differences that you need to understand.

PTAT (as we knew it) is gone

Chief among these changes is that the PTAT (People Talking About This) metric has been broken down and replaced with the sum of its parts:

Page Likes

People engaged

Page tags and mentions

Page check-ins and other interactions

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Easier navigationbut no contextualization

With the new Insights, you get new views and navigation. That means you can easily toggle between several specific views. You can check out a high-level overview of your results on one tab, then easily navigate to other important metrics and KPIs with the click of your mouse. Thats the good news. Though Facebook Insights delivers an impressive amount of data, it can be daunting to put it into context because Insights tabs only help organize high-level metrics. This is where social analytics software like Simply Measured comes into play; it puts all your metrics in one report so you can contextualize your data.

Page and Tab visits

This is our favorite part of the Insights section. Under the Visits tab in your handy new navigation bar, Page and Tab Visits allow you to see which of your tabs are being viewed. Why is this cool? If youre promoting a photo-based campaign, or running a promotion in another tab, you can benchmark that against others on your Page. This allows you to optimize your content much like you would on your website.

Nate Smitha, our Marketing Conversion Manager, explains why this is a good thing:PTAT was an aggregate metric.

It combined important engagement components, and gave you an abstract number of how many people were talking (i.e., creating stories) about your page. But the PTAT metric didnt help you understand how these stories were being created, so it wasnt a metric that marketers could use to make very actionable decisions.

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All posts published

The Posts tab offers some great content analysis, complete with previews of visual content, reach and engagement stats. Of course, Facebook wouldnt leave you high and dry without a way to capitalize on this insight through your ads budget. If youre managing Facebook Ads, this is a great feature for you. It allows you to see your highest-performing content from an organic click-through perspective, so that you can quickly boost visibility of a post in your ad campaign.

People

The People tab gives a great demographic profile of your audience, including a benchmark of All Facebook. While this isnt new, it gives you an interesting way to understand your fans. As you create personas of your ideal customer, content consumer, or audience member, tap into this info to build richer profiles.

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How to increase your ReachMany factors impact the reach of your content. Facebooks News Feed algorithm determines which of your fans see your content, and, further downstream, which fan engagement actions such as Likes and shares are shared with the friends of your fans.

To improve the reach of your content, you can:

Grow the number of active and engaged fans on your Page

Post content that can quickly and easily be consumed

Limit the amount of negative feedback your Page receives (For more on negative feedback, check out How to deal with negative feedback on page 47).

How to increase your ImpressionsTo improve organic impressions, you need to make it into News Feeds more frequently and optimize your marketing tactics for Facebooks News Feed algorithm. Specifically, just as with increasing reach, you should:

Grow the number of active and engaged fans on your Page

Post content that can quickly and easily be consumed

Limit the negative feedback you receive (For more on negative feedback, check out How to deal with negative feedback on page 47).

Paid advertising on Facebook can also drive impressions. For marketers, this highlights the importance of understanding whats driving brand exposure on Facebook.

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BASIC ANALYSESNow that weve outlined and defined all the important metrics, were ready to put them all to work for us.

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How to measure your Facebook audience beyond fansWhen it comes to measuring your audience on Facebook, there is more to it than just fans. Fans can be bought lured with offers and promotions to Like your Page. The fact that they liked your Page doesnt mean that theyre true fans of your brand or that theyre engaged with your content.

Most social marketers know that there is more to understanding their audience than a trended fan count, but many still dont know what they should be measuring to get the complete picture. Without actionable insights, its impossible to steer audience growth, tailor content to your audience or maximize engagement.

Audience analysis is about understanding the following:

With whom youre connecting

What type of content resonates with them

How you can more effectively build a community around your brand

Here are five tactics that will get you focused on the right metrics and give meaning to your Facebook audience analysis.

1. Measure the audience you actually reachThose who see content associated with your Page are not limited to your fans.

For that reason, reach which measures the unique number of people who saw content associated with your Page can give you a better idea of your effective audience.

Reporting on reach over time can help you understand how the sharing of your content impacts your ability to attract and engage your audience. Without reach, you cant accurately measure your potential to engage people or convert them into customers.

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You should segment reach by its three main types organic, paid and viral to understand how your content was shared. Its important to measure each reach type independently because each indicates different things.

Paid Reach Reflects how many people were exposed to a Facebook Ad and will likely be dedicated to driving product awareness and sales rather than engaging your community

Organic Reach Fluctuates based on changes in new fans and engagement with your content but is more likely than paid reach to generate engagement. Monitor organic reach to ensure its growing over time

Viral Reach Changes in this metric can indicate how shareable your content was

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2. Analyze your engaged usersEngaged users are the people who took action on your page or with your content. Growing this audience each month is important. As your number of total fans increase, you want to also grow the number of users who engage with your content (engaged users). In other words, as your fan count grows, you want the percentage of engaged users to steadily scale. If you were to grow your audience with users that didnt engage, the value of that audience growth would be negligible.

When paired with reach, the percentage of engaged users can indicate when engagement is being driven by successful content strategies, such as the right content format or efforts to increase content visibility through promotion (e.g., paid reach).

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While its important to continue growing the number of engaged users, its also important to understand how effective you are at engaging those who see your content. You can do just that by measuring engaged users as a percentage of reach. The more engaged your audience is, the more likely youre reaching the right audience with the right content.

Paid advertising can skew this percentage by inflating paid reach. To avoid distorting this ratio, you can measure engaged users and organic reach at the post level for all posts that werent promoted.

3. Create context for fan growthAlthough the number of total fans isnt the primary metric for measuring your audience, new fan growth can still serve as a community health indicator. With the right context it can help you identify tactics to organically increase your audience size too.

By analyzing Like Sources, you can determine where within Facebook people were or what device they were using when they liked your Page. You can also segment Like Sources to help you identify whether fans were acquired via a paid source (such as paid Likes) vs. an organic source (e.g., organic Likes).

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Daily Paid Likes vs. Organic Likes

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Segmenting Paid Likes can help you spot successful tactics for organic growth.

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Reporting on organic fan growth reveals the number of fans you were able to earn, irrespective of how many ads you ran. Organic growth trends can help you identify events, content and tactics that contributed to fan growth.

Further analyzing organic Like Sources can also help you determine whether your digital properties are effective at driving users to like your Page. For example, are social plugins on your website effectively driving users to your Page? Does better integration of social plugins on your site result in more Likes?

4. Identify your fansTo identify who your fans are, establish an audience baseline using Facebook Insights demographic data.

Then put this data to use. For example, knowing where your fans are located can help inform decisions about what kind of content you share and when you publish it. Say a sizeable percentage of your Facebook fans are in San Francisco and the San Francisco Giants win the World Series. You could use that as a newsjacking opportunity to drive fan engagement. Or consider Ford as an example; when it realized its Facebook Page had a strong following in Germany, it announced on Facebook that it would introduce the Ford Mustang into European markets.

Newsjacking defined: Brand journalism that allows you to take breaking news stories and inject them with your own ideas to generate attention for yourself or your brand.

Page Fans: Demographic Profile Page Fans: Top Countries

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If youre a B2C brand, just be sure to confirm that age and gender demographics match your target audience. Then use sales data to pinpoint the products your social audience is likely to be interested in.

Once youve established a baseline, go beyond fan demographics by building buyer personas that map to certain products or content topics. Measure engagement with content that ties back to personas as part of your regular audience analysis.

This type of analysis can give you a deeper understanding of who your audience is and what content will resonate with them.

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5. Discover when your fans are most activeThere are a couple of ways to figure out when your fans are most active. The first is built into the Facebook Insights tool.

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Facebooks recently redesigned Insights tool displays:

How many of your fans were online each day of the past week

The average number of your fans who saw any posts by hour

This is an extremely valuable tool, but its important to note that it measures when your fans viewed any Facebook posts, not just posts specific to your Page.

The upside is that fan activity isnt biased by when you post; the downside is that its limited to your fans and does not include engaged users.

If you have a well-established Page and a sizeable Facebook fan base, its likely that a large portion of your audience isnt active with your brand on a weekly or even monthly basis.

Before making major changes to how you time your posts, you should validate your findings by analyzing post reach and engagement with your content. This approach is more time consuming, but will help ensure you know when people are most likely to engage with your content.

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How to determine which posts you should promote with Facebook AdsFacebook Promoted Posts are a great marketing tool for amplifying the reach of specific content. Before you start allocating ad dollars though, you need to determine which content is worth promoting.

In this section, we outline five ways you can analyze the data from your Facebook Page to guide your Promoted Posts game plan. The more insights you glean ahead of time, the greater the likelihood of success when you execute.

1. Give new life to old contentAnalyze your content over a historical time period (3, 6, or even 9 months ago) to find posts with high engagement. These top-performing legacy posts have the potential to be successful when promoted. Running a Facebook Content Analysis report will give you an idea of which types of posts and what kind of post content generate the most engagement.

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Here, we see that multimedia posts performed much better than posts with links, generating over twice the engagement per post.

In addition, we can analyze how people engaged on those posts.

2. Recast lower-performing contentNext analyze your lowest-performing content to identify posts that drove little or no engagement. Knowing what hasnt worked gives you the opportunity to recast that content and then give it new life with promotion.

3. Expand the reach of popular contentYou can also analyze your content to identify content with high engagement. Then capitalize on those posts with paid promotion to increase exposure and improve the success of your overall advertising strategy.

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4. Figure out what works for your industry (and your competitors)Analyzing your competitors Facebook content can also help determine which content types and topics to promote. Identifying top performers and understanding what content your competitors use to successfully drive engagement gives you more options when putting together your promoted-content strategy.

5. Figure out what works on other channelsBy determining what works well on other social channels, you could uncover posts that deserve a spot in your promoted plan on Facebook. For example, analyze your top-performing Tweets by engagement, and use your best Twitter content as a base for a few Facebook Promoted Posts.

Evaluating and measuring your current content performance gives you a pre-launch prep list, and sets your campaigns up for success before you spend any money. When you do launch, you will be starting off with a smarter, data-driven plan that will save you time and money.

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Fan Page Comparison: Engagement on Brand Posts

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CONTENT TYPE PERFORMANCE

Most Engaging Content Type

Most Commonly Posted

Best Performance: Coca-Cola

Photos

Photos

Photos

2.5M interactions, 88% of all engagement

387 posts, 58% of all posts

9,258 interactions, .43% of the brands engagement

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How to measure the impact of visual contentYouve probably noticed by now that visual content is one of the most widely used and widely engaged-with content on the internet. Visual content has become more and more impactful as a way to reach potential customers, fans and followers. But with so many services for creating and distributing images, and so many types of visual content, how can you tell which works the best?

Here are some quick ways to analyze your visual content and create a strategy based on past success.

Measure consumptions by post type

With Facebook Insights, you can delve into how many photos are viewed, videos watched and links clicked. Try different types of content and track how they perform over time. This data can be found in our Facebook Page Insights Report.

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Measure total engagement against post engagement

Measure engagement type overall compared to per-post engagement on your various content. Perhaps you see huge engagement on photos but have also posted your photos four times as many photos as any other media. In such cases, it helps to know how successful your photos are on a per-post basis, breaking down Likes, comments and shares. You can measure this in our Facebook Fan Page Report.

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Measure engagement on Instagram

Since Facebook acquired Instagram, the two companies have created a very synergistic relationship so its in your best interests to track how your Instagram photos are performing on Facebook (which you can do using our Instagram Account Report). Then compare this to the performance of your Timeline photos within Facebook to form a solid Instagram strategy.

Engagement Outside of Instagram

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How to deal with negative feedbackFacebook doesnt have a dislike button, but the negative actions users can take can have serious implications for your brand. Namely, negative feedback ultimately limits the reach of your brand posts because of how the Facebook News Feed algorithm works.

Lets break down what constitutes negative feedback on Facebook. Then, with data from the Simply Measured free Facebook Insights Report, well show how to find out how much negative feedback you receive and how to address the related data.

What is negative feedback on Facebook?There are four main types of negative Facebook feedback, each posing different consequences for your brand:

1. Hide Clicks: When fans click to hide a specific post from appearing in their News Feeds

2. Hide All Clicks: When fans click to hide all posts associated with a single company or brand from appearing in their News Feeds

3. Report Spam: When fans report one of your posts as spam

4. Page Unlikes: When users choose to unlike your Page

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Segment negative feedback actionsSegmenting negative feedback can help you understand how its affecting your brand. For example, a fan hiding an individual post is much less severe than if they were to hide all of your posts. When a user hides all of your posts, you lose the ability to share content with them in the future.

That said, viewing individual feedback metrics like Hide All Clicks can give you an accurate picture of how many of your fans are opting out of seeing your content. On the other hand, tracking Page unlikes can show your effectiveness at retaining fans. When trended over time, peaks in negative feedback indicate when youre receiving too much negative feedback. By cross-referencing this with the type of posts and content you published around that time, you may be able to identify the root cause (see Analyze negative feedback by post below).

Negative Feedback by TypeHide Clicks Report Spam Hide All Clicks UnLike

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Negative Feedbackpeaks are red flagsfor brand content

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Create benchmarks for your brandAcceptable levels of negative feedback vary by brand. The volume of negative feedback you receive can be influenced by how much reach your posts get, the size and quality of your audience, and your industry.

Since these factors are unique to your brand, one of the best ways to determine acceptable feedback levels is to establish benchmarks based on the average volume of negative feedback you receive, either by day or by post. Then set goals for decreasing your negative feedback average to help maximize your post reach.

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Analyze negative feedback by postGo a step further than negative feedback Page totals to analyze actions taken on specific posts. Your per-post average will help you flag posts with higher-than-average negative feedback.

Once you identify which posts receive the most negative feedback, determine the post attributes most likely to cause fans to hide your content, flag it as spam or unlike your Page. Going forward, avoid those post attributes.

Account for reach

The more people who see a given piece of content, the more likely it is that someone will find fault with it. In other words, a post with twice as much reach is likely to receive more fan engagement, but also more negative feedback. You can account for this by measuring negative feedback as a percentage of Reach.

Peaks in your negative feedback rate show when more users respond negatively relative to how many users saw your content. This is a powerful metric for determining how much negative feedback is too much.

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ADVANCED ANALYSESFacebooks Graph Search provides an alternative to the major search engines. Since the service is still (fairly) new, at least from a marketing perspective, it can be hard for businesses to pinpoint how to best optimize for it. The answer is that while you optimize to appear in the major search engines using SEO (search engine optimization), you optimize to appear high in Graph Search results using GSO (Graph Search Optimization).

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How to optimize for Graph SearchGraph Search ranks content based on specific user-driven metrics, such as engagement on outbound content, so these are the ones you should focus on. With The Facebook Page Insights Report from Simply Measured, you can analyze these metrics to optimize your Graph Search rankings.

Here are four key metrics to focus on while ramping up your GSO.

1. Engagement on outbound content

Hand-in-hand with how people engage with your Stories and posts is the engagement on your outbound content; by that we mean content that youve posted on your Page. Since the goal with Graph Search will be to have your brand-generated Page, posts and comments show up at the top, its important to focus on this metric. Facebook bases priority in News Feeds on a number of factors, one of which is the number of Likes your content has gotten from the searchers network of friends (or even friends of friends, as a secondary level). Focus on content, stories and comments that are garnering the most Likes and overall engagement.

Engagement Details

Averages Per Post

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Likes per Post

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Comments per Post

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Clicks per Post

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Shares per Post

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2. Page fan demographic profile

Your demographic metrics give you insight into the type of users interacting with your brand, valuable information that makes it easier to cater to your market. Graph Search favors localized content so if youre a brand with more than one location, claim brand Pages for each. If your Page caters to a specific location or type of clientele, optimize your About tab to reflect this by making your profile rich with relevant content and keywords.

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Los Angeles, CA

Other

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3. Stories on user-generated content

The results served up by Graph Search are based on a users connections to friends. Stories generated by users are a very important metric in this regard. With that in mind, make your Page and content sharable, and give users an incentive to promote your brand to their network. Contests and promotions that encourage mentions of your Page are one good way to appear in Graph Searches of a users connections.

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4. Top keywords from comments

Focusing on the keywords appearing in comments can help you in two ways. For one, you can cater content to the conversations people are having, and drive search relevance by better engaging your active audience. Secondly, if the conversations arent driving more traffic to your Page, you can launch a keyword-relevant campaign that steers conversations toward topics that will help your GSO ranking.

How Graph Search can simplify your Facebook strategyIn 2013, Facebook announced that posts and status updates are now part of Graph Search results. This update to the search platform allows users to search content including photo captions, check-ins and comments.

While this feature only allows users to search content visible to them including posts from friends and publicly shared content it also means Facebook marketers can more easily plan campaigns and ad spend based on relevant conversations.

Comment Keyword Analysis

Total Comments 4,045

Facebook 1,020

975Sale

567Analytics

430Data

231Like

90Seattle

87Software

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What does this mean for marketers?As a social media manager, you have to dig through an abundance of data to understand how well youre engaging your intended audience. On Facebook alone, Insights can be overwhelming, Ads Manager is complex, and identifying conversations and topics that your audience is talking about can be daunting unless those conversations directly involve your brand.

The good news is that these users are already talking about your brand. While you want to keep them engaged, happy and purchasing, you still need to reach new users.

There are several ways the new Graph Search functionality can help you do this. While its no replacement for a solid reporting tool that helps you get more from Facebook Insights, these new Graph Search features can help simplify your job as a social marketer.

Check out our powerfulFacebook Analytics

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1. Search for key termsBy searching Posts about The Voice, for example, NBC would be able to see all public posts and conversations about its show something it wasnt able to do in the past.

This type of information can give brand and social media managers great insight into the way their fans are talking about their company, offering, etc., even when they arent tagging the actual Page. To continue with this example, NBCs brand and social media managers could also search on each of the celebrity coaches from the show to identify who resonates with fans, helping shape decisions for their next season.

This opportunity isnt just for giant national broadcasters. Even a small- or medium-sized business can identify conversations within its particular industry. For example, if you sell tools, you can search for Posts about handsaws and find out which competitors, features and projects people are talking about in relation to handsaws.

2. Search by locationIf you run a brick-and-mortar store, youre bound to be more interested in local traffic than you are in Facebook fans from across the country. With the new Graph Search functionality, you can search by location. Lets assume you run Mom and Pops Hardware Store in Seattle, WA.

Posts Written in Seattle, Washington could deliver insight into what people are talking about in general in your city (around the time of the 2014 Super Bowl, the answer was Seahawks). You could narrow it even further by looking at Posts written at Mom and Pops Hardware Store to find out what customers are saying about their experience in your store.

Posts about The Voice

Posts written in Seattle, WA

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3. Search by timeSay you ran a sale at your hardware store last month. Just search on Posts written at Mom and Pops Hardware Store from last month for posts from that time frame to get a sense of whether or not potential customers were aware of the sale.

4. Search your own contentWant to make sure you dont miss a response when you participate in Facebook conversations? Now you can search Posts I commented on or My posts from last year to identify the places you engaged with fans.

So there you have it once youve used Graph Search to identify the conversations to target, you can track success, allocate ad spend and use your analytics to form future strategies.

Analyze to take advantage of News Feed changesIn its most recent attempt to make branded content feel more organic, Facebook announced that it has updated the way Page interactions display.

The update will treat Pages even more like people. If one Page tags a second Page that a user has liked, that post may appear in the users news feed, even if they dont like the first Page.

While the intent of this change is to create a more organic and natural newsfeed for Facebook users (the network ran a survey and found that these stories received high scores), the implications are also awesome for brand pages looking to expand their reach or grow their engaged audience. This change brings Facebook closer to Twitters prerogative; validating the fact that users are less resistant to brand interaction than was once assumed.

Posts written at Mom and Pops Hardware Store

Posts I commented on

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Here are some ways to ensure your page increases its odds of success with this update.

1. Identify Pages that already interact with your Page:Pinpoint brand Pages that already drive engagement for your brand by mentioning your Page, and leverage this attention.

2. Tag pages in posts when you may have similar audiences:This can help grow your audience organically, and gain added exposure for your content among a segment you wouldnt have reached otherwise.

3. Discover new or related audience segments:Identify other brands in your space who engage their audience at a high level, and leverage this attention.

Seems simple enough. But whats next? Aside from guessing, how can we identify brand Pages to involve in our engagement strategy? Here are four types of analysis, using four different Simply Measured reports to help you plan your Page-targeting strategy.

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How analysis can help identify opportunities1. Discover the pages mentioning you:Finding pages that are already mentioning your Page gives you an opportunity to develop content that builds that relationship, and now, leverage their audience.

Using Simply Measureds Facebooks Fan Page Report, we are able to identify the top posters of any brand page, whether we have admin access or not. Using Ducatis Facebook Page as an example lets take a look at their top posters by both engagement and number of posts:

Top Posters by Total Engagement

Ducatisti Integralisti

Zacks Garage

Franck Carini

Ben Kreten

(The users whose posts on your wall have recieved the most engagement)

Melanie Kreten

Juan Carlos

Kelly Cook

Vijay Nalanaglu

Yumi Kawaguchi

Top Users by # of Posts

Ducatisti Integralisti

Ducatisti Integralisti

Valentino Rossi Fan Club

Alpinestars

(The users who have posted most frequently on your wall)

SPEED

Alex Tondini

Franck Carini

Juan Carlos

1,052

37

29

19

17

13

9

8

7

Ben Kreten

8

5

3

3

3

3

2

2

2

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Right away, its clear that Ducatisti Integralisti is both the most frequent poster on Ducatis page, and that their posts have received the most engagement of anything posted on Ducatis wall.

To get a closer look at that engagement, we can open this report in Excel, and flip over to the Posters tab.

Of the engagement on Ducatisti Integralisti posts to Ducatis wall, 219 were shares and 786 were Likes. This suggests that there is both an overlap of Page fans, and interest. This is key to Facebooks News Feed relevancy algorithm. According to the announcement from Facebook:

We look at many factors to make sure the most relevant stories appear in News Feed, including which posts are getting the most engagement (such as Likes, comments, shares and clicks) across all of Facebook. We also consider which posts are getting the most engagement from people who Like both the Page that posted and the Page that was tagged.

2. Find large pages catering to similar interests:If you have a large list of competitors or industry frienemies, theres a good chance that theyve reached a large group of potential customers that you havent. Find out who they are, and how theyre doing it.

Competitive analysis is one of the most versatile and under-utilized types of analysis. Theres a lot you can learn from your competition, and in this case, a lot you can leverage.

Ducatisti Integralisti is the most frequent poster on Ducatis page. Since Ducatisti Integralisti is a Ducati-focused site, this isnt surprising, but its very possible that not everyone who Likes that page also Likes the Ducati page. Ducati could take advantage of this potential by tagging Ducatisti Integralisti in their Page Posts. With Facebooks newest change, this gives them a new potential to show up in relevant feeds.

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With the Facebook Competitive Analysis Report, you can add competitors or successful companies in your space, and identify trends in engagement. Once youve done that, you can have a good understanding of how and when to mention them in a Post, and leverage their audience.

In the above example, Special K had the most engaging Tweet, leading the way with a post about Mothers Day. If Ive determined that Id like to attract the audience that engages with Special Ks Facebook Page, this presents a great Mothers Day theme for me to use, as opposed to only talking about our products, which may compete for market share.

3. Learn when to time your mentionsOnce you know which Pages youre looking to leverage, its time to focus on tactics. How do you plan on doing this?

While Facebook offers a plethora of public data on your Page and your competitors Page, you can also access data thats private to you as a Page admin. The Facebook Page Insights Report can give you some great data about when to plan your attack, so to speak.

Fan Page Engagement Comparison Over Time on Brand Posts

Honey Bunches

Cheerios

Special K

Capn Crunch

Frosted Mini-Whe...

Kelloggs Frosted...

Kashi

Fan

Inte

ract

ions

(Li

kes,

com

men

ts, p

osts

,

6K

5K

4K

3K

2K

1K

0

MOST ENGAGING POSTS FROM PEAK

From 5/13/12 by Special K

From 5/11/12 by Cheerios

From 5/21/12 by Special K

4,830 Interactions

2,317 Interactions

2,683 Interactions

5/1/

13

5/3/

13

5/5/

13

5/7/

13

5/9/

13

5/11

/13

5/13

/13

5/15

/13

5/17

/13

5/19

/13

5/21

/13

5/23

/13

5/25

/13

5/27

/13

5/29

/13

5/31

/13

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In the optimization section of the report, you can identify the peak times that your audience is logged into Facebook. If youve done your homework, this will mirror the data for industry-aligned pages youre looking to target. Pick your times wisely. Mention other pages at peak times to ensure it displays in their fans News Feeds.

When Are Your Fans Online?

250.0 M

200.0 M

150.0 M

100.0 M

50.0 M

0

ThursdayWednesdayTuesdayMonday Friday Saturday Sunday

# o

f Fa

ns O

nlin

e

12am 3am 6am 9am 12pm 3pm 6pm 9pm

Top Time

8am - 9am For Online Fans

7am - 8am For Brand Posts

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4. Test and measure everythingOnce youve started your campaign, and are mentioning other brand Pages, its time to measure. Did it work? Which one worked the best?

Using the Facebook Post Insights report, you can determine which posts led to the highest engagement.

Analyze whether or not tagging the brand pages boosted your engagement per post, or if it stayed relatively flat. This will help you understand the value of engaging with specific pages.

Make sure you take into consideration your overall content goals when it comes to Facebook. Youre looking to see which post drove the most engagement, but also what type of engagement. If tagging a specific Page led to a lot of photo views, but no link clicks, which was the goal of the content, it may be time to reevaluate or try a different angle.

30K

25K

20K

15K

10K

5K

0

Post Consumptions Over Time

5/9/

12

5/21

/12

6/8/

12

5/18

/12

6/5/

12

5/30

/12

5/1/

12

5/12

/12

5/24

/12

6/11

/12

5/3/

12

5/15

/12

6/2/

12

5/27

/12

6/14

/12

5/6/

12

Photo Views Other Clicks Video Clicks Link Clicks

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Perform a competitive analysis in your industrySocial media puts an incredible amount data at your fingertips especially when it comes to analyzing your industry as a whole. Weve built reports that help you benchmark engagement across channels, measure share of voice, and analyze your competitors content from all angles. From this, weve created a guide on how to analyze your competitors using Facebook data, which dives into:

Competitive Benchmarks We can help you find out how you stack up against competitors in your industry based on key metrics like engagement.

Competitive Analysis We tell you how to find out why your posts or your competitors posts perform well. This includes sentiment around campaigns like promoted posts, or specific topics.

Competitive Insights We help you discover how to use this data to find out how to modify your Facebook strategy to outshine the competition.

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CONCLUSIONNow that you know what each of the Facebook metrics means and how to analyze them, its time to put that knowledge into play. If you dont currently have a tool to help you dive into all of your Facebook data, wed love you to try Simply Measureds full suite of powerful social media analytics reports.

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SIMPLY MEASURED SAMPLE REPORTSSimply Measured provides a measurement and reporting solution that aggregates social media data and web analytics from more than a dozen sources and presents it in a single dashboard. Weve provided samples of reports used by more than 30 percent of the top 100 global brands and over 80,000 users who are Simply Measured customers.

Answer questions about Facebook Page performance and engagement, as well as fans, posts, Likes, comments and engagement trends. Dig into the most effective posts and the impact theyve had on your Page and your audience.

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Understand the performance of your brands Facebook Page(s)

Facebook Page Insights Report *This report requires authorization from your Facebook Page

Facebook Post Insights Report *This report requires authorization from your Facebook Page

Multiple Channel Facebook Analysis Report (Mashable)

Facebook Content Analysis Report (Cheerios)

Facebook Domain Insights Report *Requires use of Facebook Social Plugins

Instagram Account Report

Benchmark your brands Facebook performance against competitors

Analyze the audience, content and engagement trends of any Facebook Page, allowing you to understand your competitive position, performance and market share compared to your competitors.

Measure your customer service efforts on Facebook

Dive into individual user posts, track response rates and times, and analyze a dedicated customer service Facebook Page in relation to your main brand Page to understand your customer service effectiveness.

Facebook Customer Service Analysis (Home Depot)

Compare your efforts on Facebook against those on other social networks

Measure your efforts on Twitter in context with Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, YouTube, Google+ and more. Compare audience size and growth, as well as post engagement across all major networks.

Complete Social Media Snapshot (RedBull)

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ADDITIONAL RESOURCES AND SOURCES

http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/29/4783702/the-faces-of-facebook-natalie-rojas

http://investor.fb.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=802760

http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AMDA-NJ5DZ/2301311196x0xS1326801-13-3/1326801/1326801-13-3.pdf

http://socialbarrel.com/facebook-photo-library-now-250-billion-user-photos/53315/

http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/24/facebook-growth-2/

http://www.businessinsider.com.au/marketers-are-spending-more-ad-dollars-on-facebook-2013-9

https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/under-the-hood-building-graph-search-beta/10151240856103920

http://www.insidefacebook.com/2013/04/22/graph-search-optimization-the-new-seo-and-what-it-means-for-social-advertisers/

http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2013/03/creating-content-facebook-graph-search/

ABOUT SIMPLY MEASUREDSimply Measured is a fast-growing team of data geeks dedicated to making the world of analytics and reporting a better, more beautiful place.

Our goal is to put the tools to understand business data in the hands of business users. We think reporting should be simple, beautiful, and accessible for everyone not just data scientists. Our software streamlines the process from data to deliverables and eliminates the countless hours spent on everyday reporting tasks. We do this by putting cloud data sources at your fingertips, providing a marketplace of best practice reports, and generating beautiful deliverables on the web, in Excel, and in PowerPoint with a couple of clicks.

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