Download our latest eBook completely free for valuable insights on why you should start viewing your social media campaigns & management as a science, not an art. Changing your mindset on this can lead to fantastic results through the disciplines of analysis and optimisation, and this book will help you achieve this across your organisation.

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2. Legal Notice:
© Datify 2013 . All rights reserved
This book is not intended for use as a source of specific business advice.
Any advice, recommendation, information, assistance or services given by
the author within this ebook is general information, and your individual
situation needs to be taken into account before acting on this advice.
The information contained with the ebook is given in good faith and is
believed to be accurate, appropriate and reliable at the time it is given,
but is provided without any warranty of accuracy, appropriateness or
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information, assistance or service, to the extent available by law.
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3. FACEBOOK COMMUNITY
MANAGEMENT: IT’S A
SCIENCE, NOT AN ART
D
o you run a Facebook page for your business? If so, this short guide
will help you realise the potential of your page by following a set
process to make community management much more scientific.
I’ve personally been involved in running
Facebook pages for a number of years,
from small local business pages right
up to those of multi-national companies
with millions of fans. No matter what
size your business or Facebook page
is, this process will work for you if
implemented correctly.
Not every page is run for the same
reason; for some it’s all about
brand awareness, for others it’s
customer service, however all should
fundamentally believe in the core
concept of return on investment. If
your budget for Facebook isn’t either
generating a profit, or paying for itself by
generating cost savings, then it’s time to
make a change.
How, you ask, can often light-natured
content posted on a social media
platform be classed as a science? The
answer is data, and lots of it. Facebook’s
platform is absolutely bursting at the
seams with rich, user based data allowing you to stay one step ahead of
your competitors by becoming immersed
in it and the insight that can be drawn
from the data.
The whole concept relies on a belief in
the following statement:
Content/community management on
Facebook is a science, not an art
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4. 1
STEP ONE: FIND YOUR
COSTS & SAVINGS
Step one is probably the simplest of
them all - whether you already run a
Facebook page for your business or
are just about to start, the first step
is to figure out your costs. Not your
advertising budget, or how much you’re
paying an agency, but your true, full
costs. This includes you and your teams
time, any impact on the brand if there’s
a social disaster, project management,
advertising costs, and the cost of any
tools you may want to use.
My tip here would be not to underestimate. Doing Facebook properly
requires commitment. I’d personally
recommend using an agency for
your advertising and at least some of
your community management due to
the expertise required. Even then,
your in-house costs shouldn’t be
underestimated in terms of customer
service work, project management and
educating any agencies on the brand
and business.
On the flip side, you should also
calculate savings during step one. The
more engaged and larger your fan base
becomes, the lower your traditional
customer service costs may be for
example. All of this will naturally
depend on your business - however it’s
worth factoring in these calculations at
this early stage.
Most tools that you would want to
use are relatively cost-effective. For
in-house use we’d recommend the
following tools:
DOING FACEBOOK PROPERLY REQUIRES
COMMITMENT. I’D PERSONALLY RECOMMEND
USING AN AGENCY FOR YOUR ADVERTISING AND AT
LEAST SOME OF YOUR COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT.”
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5. Measurement And Reporting
• Social Bakers is a great tool
to measure your page &
competitors (starting from $50
per month)
• Scoreboard Social (starting from
$14 a month) offers competitive
scoreboards
• Unmetric offers competitive
analysis and alerts
Content Posting & Scheduling
• Sprout Social for posting
(starting from $39 per month)
• Hootsuite is an enterprise
content scheduling & community
management system (starting
from £7.19 a month)
• PostPlanner (from $19 a month)
Reverse personas can really help here
- don’t think at this stage about who
your business is talking to in this arena
(that comes in just a sec), but think
about who your business would be if it
were a person.
Take a page like Paddy Power for
instance. They have a very defined
positioning as a funny friend who is in to
sport & gambling. Their persona appeals
to your cheekier side and is very tonguein-cheek, even when getting down to the
serious business of betting odds.
Take this post for instance. There’s not
many brands with 1m fans who would
post this, however due to Paddy Power’s
understanding of who they are trying
to be and who they are talking to, they
know that content like this is appropriate
and will work for their audience.
Don’t let step one put you off. It’s correct
and right that you fully figure out any
costs and savings at this stage, to ensure
that you can fully justify your Facebook
commitment further down the line and so
that you have a clear target to quantify ROI.
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STEP TWO: (RE)DEFINE
YOUR POSITIONING
Again, whether you’re new to the
Facebook arena or already established,
step two shouldn’t be taken lightly. Now
may be a great time to (re)define your
brand positioning on Facebook.
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6. A good example of page that is not
clear of their vision at the moment is
Indesit (makers of washing machines
and dishwashers). At the moment they
speak to their audience as a football fan
and as a mum - something which doesn’t
quite sit together and doesn’t seem to
be resonating with the audience - take
these two posts for example:
The key at this stage is to be creative
whilst being true to your brand. Don’t
decide to make your business something
it isn’t for Facebook - stay true to who
you are as much as possible.
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STEP THREE:
UNDERSTAND
YOUR AUDIENCE
Step three is where things start to get
really interesting, and where you can
start developing a real edge over your
competitors. Again, this applies whether
you are an existing Facebook page or a
brand new one.
They are just a couple of days apart,
but worlds apart in terms of what
the brand is trying to be - as a result
Indesit actually have very poor
engagement rates on their page
compared to their competitors.
Using Facebook’s Power Editor, Facebook
insights, and other available tools, you
can begin to profile your audience to find
out who they are (if they exist already on
your page), or who you want the audience
to be if you are just starting out.
THE KEY AT THIS STAGE IS TO BE CREATIVE
WHILST BEING TRUE TO YOUR BRAND. DON’T
DECIDE TO MAKE YOUR BUSINESS SOMETHING IT
ISN’T FOR FACEBOOK - STAY TRUE TO WHO YOU
ARE AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE.”
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7. Facebook Insights
The first port of call for existing Facebook pages is
your Facebook insights panel [above]
Facebook have recently (June 2013) released
a new version of Insights which gives you even
more data than ever. If you navigate to the
“People” tab at the top you start to get a really
interesting overview of some key stats to help your
understanding of your current audience.
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8. The first screen you are presented with
on the “People” tab shows the current
age & gender split of your audience as a
percentage as compared to all of Facebook.
This is a really useful way of showing your
audience visually and seeing where you over
index versus the average. As you can see in
the example above, this page is much more
female focussed than Facebook overall, and
particularly over indexes in the female 18-24
group, and in the female 35-54 age bands.
This page is particularly weak in the male 2534 category in terms of pure numbers.
This gives an initial view as to who your
audience are in terms of age & gender
and locations. The next question you
need to ask yourself is whether this is
the audience you want, or whether this
is just the audience you have happened
to attract. The page shown in the graph
for example is positioned to appeal to
males also, but as their conversions have
proved much higher amongst females they
have continued their focus on female fan
acquisition and content.
Underneath the age and gender graph there
Next, click on the “People Reached” tab.
This, as the name suggests, shows you
is also a handy table showing the size of
your audience by geography (city & country),
and language. This again helps guide you,
particularly if you are a multi-national business.
the percentage of your audience (by age &
gender) who you have reached with your
content. This time the comparison is versus
your overall fan base as shown below.
THE NEXT QUESTION YOU NEED TO ASK YOURSELF
IS WHETHER THIS IS THE AUDIENCE YOU WANT,
OR WHETHER THIS IS JUST THE AUDIENCE YOU
HAVE HAPPENED TO ATTRACT”
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9. As you can see, in this example the page
is over indexing in it’s reach amongst 1317 year olds, but overall the reach figures
are broadly in line with the audience make
up. This is a fairly natural looking profile pages that have undertaken more ‘spammy’
content methods in the past may see much
less natural looking graphs in terms of their
reach at this stage.
The third view, “People Engaged” is
even more interesting. This shows the
percentage of your engagement versus
the percentage of your audience by age &
gender, as shown below:
As you can see for this page, the
engagement is over indexing for females,
with 74% of the people engaged being
females, as compared to 65% of the
audience being female. This is being seen
across all age groups with the exception of
the 18-24 band. In fact 18-24 year olds are
the least engaged as a percentage of their
the competition for their attention, or due to
the content not quite fitting their needs.
audience split for this brand, perhaps due to
audience is predominantly female (in
This page really starts to show some key
facts for understanding your audience,
which gives you a strong steer when
developing your strategy. The above page
for example would now know that their
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10. terms of number of audience members and
engagement) and can clearly see where
their audience is lacking. This gives you a
top level overview of who they are, but to
start getting deeper, more data is needed.
The second phase of understanding your
audience is where businesses that are
new to Facebook should also begin their
quest for understanding, as the above
Insights information will not be available
to you at this stage without an audience
already in existence.
Power Editor
A little considered calculation is the
‘Estimated Reach’ section of Facebook’s ad
system. This metric can start to really guide
you by giving top level numbers as to the
potential audience you can reach.
I’ll explain how this all works in a second,
but first now is the time to introduce
yourselves to Facebook’s Power Editor tool.
This tool is somewhat of an ugly-duckling,
but it’s usage for bulk advert editing (and
therefore bulk data extraction) is a lifesaver.
This tool can be found at https://www.
facebook.com/ads/manage/powereditor.
The tool itself is a true advert bulk editor, it
only updates to the system by the download
& upload buttons in the top right hand side
of the screen for instance, allowing you
to create and play with campaigns (and
estimated reach numbers) without spending
any money or affecting any campaigns that
are currently live.
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The key to analysing data from Power
Editor is to create multiple adverts (using
the bulk creation tools) and then taking
the estimated reach numbers from each.
Initially, think of the questions you may want
to answer, such as:
• How many people are interested
in football in the UK?
• Where are my competitors
audience located?
• What is the gender split on my
competitors page?
• How does the Facebook audience
age look across my industry?
Questions such as this, and many more,
can be answered in this way by taking a
methodological approach. Think of this in

11. the same way you’d A/B test a traditional
advertising campaign - creating variations
that give you individual results.
Let’s take a couple of these examples and
break it down. The first is quite simple, to
find out how many people are interested
in football in the UK on Facebook, simply
create a new campaign and advert, set the
location targeting to UK and in the broad
categories section choose soccer/European
football. This will give you a result much
like this, showing that there are 10.2m
people interested in football in the UK.
Alternatively you may choose to not trust
Facebook’s broad categories (or your
question may fall outside of their scope).
In this case, define your audience by all of
it’s component pages and add them in the
precise interests box.
It’s worth noting at this stage that the
estimated reach numbers have been subject
to some intense rounding from Facebook
recently. Until May 2013 the numbers were
to the nearest 20 users, whereas now they
are rounded to much higher (proportionate)
numbers. This means a little richness
has been lost from the data, however for
observing trends and picking up big data in
aggregate this tool is still very useful.
field and change the country or city field
and make a note of the estimated reach for
each variation. This can be time consuming
if there’s a lot of variables to check, but can
give a lot of insight for your strategy.
Bringing It All Together
Once you have the results from your own
page Insights, and industry or competitor
stats based on the data you have decided
to mine from Power Editor it’s time to pull
everything together.
A useful technique is to create personas
based on the data you’ve pulled and think of
your audience in this defined way.
Let’s say you’re a travel brand, and the
data you’ve pulled out indicates that your
audience is older & more female than the
average Facebook audience (in terms of size
& engagement), that the audience of your
competitors is split between the UK & Spain
primarily, and that your potential audience
are highly interested in business pages as
well as travel related topics. This may lead
you to creating a couple of personas such as
the below:
To take the second example question of
“Where are my competitors audience
located?”, simple create an advert with your
competitors page in the precise interest
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12. • Persona 1: Wealthy, retired
couple in the UK looking for
regular luxury breaks
• Persona 2: Expats living in
Spain, looking to keep in touch
with family and travel home for
key holidays
• Persona 3: 45+ year old
business woman looking for
stress-free travel
• Persona 4: Working couple
with teenagers looking for
family breaks
competitors content (rather than their
audience) to find out what is working for
them in terms of content types, posting
times, content themes and tone of voice to
ensure that your Facebook content offering
is competitive.
Our Datify data is really useful at easing the
pain of this step as we can analyse any pages
content quickly and efficiently, however there
is a manual, but labour-intensive way of
pulling this data out yourself.
Creating your personas based on this data
allows you to focus your thoughts when
planning your content later on. We’ll re-visit
your personas later on in the process so
keep them towards the front of your mind.
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STEP FOUR: EYE UP
THE COMPETITION
I personally find this stage the most fun
of them all, but that’s because I’m data
focussed by nature. Others may not find the
competitor data quite as enthralling, but
the results that can be gained from this step
should not be underestimated.
In step four we’re going to delve into
CREATING YOUR PERSONAS BASED ON THIS DATA
ALLOWS YOU TO FOCUS YOUR THOUGHTS WHEN
PLANNING YOUR CONTENT LATER ON”
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13. In essence you need to extract every post from
your competitors page (which can be a very
manual job) and capture key data such as:
performing against your competitors. This
may lead to you having a number of graphs
like this to study:
•
•
•
•
Time of post
Date
Day of the week
Post engagement (comments,
likes & shares)
• Type of post (photo, link, status,
video)
• Content themes
There are tools that can help you get part
of the way towards this goal, such as Social
Bakers, however you will still need to do a bit
of manual work to collate all of the data into
the optimum format.
Once you have all of this data to hand, do the
same for your page so that you can analyse
each part to come up with conclusions as to
where you are over performing and under
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14. When you have your page and your
competitors pages side by side like this
you can really start to see differences
in strategy. There’s nothing wrong with
borrowing a competitors plans based
on data like this - in the above example
for instance it would be sensible to
switch the volume of status and video
posts on the brand page similar to the
competitor page based on the average
post engagement rates being seen.
5
STEP FIVE: GENERATE
IDEAS & DRAW
UP YOUR INITIAL
CONTENT STRATEGY
Now that you understand your audience
and can see how your competitors are
doing (and what they are doing better
than you) it’s time to put your strategy
down on paper. All of your hard work on
the above steps will pay off at this stage.
With the above data in mind, it’s time
to get a little creative, but with defined
boundaries set by what the data says
and what you want to achieve. This will
help you focus your brainstorm and
come up with the most relevant ideas.
Once you have a strong bank of
ideas, laying them out into a content
calendar requires a little leg work.
We recommend doing a day by day
collaborative spreadsheet detailing the
following aspects for each post:
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•
•
•
•
•
- Content Type
- Images/Video to be used
- Post Copy
- URL Used (if any)
- Content Theme
We’d also include key events along the
top of your content calendar to ensure
you don’t miss any of the topical posts
that can draw so much engagement.
Your overall posting strategy should

15. be defined by the data found in steps
two, three and four. This should include
times of day you are posting, number
of posts by day, number of posts by
content type, the types of themes you
should be talking about and other key
aspects that the data brings out. This
allows you to start from place led by
intelligence, rather than going in blind.
It also allows you to be very clear on
your starting point which will make
optimisation clearer as you go forward.
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STEP SIX: MONETISE
YOUR ENGAGEMENT
As part of your initial content strategy
it is absolutely acceptable to include
some commercial posts - whether they
be pushing your products, services or
just about your key brand messages. A
common mistake made by social media
managers creating their first content
strategy, or for businesses taking their
first steps on Facebook is to overload
their content with too many commercial
posts. This can lead to a very unengaged
page and needs to be avoided.
As a general rule, having one in five
posts as commercially led is about
right when you start out, and this can
be increased to one in four, or even
one in three over time depending on
how your audience react and how your
engagement rate performs. Naturally
you’re posting to Facebook to try to
generate return on investment for your
activity, but at first this can require a
little patience so as to not alienate your
early audience.
When you are creating commercial
posts, it is key to do them in the right
way. The ideal is to still use photo
based posts with short text and a link to
your product or service. Try not to be
too sales-y as Facebook isn’t really this
kind of environment.
Ensure that you use trackable campaign
links in your posts to enable you to
measure the effect of each post on
your bottom line. You can do this by
using the Google URL builder (https://
support.google.com/analytics/
answer/1033867?hl=en) for each post
NATURALLY YOU’RE POSTING TO FACEBOOK TO
TRY TO GENERATE RETURN ON INVESTMENT FOR
YOUR ACTIVITY, BUT AT FIRST THIS CAN REQUIRE
A LITTLE PATIENCE SO AS TO NOT ALIENATE YOUR
EARLY AUDIENCE
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16. with different tracking variables. For
instance you may name each post by
date and content theme, or simply by
date and time so you are able to track
back the performance of each in terms
of referrals and sales in Google Analytics
later.
Use a shortlink generator such as bit.
ly for these posts - this tidies your posts
by constricting the long campaign URL
you will have generated to just a few
characters, and is nowadays seen as
a norm with no stigma around being
clicked by the vast majority of users.
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STEP SEVEN: MEASURE
& ITERATE - OR PIVOT
Now that you are all set up with
an understanding of the data, a
content strategy and calendar, and a
monetisation plan for your page it’s time
to start running your content.
The key to good Facebook management
is in measurement and optimisation,
and in following all of the steps above
you’re already in a far better place than
most to take the next step.
At this early stage I’d recommend fully
delving into your data every 2-4 weeks
in order for you to measure what is
happening and how you are performing.
In essence this will be a revision of steps
three and four, to see how your audience
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is developing and how your content is
faring versus that of competitors.
There is plenty of useful data to pull
out of Facebook Insights to get a quick
indication of performance such as
post engagement, page reach, the
demographics of your audience who
are engaged and so on. However, more
value can be gained by using more
bespoke methods.
Creating and studying graphs like the
below can give really valuable insight as
to how to optimise your posting strategy
based on real life data:

17. In the above example for instance, it
would be fair from looking at this data
to increase the number of interaction/
games posts, and may potentially be
worth reducing commercial posts in
favour of brand awareness posts which
may achieve the same goals but have a
slightly higher engagement rate.
Measure all of your key metrics such
as engagement rate, interaction
rate, shareability, reach and others
singularly, and also versus competitors
and also as comparative elements
across your own content by categorising
and segmenting.
Constant measurement and
optimisation is the key to success in
running a Facebook page, allowing you
to stay ahead of the changing desires &
make up of your audience.
performance of your page over time.
This will allow you to increase your
brand awareness, and return on
investment by using data to plan your
content intelligently.
All that is required is a hunger to better
your Facebook presence, a belief in
optimisation, a knowledge of the key
metrics and how to mine the data, and
some data analysis skills to draw out
the key insights that will make the
difference for your page.
A lot of the above is labour intensive,
which is where Datify can help - we
provide full data analysis, content
strategies, regular reporting, as
well as full content management
services, covering strategy, creation
and implementation.
If your analysis finds that things are
really not working for your audience,
it may be worth pivoting - which in this
case would involve returning to the start
of this whole process and working your
way back through to come up with a new
strategy to engage your audience.
SUMMARY
If you follow this process, I am confident
that your Facebook page will perform
better than before and that you will
be able to continually improve the
datify.co.uk
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18. SO WHAT’S NEXT? GET
IN TOUCH TO SEE HOW
WE CAN HELP YOU.
@datifyuk
www.datify.co.uk
info@datify.co.uk
Datify
26 Priestgate
Peterborough
PE1 1WG
GET IN TOUCH FOR A FREE INITIAL REVIEW OF
YOUR FACEBOOK CONTENT AND A NO-OBLIGATION
PROPOSAL FOR HOW WE CAN HELP YOUR PAGE
GROW IN TERMS OF SIZE AND ENGAGEMENT
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