Today’s session will start with a brief review of our last session. We’ll review your homework and then jump into how the recent changes to Facebook will impact your core strategy – hint: it won’t. We will help you understand how to use the free Insight tools that Facebook provides you with, and we will lay out some baseline benchmarks for success that you can rate yourselves against. As always, we will be taking questions throughout the presentation and will be answering your questions at the end of the session.
When we last met, we asked you to try something new, whether it was posting at a new time, or varying up your content. Now hopefully you weren’t scared off when the New Facebook rolled out. If you are not aware, Facebook made some changes to the way that your homepage appears when you log in. We’re not going to spend a lot of time discussing these changes because they have NOT impacted the way that you will be measuring and monitoring your success on the network. The changes have done nothing if not reinforce how important it is to develop compelling content and build community. So hopefully you’ve been applying some of what we’ve taught you to your page…
As the admin on a Facebook Page, you have access to “Insights.” Facebook Insights provides Facebook Page owners and Facebook Platform developers with metrics around their content. By understanding and analyzing trends within user growth and demographics, consumption of content, and creation of content, Page owners and Platform developers are better equipped to improve their business with Facebook. Insights are only visible to Page admins, and you will need a minimum of 30 likes on the page in order to get access to Insights. Facebook set the limit at 30 in order to protect the privacy of their users. Insights include information about when things happened on your Page – they are calculated using Pacific Standard Time. The data that you get is not available in real-time, but at most will be 48 hours old. This will make sense when we move on to the next slide.
If you look at your Page, you will see light grey type just below the post itself with some numbers, just like on this post. These numbers do not show up immediately and generally take about a day to appear. They are constantly being updated to stay current. In this post on the Make Me Social Page from September 2 nd , we see 786 Impressions and 1.65% Feedback.
These Insights appear directly on the page but they’re not the only information available to you.
When you go to the Page that you admin, on the right hand side you will see “View Insights” – once you click on it, you will never see Facebook the same way again.
As soon as you open the Insights section, you get access to simple analytics related to the level of awareness and engagement on your page. The sections are split between “Users” and “Interactions.” You can select the timeframe that you would like to examine in detail using the box on the upper right hand side, and you can export that data for further analysis and reporting purposes. Each colored line represents active users over a period of time. For Pages, people are considered active users if they have visited the Page; viewed a post by the Page; or interacted with a post. User activity should increase when posts are made. Generally you want to track the insights to your goals – if your goal is consistent Page growth, you want the “New Likes” to be in the green and constantly be going up. If you want an engaged and active Page, you’re going to want to see healthy levels of active users and be in the green. As you can see here, we have a very active Page. Here you can see the level of engagement on your Page. The engagement and post views are going to be tied together closely. Keep in mind that this is tracking over the course of a month, and the percentages displayed are compared to the month previous – you can see what they’re comparing it to by mousing over the percentage. So I can tell you that the reason that our Post Feedback, which is the number of likes and comments made on Stories, is down 12%, is because the month prior we were posting more frequently and about different topics.
When you click to see the details of the Users section, you will see additional graphs. The ones on this slide show you how many views each post had relative to the amount of engagement. You’re generally going to see a lift in awareness tied to a lift in engagement. It is normal to see a big difference in the number of people who SEE something VS the number of people who ENGAGE with something. The 2 nd chart here tracks New Likes, as well as Like Sources. If you are running a campaign to send people to your Facebook Page from a website or an email campaign, or a campaign that asks people to share your Page, you should start to see the results of that here. You can also see where new likes are coming from, and when they’re coming. Here we see a sharp lift in the blue line around the first Session that we held with you all. The green line that you see at the bottom is “Unlikes.” If you see an increase in Unlikes clustered around a certain timeframe, you’re going to want to look at what content was being posted at that time that caused people to leave.
The demographic information provided gives an overview of what the people who like your Page look like. Now this section is really cool because you can use it to get a really good understanding of who your audience is, where they live, and what language they speak. When we spoke in the previous Sessions about tailoring your message and posting schedule to your audience, this is where you go to figure out who your current audience is. We’ve got a healthy cluster of people on the East Coast, and the majority of our fans are in the United States, so we’re going to want our posting schedule to reflect American Eastern Standard Times. That means that we’re more likely to post at noon Florida time than 3 AM Florida time.
Here you can see the total activity for the Page in the last month. The views are broken out by Tab, and the bulk of the views appear to be going straight to the Wall. Our current landing page for people who don’t like the Page is the “Connect with us!” Tab, so we can assume that the bulk of the views are coming from the existing community, not from new Fans. Since we are not currently actively courting people to bring them to the Page, this makes sense. The External Referrers back this up, with many coming from more passive sources like our email signatures and our blog.
When you dive deeper into the Interactions section, you get this great side by side comparison of the posts that were made and the associated Impressions and Feedback on each post. All of this information can be used to help you refine the type of content that you’re posting, and when you’re posting it. We want you to start paying attention to this and tracking your success OVER TIME. It is very important that you don’t walk away from this thinking, “This month the Insights told me that I did terribly, I need to adjust my strategy IMMEDIATELY.” We want you to track change over time and carefully test changes, rather than jumping headfirst into a new strategy based on small amounts of data.
So how can you know if your page is doing well if you have no idea what a high performing page looks like? What percentages should you be aiming for? How will you know when you’ve found success?
You should be learning each month, and applying what you’ve learned…so there should be growth month over month, and your insights should have lots of green upward pointing arrows. We don’t want you to spend eight hours every day on your Facebook Page and not see any results. We also want to set the expectation that if you’re not spending time refining and evaluating your strategy, you’re not likely to see consistently positive results. It’s safe to say that if your Feedback levels or at or around 1%, you’re doing well. It’s also fair to say that that may not be realistic for your community right now. Use that as a target, and see how close you can get…but don’t assume that getting .5% is terrible if you’ve never gotten above .1%. You should be looking for sustained growth over time.
Test different posting times, content themes, and media types Track the impact that the changes have on your users and engagement levels Analyze the results, try to understand what caused a change, and if it was good, how you can replicate it Make a habit of reporting your findings so that you can accurately track the growth of your page Regroup. Once you’ve started to draw conclusions from the data, figure out how you can apply that new information to your efforts. Examine your strategy and see where you can make it stronger. Look at your content calendar and see what adjustments need to be made. As always, the more educated that you stay about the platform, especially with the changes that are slated to come, the better off you will be.
That brings us to the end of our series, and we want to wrap up the three sessions by giving you three main points. Know your goals, know your audience, and know your platform. Your strategy should help you reach your goals, your content should be developed with the audience in mind, and you should take advantage of the tools and capabilities provided to you by the platform, which is in this case Facebook.
Resources for ongoing education – Facebook for non-profits, Make Me Social, the Global Giving Project Leaders Group, Inside Facebook, and the Crowdsourced Facebook Marketing Book, which is a really comprehensive look at marketing and community management through Facebook.
Meg: Before we go we want to remind you that we work with organizations like yours in a variety of roles to support their social media efforts. ---Review what we can do, and how to contact you.