With the explosive growth of social media (and social media platforms) it is understandable that a lot of people (and businesses) are sceptical about introducing social media as part of their marketing mix. Add to that the frustration of so many metrics across each social media platforms to keep track off, that there is no wonder people end up confused.
In this chapter, I hope to demystify some of the pain points around social media analytics and metrics so that you, or your business, can start implementing a great social media campaign.
Let me start by explaining the analytics and important metrics for each of the 4 big social media platforms. These are metrics that only you as the page owner have access to.
In the Key Performance Indicators section, I will also go through some metrics that you can use to benchmark yourself (month on month) against your competitors.
Finally, I will discuss some reporting tools that allow you to connect all your social media accounts together in order to get a combined report, as opposed to having to log into each of your social media accounts to get the data.
Social Media Platform Analytics
While you may not be active in all of the social media platforms, there are many reasons you might want to look into platform specific analytics. Perhaps you have different people reporting to you on different platforms, or perhaps you’re testing the waters with Facebook before jumping into any of the others.
This section will explain important metrics to measure on a platform specific level and which metrics can help you create a better strategy. Please keep in mind these are usually learned from there own propriety analysis tools, and therefore it may be difficult to benchmark against competitors. (Please see Key Performance Indicators section for more details on this)
Facebook Insights is Facebook’s own “analytics” software and allows you to measure a significant amount of detailed information about your Facebook page and posts. However, exporting your data can seem like one large data dump if you don’t know what specifically to look for.
Many books have been written about Facebook metrics, analysis and interpretation, but let’s cut to the important stuff and work out if your Facebook strategy is working and what type of content is pleasing to our audience ( and drives sales)
To simplify matters, I have highlighted below the key metrics you should keep an eye on. I have divided these into Facebook Page metrics (metrics that are measured on a page level) and Facebook Post metrics (metrics that are measured on a post level)
Page Specific Metrics
To run a successful Facebook campaign, you want to be able to get an overview of how your page is performing as a whole. Therefore there are a few specific reports you can run from Facebook Insights on a Page Level basis.
When logged into your Facebook Page, select “Insights” from your Admin Panel and click on “Export Data”. This will give you the option to export data on a Page level basis.
The metrics you want to follow on a Page level basis are:
Daily People Talking About Your Page
This includes the number of people sharing stories about your page. These stories include liking your Page, posting to your Page’s timeline, liking, commenting on or sharing one of your Page posts, answering a question you posted, responding to one of your events, mentioning your Page, tagging your Page in a photo or checking in at your location.
Daily Page Stories
The number of stories created about your Page. Stories are created when someone likes your page, tags your page in their status, answers a question on your page, likes, comments or shares one of your posts, tags your page in a picture and checks in to your page.
Daily Total Impressions
This highlights the number of impressions seen of any content associated with your Page. (This is basically the number of times any of your content has been seen, even if people didn’t click on it in their newsfeed.)
Lifetime Total Likes
This illustrates the total number of unique users who have liked your Page. Note – this is an accumulating number, and should be growing!
Daily New Likes
The number of new people who have liked your Page each day
Daily Unlikes
The number of ‘Unlikes’ your page has received each day.
All of these can be exported for a particular time period, and it would be smart to get a total for each, so that you can conclude;
- Total number of people talking about your page in a given month (users)
- Total number of stories created about your page in a given month (interactions)
- The amount of eyeballs that saw any content associated with your page
- Total number of likes gained within a month
- Total number of likes lost within a month
- Total Likes Of The Page
Post Specific Metrics
When exporting Post Specific Metrics from Facebook Insights, you will get a tab with 30+ different metrics you can analyse. Some are more useful than others. To export Post level metrics, select “Insights” from your Admin Panel and click on “Export Data”. This will give you the option to export data on all Post level basis to an excel spreadsheet…
This is a sample from a chapter in the brilliant book, The Big Social Media Book. Available from Amazon.
