Which Social Media Data Should I Track? The Ultimate Metrics To Measure The Health Of Your Facebook Page

Meet Alex Baer from Iris, Nicolas Griffioen from 90/24 and Alex Packham from ASTP. We asked these three power users of Locowise to give us some insights into the ultimate metrics to measure the health of a Facebook page.

One thing that’s clear is that every project and every brand will have different needs. The most meaningful metrics are those that tell you a story, show if you’re making an impact and help you make better decisions in the future. These are the metrics that support the business goals and objectives that your brand has. So remember to set the goals first and know what you want to achieve before trying to figure out what metrics you should track.

One thing that’s clear is that every project and every brand will have different needs. The most meaningful metrics are those that tell you a story, show if you’re making an impact and help you make better decisions in the future. These are the metrics that support the business goals and objectives that your brand has. So remember to set the goals first and know what you want to achieve before trying to figure out what metrics you should track.

Is your goal with the social media activity to increase your brand awareness and reach the most people possible?
Is your primary goal to drive traffic and sales to your website?
Is the goal to help improve the efficiency of or even replace the traditional customer support channels?
Identifying goals to track becomes easier when you know where you want to go and what you want to achieve.
When you know your goals, it’s time to take a look at the ultimate metrics to measure the health of your page.

For Alex Packham monitoring the actions your content generates is an interesting metric. This is a good way to judge the quality of your content and how well it resonates with the audience that you reach. You can measure the number of clicks your links get. You can measure likes, shares and comments your posts achieve. It’s harder work now but earned media still exists, Alex tells us. It’s important to know what type of content generates action in order for you to create more of it.
So which should you prefer: eyeballs (impressions and reach) or the actions (engagement such as clicks, likes, comments and shares)?

Eyeballs on your content are nice to have and they are an impressive metric to showcase how many people see your brand name and the content that you produce. Having said that, without actions impressions and reach do not mean much. What you really want is for people who see your content to take action. You want them to click to view the video you posted. You want them to share your post with their friends because it resonates with them.

With this in mind let’s move to the engagement rate and virality, metrics that can help identify content that really works.

For Alex Baer and Alex Packham engagement rate is one of the popular metrics that they track for clients. You can calculate the engagement rate yourself by taking all the engagements and dividing them by reach. Alternatively you can find it in the “Content” section of your Facebook page report in Locowise. It puts together impressions and reach with actions and engagements by showing the percentage of people who liked, commented, shared or clicked on your post out of all the people that the post reached. It’s a powerful metric that helps you easily identify which of your posts get the highest rate of engagement.

Virality, according to Iris, can in some cases be a better metric than engagement rate to track the performance of content. Virality tells how engaging or shareable a piece of content is as it only includes proper engagements, says Alex Baer. It is a metric you can calculate yourself or find it in the “Content” section in Locowise. In Locowise it’s calculated as the sum of post comments, likes and shares received per 1000 impressions. It does not consider actions such as views or clicks on links.

Alex Baer tags and organises content that he posts into different content buckets. Then he analyses the performance of different tags in order to really see what content gets the best results. This enables him to create more of the type of content that’s proven to be successful. The content buckets are not necessarily about the format of the post but more about themes of posts. Is the post a fact? Or a quote? Maybe a news story? A competition? You can go even deeper into this categorisation. For example a car manufacturer could split the content into “Motorsports content”, “Looking after your car”, “Driving on the road” and such.

Most social media publishing tools allow you to tag content as you post it, while Locowise also allows you to tag the content within Locowise. You can even import the labels from your Hootsuite account directly into Locowise to make this process easier. Then in the “Content” section of Locowise you can rank the specific content buckets by engagement rate, advocacy and similar to truly identify what theme performs best.

Since Facebook started the push into video, brands have started uploading more video. Larger pages can gain an increased reach by posting videos. Both 90/24 and Iris have done a lot of video work for their clients. According to 90/24 video on Facebook is the format that works best for views and engagement. Nicolas tells us that there’s no particular formula for what works, but it’s about the story you tell. The video should be entertaining and emotional, not commercial and boring. People don’t have much time so keep it under a minute too.

Alex Baer adds that videos should be treated like any other content when doing performance analysis. Measure actions in video posts, retention time before the drop off and the percentage of video being watched. You should also tag videos as described above in order to identify the effective themes.

According to Nicolas it is worth keeping track of the activity that you do on the page in order to review the work and the output of the social media team.

Look into how many posts you made in the period and how that compares to the period before. Did your brand post more or less than last month and why?
You can look into metrics such as average response time to identify how long it takes for a community manager to respond to a question.
You can also look into the format that has been posted and compare it to the reach and engagement numbers we looked at earlier. This will ensure that you are actually posting the most effective content format.
This process will help to review and appraise the work of a community manager.

Social media is not necessarily only about revenue and return on investment but the bottom line should still play a vital part in your measurement and management reporting. This will help to underline the importance of social media to the management and win a bigger budget and more resources.

Both ASTP and Iris focus on the sales funnel and try to understand how much revenue is being driven by their social media efforts. One way to get some clear ROI numbers is to tag your links and use trackable links when posting on social media. You can then then analyse the results of what happens when social media visitors access your website through web analytics tools such as Google Analytics.

What metric you focus on in your web analytics tool depends on your company. Some will be focused on acquiring new leads. Some would prefer to grow their mailing list and user database. Some brands would want more subscribers or buyers.

Traditionally this metric would probably have been top of the list for most people in social media, but the size of the Facebook page itself is not as key as it was a few years ago. It is no longer the most meaningful metric, it’s more of a vanity metric. Still, many executives and clients want to see the growth of the page so it is a metric that they can look at to understand the overall trend and boast about the total page likes.

Your role as a social media professional is to educate your clients and your management on why total page size is not the most accurate number to look at. Some arguments that you can use are as below:

It’s easy to pay for likes these days and acquire a lot of new fans over a short period of time which doesn’t really mean that you have a good community, or that you produce important content or that you have an engaged audience.

There are also cases of brands buying fake likes from unofficial sources which artificially inflate their page sizes. The large number of likes can fool an inexperienced person but doesn’t really deliver any value nor does it take the company closer to their goals.

Having a large page doesn’t mean that your content will be seen by lots of people. You can expect some 10% of your audience only to be reached by the content that you post, and this can go even lower if you have a very large page

Benchmarking is important for all three of our power users. Benchmarking helps not only to see what competitors are doing and what the effective ideas are, but it also allows you to set targets and expectations for your own efforts. Have a look at our guide to benchmarking for more details on the best ways to compare your work to that of your competitors.

Last but not least, our power users wanted to highlight that a more meaningful way to understand actual growth and progress is to compare data to the previous periods. For example, if you’re putting together a monthly report you should always compare all the stats to the previous month in order to better explain the results you have achieved so it’s easier to see the larger picture.