“In these days of cool reflection,” sang Freddie Mercury in Queen’s 1995 hit Heaven for Everyone. Back then, he had no idea how relevant the concept of reflection would become in the form of analytics.
Facebook, in particular, uses analytics to deliver valuable insights. It’s one thing to know how many page likes or shares you’ve received, but other statistics are even more useful.
1. What Prospects Want
One of the hardest challenges of social media marketing is knowing what your audience wants to see, and what they will engage with. By reviewing those posts with the highest number of views, you can begin to map out the patterns.
Use the Post Reach and Post Engagement options to find the posts with the most traction, then click through to see what the posts were. Analyze the media type, the call to action, the source, the length, the format and the posting time, and review the profiles of users who engaged.
2. Discover Your Competitors
Knowing who your theoretical competitors are is one thing, but those aren’t always the same people taking business away from you. And when it comes to Facebook, it’s useful to know who your followers view as your competition, and identify the companies taking traffic and leads from you.
Scout the profiles of some of your followers to see who else they follow. Look for the Pages to Watch option in your own page admin dashboard, and add the pages you identified from the profiles as well as your “usual” suspects. You’ll be able to monitor their traffic and engagement stats that way and identify who you are losing sales (or awareness) to.
3. Identify Your Audience
It’s informative to be able to see whether you are reaching your target audience effectively. With Facebook being such a global platform, the risk is high of gaining followers who will never become customers.
By reviewing the profiles of your Page Likes and engagements, you can determine whether your posts appeal to the right people, or whether you’re unintentionally providing fodder for a completely inaccurate demographic. Knowing leads to doing, and enables you to tweak accordingly.
4. The Best Times to Post
This is a question social media marketers have been asking since the early days of Facebook. While there are tons of theories on when to post, it’s possible to base your decision on actual data.
The Lifetime Talking About This tab allows you to see what areas of your page people visit most, including your timeline, info, and photos tabs. By tracking engagement versus time posted you can identify whether some posting times are more well received than others.
For more information about social media marketing and analytics, call Wax Custom Communications at 305-350-5700 or visit waxcom.com.
