The most common question we as marketers get asked is, “How can I tell if my social media management strategy is working?” Marketing has been notoriously difficult to track progress and overall effectiveness but in recent years the use of analytics has made life much simpler. Analytics for those who may not know, is the systematic computational analysis of data or statistics. In a less confusing way, it means you get to see how many people look at, like, follow, share, comment and react to your advertising efforts. While you can use analytics for all of your marketing material, today we are going to look at everybody’s favorite social media site, Facebook. Through Facebook Insights you can see a wide variety of analytics and today we are going to discuss a few of the basics and what they mean for your business.
Engagement
Social media is all about interacting and engaging with your customers, the engagement metric lets you see just how well that you are doing this. Engagement measures the number of times somebody took an action on your posts, whether it be clicking a link, sharing that post or even just leaving a comment. Engagement is one of the most important metrics that you can track for your business. If you have a lot of engagement it means that your customers are interested in the content that you are sharing, which of course is always a good sign. If you have low engagement, it gives you a chance to try new techniques and see what gets a reaction from your audience.
Reach
Facebook uses an algorithm to determine where your posts show up on your followers’ timeline. Facebook tries to place posts that they think the user would be most interested in towards the top. Many times posts will go completely unseen, this is where reach comes into play. There are multiple studies done on how many posts get seen organically on Facebook and the number typically sits between 2% and 6%. While the reach may be low it’s still good to keep track of how many people certain posts are reaching and you can always increase a posts reach with paid Facebook Advertisements.
Click-Through Rate
When your business posts a Facebook Ad there is typically a call to action. The most common call to action is trying get people to your website. The click-through rate shows the percentage of people that see your ad and click through to your landing page. According to data from Worldstream.com, the average click-through rate across all industries is 0.9%. Click-through rate can be an interesting metric to follow to see which ads are getting people to stop and visit your site and which ads people are scrolling right past.
If you are looking for more information on the vast world of Facebook analytics or just analytics in general, contact our team at Midwest Marketing today! 605-716-5666
