Hello Friends,

For all of you who are admins of a Facebook Page, Facebook recently modified the Insights dashboard to make it easier for you to obtain information about Fan interaction on your Page.

To help you navigate through the changes and interpret the data I have sourced an article called "A Beginner's Guide to Facebook Insights" by Ekaterina Walter. Ekaterina is a part of Intel’s Social Media Center of Excellence and is responsible for company-wide social media enablement and corporate social networking strategy. 

Facebook Insights is a powerful tool to assist you in identifying and responding to your target audience. If your business doesn't have Facebook Page and would like to know how to build a Facebook strategy or if you would like more information about interpreting your Facebook data, contact us at Trio Web Design - info@triowebdesign.com.

- CBB

----------------

A BEGINNER'S GUIDE TO FACEBOOK INSIGHTS - by Ekaterina Walter

You have created a Facebook Fan Page. Now what? I bet these questions come to mind: “Is my page a success?” “Who is engaging with us?” “Is our engagement effective?” “Does our content strategy work?”

The Facebook Insights dashboard will help you answer some of these questions. As defined by Facebook, “Insights provides Facebook Page owners … with metrics around their content. By understanding and analyzing trends within user growth and demographics, consumption of content, and creation of content, Page owners … are better equipped to improve their business with Facebook.”

So what’s the best way to use this relatively new tool? We’ve outlined some steps below that should have you measuring Facebook engagement in no time. Note that only page administrators can view Insights data for the properties they own or administer.

EXAMINE A WIDE RANGE OF DATA

There are two types of Facebook insights:

• User Insights: Total page Likes, or a number of fans, daily active users, new Likes/Unlikes, Like sources, demographics, page views and unique page views, tab views, external referrers, media consumption.
• Interactions Insights: Daily story feedback (post Likes, post comments, per post impressions), daily page activity (mentions, discussions, reviews, wall posts, video posts).

The question then becomes: “What do you want to track and measure?” There is a lot of data offered, but you want to sort through it and identify what information is meaningful and will help you make decisions about your engagement and content strategy. If that data is not readily available, you might want to do some manual calculations to derive the numbers you’re looking for.

Below are the insights I recommend you pay attention to and track.

• Monthly fan size growth: Record the number of fans (or “Likers”) you have on the first of every month to see what your growth looks like. I’d say if you are growing organically and you have 10 to 13% monthly growth, you are doing extremely well. That is probably the highest organic growth number anyone can achieve. You can even go more granular and calculate weekly growth. Whatever you decide to do, make sure to watch for the spikes in fan growth and try to identify what contributes to those spikes.

• The average number of Likes or comments: These are your engagement measures. If you know the average number of times fans interacted with you for every single post, you will be able to identify which discussions are of more interest to your fans. Watch for unusual spikes or drops in this number. I love this metric because it is extremely helpful in making immediate decisions in your content strategy and changes to your editorial calendar. Increase the number of posts around the topic your fans are more engaged with and decrease the number of posts around topics they are not interested in.

• Unlikes and attrition rate: The fact is that you will always have some unsubscribes, no mater how great your engagement is, but hopefully it is just a small number. I usually just watch for spikes in the unlike numbers. You want to try and correlate them with the activity on your page and understand why people are leaving your page. It is rather hard to nail down the exact reason, but if there is an unusual spike, you will usually have a pretty good idea. The simple attrition rate formula is:

Daily Unlikes / Daily Fan Count - This metric will tell you how many of your fans are leaving your site. It is normal to have small constant attrition over time.

• Demographics: No matter what your objectives are, you can always find the demographics data useful: the gender of your fans, their ages and where they are from.

• Mentions: This is the number of times someone tagged you in their post. The reason why this metric is important is because it is the easiest way for your fans’ friends to click through to your page. Every time someone tags you, the name of your Page appears as a link. It is much easier for someone to click on that link and learn more than to search for your Page manually. One of your goals should be to increase the number of mentions by your fans.

• Page views: I like this metric because it helps you identify the number of returned fans. If you take the number of page views and subtract the number of unique page views, you will see how many of your fans are actually coming back to your page. You can also look at the Daily Active Users metric.

• Tab views: This is the new metric Facebook implemented a couple of months ago. If you have multiple tabs on your page, it will tell you which tab gets what percentage of traffic. This metric will help you decide on whether you would want to keep or maybe get rid of some of your tabs. This is especially helpful as you can only have six tabs visible on your page at one time, and this data will help you prioritize accordingly.

• Referrers: Another new metric that tells you where the traffic to your page comes from. You want to increase exposure to your page on the sites that bring you the most traffic.

• Impressions: If your page is over 10,000 fans, you will see the number of times your post was viewed –- impressions. This metric is not exact since every time someone’s page refreshes, it counts as an impression. This number is usually a little overblown, but can show you how many times your post has been seen.

Some of these metrics require constant manual tracking and analysis, which is a big downside. However, the above metrics will help you make decisions about your engagement and content strategy that would allow more effective interactions with your customers.

Hello coffee break followers,

I received an update from one of the RSS feeds I follow indicating that Facebook recently released a new feature that automatically suggests Pages for new users to “Like.” Facebook has placed this new functionality as the second step, second only to finding friends, in the Facebook signup process.

This new step in creating an account is called “Choose your interests,” and at this point new Facebook members will be greeted with a selection of Pages that are suggested for them based on the Pages that people in the same demographic commonly “Like.” The Pages profiled are commonly selected based on how much the Page is updated and how often it engages with Fans. This new effort will increase the exposure of Pages in general and likely increase the number of “Liked” pages per member.

If your business is not currently on Facebook, I would suggest you look into creating a Page for your business.  Leveraging social networking platforms like Facebook is a strategic low-cost move for small to medium sized businesses.  Reference my previous posts Internet Presence: How to Avoid Brand Sabotage (Feb 2010) and Facebook Advertising (May 2010) to assist you in determining the value of having a Facebook Page.

Creating a strategy that aligns with your business goals and objectives on any social networking platform can be overwhelming.  If you would like more information to help you create a Page for your business contact us at Trio - info@triowebdesign.com. 

Enjoy the weekend soccer fans!

- CBB 

Oh friends, I do believe it is summer.  

If you live in Saskatoon, you know what I am talking about.  The last few days have been glorious and have inspired me to move the blog outside. Fresh air is a necessity to working effectively - that's my story and I am sticking to it - if you want to borrow it so you can enjoy a few moments away from your desk today feel free!

A gem of a report came across my desk this morning while I was reviewing a few of my RSS feeds - Neilsen/Facebook Report: The Value of Social Media Ad Impressions. It looks like Neilsen and Facebook teamed up to analyze the effectiveness of ad impressions in relation to viewers noticing ads, absorbing the content, and ultimately making a purchase decision.  

If you are a business owner who currently has a Facebook Page or is simply just advertising on Facebook, you need to read this report.  It will help you formulate the best advertising strategy on Facebook and assist you in analyzing the effectiveness of it.

I have included the key findings from their report below.  If you are at all interested in learning more, visit Neilsen Online, and download the document.  

- CBB

_________

Jon Gibs, Vice President, Media Analytics, The Nielsen Company - Sean Bruich, Measurement Research, Facebook, Inc.

We’ve heard from countless brand marketers about the need for guidance when it comes to measuring the value of social media advertising. It’s why we’ve made a major investment towards helping advertisers understand how to achieve their brand goals in a social context. Our joint report: Advertising Effectiveness: Understanding the Value of a Social Media Impression provides early insights from Nielsen’s BrandLift product which analyzed survey data from more than 800,000 Facebook users in response to more than 125 Facebook ad campaigns from 70 brand advertisers.

While the medium of social media advertising is still a wild frontier for some, the BrandLift framework solves a number of advertiser concerns by providing quantifiable data that can be mapped to trusted advertising effectiveness benchmarks already in place: Ad Recall, Brand Awareness, and Purchase Intent.

Suggesting You “Become A Fan” Of Social Engagement

Study after study has shown that consumers trust their friends and peers more than anyone else when it comes to making a purchase decision. It’s critical that we understand advertising not just in terms of “paid” media, but also in terms of how “earned” media (advertising that is passed along or shared among to friends and beyond) and social advocacy contribute to campaigns. To that end, we took a closer look at 14 Facebook ad campaigns that incorporated the “Become A Fan” engagement unit and sliced the effectiveness results three different ways, by each of the types of ads available on Facebook: 1) Lift from a standard “Homepage Ad”; 2) Lift from an ad that featured social context or “Homepage ads with Social Context”; and 3) Lift from “Organic Ads,” newsfeed stories that are sent to friends of users who engage with advertising on a brand.

For those Homepage ads at the top of the marketing funnel, awareness increased on average by 4% between exposed and control audiences. Purchase intent also increased on average by 2% following ad exposure on Facebook.

Comparing the responses of those users who had seen ads with social context against users who saw ads with no social context from the same campaign, we saw a measurable lift in lift.

While exposure to the homepage ad itself increased ad recall, those users exposed to both the “paid ad” and the organic impression remembered the ad at three times the rate of those just exposed to the paid homepage ad. We saw a similar effect for the other two metrics evaluated. Homepage ads increased awareness of the product or brand by 4% on average, but exposure to both homepage ads and organic ads increased awareness by a delta of 13% versus the control group. Exposure to organic impressions also impacted purchase intent as well, increasing the impact of the ad from 2% to 8%.