This is part three in my series on creating a Facebook strategy:
- In part one we looked at the planning stage.
- In part two we will look at creating content.
- In part three we will discuss how you can measure your results.
Now that you have planned that strategy and thought about the content you will post it is important to monitor your success.
You need to do this on an ongoing basis. If you wait until the end of a campaign you may have missed some key signals on how your strategy is working. I recommend doing a weekly audit to start with and then pushing this out to bi-weekly or monthly once you are further into your plan.
Keeping a keen eye on your Facebook strategy results allows you to adjust your strategy as you discover what is and isn’t working. In today’s post I’m going to look at how to measure success dependent on your business goals.
We’ll look at:
- Are you reaching the right people
- How to measure growth in interactions
- How to find your best posts
- Tracking traffic to your website with Google analytics
- Whisper codes and Facebook ‘Offers’
Before we start you need to go back to the beginning and look at what goals you set for your strategy. Here is how to measure success depending on the goals you set.
1. Increase audience size
Was your goal to build your community? If so this is one of the easiest statistics to measure. Make a note of how many Likes your page has when you start and monitor the growth over the duration of your campaign.
It’s also important to ensure that you are attracting the right people. You may well achieve your goal in audience size but you need to check that your audience is relevant.
You can discover this via Facebook insights.
On your Facebook insights tab click ‘People’. Here you are able to view demographic data about your audience. You can see what percentage of your Likers are Male or Female, what age group they fit into and where they live.
Going beyond page Likers you can see this same information about the people that your page posts have reached and the people who interact with you.
2. Brand awareness
Is your brand getting noticed on Facebook? One good way to measure this is to measure the number of interactions you get on posts and the amount of people that are talking about your page (PTAT). You can do this manually but it takes time, particularly if you are getting a lot of interaction.
Quintly is a really useful tool for monitoring growth in interaction and PTAT. You will need to set it up prior to starting your campaign so that it can start gathering data.
In the graph below you can see statistics about interaction and PTAT both for Spiderworking.com and We Teach Social. As you can see Spiderworking had a peak but is now tailing of (due to me posting less) and We Teach Social is seeing a small but steady increase.
Fanpage Karma is a nice tool that shows you all sorts of inside data on your page. One of it’s best features helps you to find out what posts are performing best.
It will show you a list of your top performing posts and your weakest posts. This should help you define what posts work best for your audience.
You also have the ability to tag your posts according to type, style, tone of voice and desired action. By doing this you will be able to see what types of posts consistantly perform best for you.
3. Traffic To Website
Google Analytics
This is an easy statistic for you to measure. If you have Google Analytics installed on your website, and if you don’t you really should install it, you can see exactly how much traffic is coming from Facebook.
Click on ‘Aquisition’ on the left hand side ‘social’ and ‘Network referrals’ to see how many people have arrived on your site via Facebook.
Google URL Builder
The only catch here is that you will only see the total number of referrals that come to your site via Facebook not the number that come from your page or your ads. For a more detailed analysis you can use Google URL builder. This adds some tracking info to the links you post to Facebook allowing you to identify exactly how many click throughs come from those links. Click here to read more about how it works.
Bitly
If you shorten your links using Bitly before you post them to Facebook you are able to access information about how many times those links have been clicked and by who. This is a particularly useful tool to use if you don’t have analytics installed or if you are driving traffic to a website other than your own. Click here to read more about how it works.
4. Leads
If your goal was to get more leads you first need to decide what a lead is. Is it an email address? A website enquiry? A phone number?
If you want to collect email addresses you can count how many you collect from competitions or other promotions you do on Facebook. You can do the same for phone numbers
If you want people to complete a form on your website use Google analytics to track those who visit your site from Facebook
Keep a record of how many of these leads convert to see how effective your lead capturing contests and promotions are.
5. Sales
Facebook offers
Facebook offers have passed their prime but they are still available. Click the ‘Offer’ icon on your status update box to set up an offer. This is a paid option but you will be able to measure it’s success when people avail of the offer.
Whisper codes
Share a word or a phrase on Facebook and encourage your customers to say it when they drop in to the store or order from you on the phone. If you are an online store you can set it up as a discount code on your website. When customers use this code give them a discount or something extra with their purchase. This is a great way to know that people are finding out about you or paying attention to your posts on Facebook.
Keep a record of all these statistics so that you can measure progression over time.
These are just a few ways you can measure the success of your Facebook strategies. How do you do it? Leave me a comment below.
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I see very few offers being created now but still see the occasional whisper code. Have to admit I like them – even if it is for an online store rather than a bricks and mortar shop, they just suggest a conversation is happening 🙂
Excellent post on measuring – probably the most important aspect of a strategy.
Thanks Lorna, I do think offers have fallen out of favour. It might be worth doing a trial to see if they are still effective 🙂
I’m often asked about the measurable results from my social media campaigns but because I don’t have a planned campaign as such, it’s difficult to measure the results! I’m hoping to find some time and really think about the points you’ve raised in the three posts Amanda and am curious about the difference it might make both in terms of enquiries and interaction.
Thanks Dee, measuring can often be the thing that makes us want to construct a better campaign so although I’ve left this to the end of the strategy posts there’s no reason you couldn’t start with it.