5 Metrics to Determine if Your Facebook Audience is Engaged
Facebook fans are great! And followers are wonderful! In the past few years, we have seen a strong push from marketers to grow their Facebook audience size and many have been very successful. The question remains, how successful are brands at driving engagement? It’s not unusual to see 2-3% of fans driving 100% of engagement. Establishing metrics to track Facebook audience engagement can prove more effective than working only from high level Facebook Insights. Here are 5 metrics to track as you begin to look beyond acquisition and start focusing on delivering engagement through Facebook.
- Newsfeed Impressions- Facebook fan size is just one way to look at audience reach. Beyond that marketers can start tracking impressions at a post level to get a better sense of the viral impact of their messages. Impressions can be broken down between organic versus viral impressions at a post level.
Why is it useful? Facebook newsfeed is a crowded space with multiple brands and friends competing with relevant messages. Understanding the impressions your posts receive shows not only how many of your fans are seeing your messages, but how often they are shown to friends of fans. If impressions are low, you can try adding different media, change the day and time of posts and introducing geo-targeted specific posts that may reach a smaller but more targeted audience.
- Interaction Rate – Measured at the post level to determine not only how different message content are resonating with your audience, but how the different media components are driving interaction (clickthroughs, views, etc)
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Post Virality – Measures the potential word of mouth influence your messages have on Facebook. Without looking at media interactions, this metric focuses on types of interactions (comments, likes, shares) that are shown on friends’ newsfeeds.
- Negative Feedback Rate – Measures the negative response to messages at a post level. Comparing this rate by content type reveals what types of messages are creating negative feedback among audience.
These three measures of resonance reflect how engaged your fan base is with your brand and shows how relevant your messages are to your audience.
Why is it useful? Perfect your social media messaging to deliver relevant and engaging content your fans want to see and share. Stand out in a crowded Facebook newsfeed with messages that have staying power and continuously drive fan engagement. Start tracking what types of content, message construct and media resonates with fans. This is helpful, when you want to start creating audience segments within your fan base, to deliver targeted messages that match their interests.
- Referral Traffic- Referral traffic measures how many fans visit your website after viewing Facebook content. You can measure this at an aggregate level by tracking activity from Facebook referral sources or at post level by using tracking codes on any links posted in Facebook.
Why is it useful? Identifying site traffic based on Facebook referral sources is the start in defining the ROI for Facebook social media activity. Even better, if you can track individual post referral codes you can evaluate direct attribution of site activity from Facebook.
At Merkle Connect, we refer to these metrics as “Unconnected” fan metrics, because marketers can start tracking them without a direct connection with fans. These are a great for assessing how well you are engaging the mass Facebook audience. They can start to identify the efficacy of your content, community management, and geographic targeting.
Ultimately we believe marketers should shift their overall social CRM strategy to a “Connected” fan strategy, where we can track and measure social CRM behavior at an individual level. Connected metrics include site + social behavior, connected fan value, social ROI, and more. Keep an eye out for the follow up blog that details the metrics that you can track for a Connected fan.