With Facebook, your marketing resources are people, time and money. So how do you make sure you're working as efficiently as possible in order to get the biggest bang for your buck? Here's what I recommend for knowing if your Facebook Marketing is working.
Credit © David Coleman
1. Test your timing
In Facebook Insights, under the Post Tab is where you'll find a graph that shows you when your fans are online. Hover over each day of the week to see how the graph changes. Although this is only 7 days of data, you can look at it weekly for a month to see the consistencies then schedule your posts for when fans are online. If you're posting at the same time every day, you might want to switch it up depending on when fans are online and engaged.
Test, test, test to find what's best for your particular audience.
2. Post more often
Most Pages can benefit from posting more often. If you only post 1-2x a day, try 4x a day. To be efficient with your time, find evergreen, popular content to repost. Your content mix might look like this: 1 product/service-related post, 1 piece of curated content, 1 share and 1 re-post per day.
3. Export the Data and look for trends
Instead of only looking at the web-version of Facebook Insights, export 150 days of data using the Post Level Data export. Exporting the metrics lets you really dig into the data in a more granular way. For example, the web-version of Facebook Insights shows fan and non-fan data together. You can see just fan data only via the export. Plus when looking at several months of data at a time, you can more effectively segment out post types in order to see what types of link posts resonate most or what types of photo posts get the most engagement vs. looking at the data lumped together.
This tactic is also good for highlighting what type of popular, evergreen content can be shared again.
4. Calculate the ratios that matter
When you have Facebook Insights Post Level Data exported, then you can look at metrics that matter more than Page Likes and Talking About This. For content marketers, you're likely more interested in Link Clicks (tracks of consumption of content), Fan Reach, Fan Engagement, and Lifetime Talking About This per post. Plus once you have post level data exported then you can run some calculations and monitor ratios like the percentage of times a post was clicked over the amount of times it was shown. This ratio lets you measure success beyond just looking at clicks. Or Engaged Fans vs. Fans Reached, which gives you a better idea of the success of a post. Jon Loomer has a great post on 8 Facebook Ratios to monitor.
5. Find shortcuts but don't shortchange your audience
You want to share relevant, valuable content with your audience. You also want to serve cheese with the broccoli. If your content is always on message, always about your product, service or organization, then it becomes tired and fans stop engaging. Find memes that are related, however indirectly, to your audience's interests. There's a ripe vein for book publishers in that book lovers enjoy beautiful images of bookshelves, typography, behind-the-scenes production shots, libraries and bookstore images, anything with cats (haha, kidding, ok not really).
6. Determine value
Step back and consider what conversions matter to you? Go beyond tracking Page Likes and think about how you can use Facebook as a sales funnel. Track sales, email signups, contest entries, and any other conversion that allows you to capture leads (dollars or data!).
When you link to your website in a Facebook post, use the Google URL builder in order to tag the link so that you can properly attribute website conversions due to your Facebook marketing activities vs other Facebook referral traffic.
And in Google Analytics set a value for conversions. Either calculate the ROI, take an educated guess, or at least set $1 as a value for each conversion. If you set a value, then you're able to more concretely determine the value of your Facebook marketing activities to your busines.
