Facebook. Get it right and your community can thrive. Get it wrong however and you can waste an awful lot of time. Having a good Facebook strategy is crucial to raising brand awareness and growth. The social network is a marketers’ dream due to the huge amount of people using it and harnessing its potential can prove to be very successful. Understanding how your page performs is key to unlocking this success. Without conducting a good Facebook page analysis, then there is no way you can improve your page performance.

How to use Facebook's analytics tools

If you’re a start-up, then getting coverage is key for your success. The content that you produce may be fantastic, but if it’s reaching no one, then your competitors will get ahead of you.

This is where Facebook Analytics can help. It can give you a tonne of information about your page. But, it can overwhelm you.

Understanding what you need to look out for is key to improving your Facebook page performance. Without knowing what you need, then analysing your Facebook page data can be a very long and manual task.

Two of the most important data points to look for when doing Facebook Page analysis are: reach and engagement

Reach

Reach is the number of unique people who have seen your post. This essentially means that is has been shown in someone's news feed. Having a large reach goes hand in hand with brand awareness. This is one of the most important things to get on Facebook.

Be aware not to confuse your reach with impressions. Impressions means the total number of views of the post, which is still important, but slightly different as your post can appear several times in the same person’s news feed.

Engagement

Your posts could reach a huge amount of people, but if they’re not engaging with it, then that’s just as big a problem as having no reach. It means no one is taking your content in and it’s not having a lasting impression on people.

Engagement is generally measured on:

• Comments

• Likes

• Shares

Trawling through the many graphs, data and page reports that Facebook Analytics tell you can be confusing and long.

Metrics for success

The 4 metrics it provides are the best indicators to see how your page is performing. The metrics are:

1. Page experience

This is the percentage of your engaged followers who liked or followed your page for continued engagement after a positive page experience. Having an engaged community is crucial to the success of any Facebook page.

2. Conversion rate

This is the percentage of your total followers that click on your page’s call-to-action button or contact information. If you’re a young start-up, getting people to click on your CTA’s is very important. They can drive a large amount of people to buy your product or see your content, but if no-one is clicking on it, then it needs to be changed. Being able to see this data with this analytics tool can prove to be highly valuable to you and your business.

3. Organic reach

This is measured by the percentage of your total page views from people you haven’t paid to reach. It can be easy to pour money into Facebook to get people to click on your ads. But a business that has a lot of organic growth is a sign of good things to come - and show’s that you’re doing something right! The more people that engage with your posts then the larger your reach becomes.

4. Virality

This shows how viral your content currently is. It tells you how often your page has been shared to new people’s news feeds as a result of one of their friends liking, commenting or sharing one of your posts. Having viral content is highly valuable to increasing the growth and performance of your page.

The good news is that if your page isn’t performing as well as you would like it to, then you can get tips from Disciple on how to improve it, all for free. Using a Facebook Analytics tool that gives you the metrics that really matter to improving your Facebook page can save you a lot of time and complication.

How to improve your Facebook Page Performance

Now that you know where you page is doing well and what it could be improved on, there are some easy steps that you can follow to see quick results.

1. Focus on value

Churning out endless amounts of content won’t improve your reach. Focusing on the quality and value of your content will improve your reach. This will help the virality of your page and will help to drive organic growth.

Posting too much content will actually decrease engagement. People will feel like they are being spammed and will be drawn away from your page.

They will value content which is original, interesting or entertaining. Try to post between 1-3 times a day and keep your audience location and time of day in mind.

2. Know your audience

Understand what your target audience do and don't like. What are they going to love? What are they going to react to? What are the problems that they need solving and how are you going to solve them?

Build up a persona of your audience around these and write your content based on this and your page performance will increase.

3. Test your CTA’s

Your content may be great, but are you CTA’s good? If no one is clicking them then no-one is going to go and buy your stuff. Try and experiment with different, more catchy CTA’s and see if they perform better.

4. Try out different visuals

Do your visuals fit with the content of the post, or your overall brand? Finding imagery that resonates with your audience can be very powerful. As well as this, play with new ideas for imagery so that people don’t get tired of seeing the same thing over and over again.

5. Analyse your posts

What type of posts perform well? By analysing the data, you can see if people engage more with videos, photos, statuses or web links. Gear your content towards what people prefer and you’ll see high engagement. Tasty are a good example of revolutionising how recipes are shared on social media. Finding new, better and simpler ways to get your content out will see great results.

6. Be human

Facebook may work on algorithms, but its users don’t! If people are engaging with your posts, then engage back with them. Keep the conversation flowing. Not only will it help to keep your posts visible, but people will respect your brand more too. It’s a win-win.

As well as this, you can engage with them by running competitions, quizzes or polls. This is an easy way to get your audience engaged and keep them glued to your page. It helps to build a sense of community.

Do competitor’s Facebook Page analysis

Unfortunately, there are some important things that Facebook Analytics can’t tell you. Finding out how your competitors Facebook Page’s perform is one of these.

Conducting analysis of your competitors is important. Seeing what they do right and what they do wrong can be used for your own learning process. See what they do best, and then make yours even better.

A good place to start is to gather 3-5 of your competitors, see how often they post and what kind of content they post. Make sure to take note of the engagement on their posts, how large their following is and who they are targeting with their posts.

Have a look at when they post too. Are their posts either side of working hours getting more engagement? Or is during the middle of the day better? Bear in mind that their audience and location may be different, but it’s still useful to see what performs better and what doesn’t.

Facebook can seem very crowded, and it’s getting even harder to get your content noticed on the platform. This means getting your Facebook page analysis and strategy right are even more important now. Using quick Facebook analytic tools to help you along the way will save you time and give you quick results on your page performance.