It's Time To Start Tracking The Right Facebook Metrics

Facebook is about reach and spurring users to share your stuff. The rest is noise. Marketers are finally starting to appreciate this, and they're changing how they evaluate their Facebook performance. They are beginning to focus on activity, engagement, and reach. The importance of evaluating one's own brand against competitors is also becoming critical.

The definition of competitors is changing. With consumer attention drawn in so many directions, competitors are not limited to those who make a similar product, or offer a similar service. A competitor is any brand that is competing for consumer attention, on any medium.

In a new report from Business Insider Intelligence, we introduce a package of easy-to-compile social media metrics that analyze activity, impact, and competitive context. Many of these metrics can be calculated from numbers available on Facebook's free Insights dashboard for page managers. Activity metrics measure what the social media manager is doing. Impact indicators measure results. Competition indicators put all indicators in context by comparing them to numbers attained by other brands vying for attention.

Here are the metrics marketers should focus on:

• Activity Metrics: Activity Indicators are straightforward and useful. In tandem with other indicators, they can be used to gauge how well a social media manager is performing and what actions are working. They include post rate, post rate by type, post rate by topic and response rate.
• Impact Metrics: While reach and engagement don't give a dollar value for return on investment, they do paint a picture of whether the right audience is being reached and cultivated, and whether brand awareness is being boosted. In Facebook Insights, "engagement rate" has now replaced "virality" as the main measure of engagement. Engagement rate includes all clicks on a post. If someone clicks on a photo to enlarge it, it's weighed the same as a like.
• Take Post Reach Further: Tracking post reach can help determine whether or not a campaign is worth investing in. For example, producing a $10,000 video may not make sense for a brand if its average reach on a post is only 500 Facebook users. To get more mileage out of the post reach number, divide it by fans in order to see what percentage of your fans are seeing at least one of your posts.
• Assess the Competition: Share of voice is the percentage of people talking about brands in your industry that mention your brand. This is helpful for understanding both how big the chatter about your industry is, and how effective your strategy has been at carving out a share of that buzz. Share of conversation indicates whether your brand is being mentioned in targeted conversations, like Superbowl chatter.

In full, the report:

• Explains why marketers are moving away from talking about ROI and looking at audience-based and branding-type goals
• Breaks down which metrics are on the way up and which metrics are on the way down
• Gives detailed explanations of how marketers can best analyze and apply these metrics
• Digs into Facebook Insights and explains how a true understanding of engagement can be gleaned from its data
• Contextualizes the importance of vetting social media marketing efforts given the ballooning share of budget that will go toward Facebook and social media in the future

For full access to the report on The Decline Of Social Media ROI sign up for a free trial subscription today.