UNDERSTANDING THE DATA around your Facebook content is tough. On the one hand, you have the Facebook dashboard, which doesn’t give you much to work with. On the other hand, you have the full export of Page and Post-level data – all 65 tabs of it at the Page level and 8 tabs of data at the Post level. Of course there are numerous reporting tools, including many social media management platforms, that repackage all this data. That’s great if you want a lot of charts and graphs, but not so helpful if you want to look at the right metrics to measure the performance of your content.

In or #SMW talk @GravityThinking looked at the 4 key metrics that will help show you what content is working and deserves more of your media spend.- reused specific examples from the Post-level export as well as from a exclusive licensed tool we use to provide this more granular insight

First up was ORGANIC POST REACH, in short, the number of unique people reached organically by each post, as a % of your total Fan Base. This can be found on the “Key Metrics Tab”, divide “Lifetime Post Organic Reach” (this is uniques) by your number of Fans (Lifetime Total ‘Likes’). We focused on how Organic Reach tells you how well Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm rates your posts. This gives you a good indication of which posts are getting the most engagement with the least amount of negative feedback. 

Next was POST RESPONSE  – in essence you’ve reached people, both with Organic Reach and paid support How many people are actually taking actions? Post Response looks at the percentage of people you reached that have responded to your content. You can see this On the “Key Metrics Tab” by dividing “Lifetime Engaged Users” by “Lifetime Post Total Reach”. This gives you the percentage of people that “interacted” with the post.

Reaching a lot of people is good; having them interact with your content is great ! Post Response shows you how well people react to your content, and is particularly important when you are doing a lot of paid media support. With paid spend, you can reach a lot of people, Fans, and even non-Fans. Posts that actually drive engagement are much more worthy of your media spend.

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Third up is STORIES - In Facebook-speak, a ‘story’ is an action that can be seen by a user’s friends. For posts, stories are generated by ‘Likes’, comments, and shares. This one seems simple, since you can just count ‘Likes’, comments, and shares on a post on your Timeline. However, all actions aren’t equal, and the way you evaluate posts should differentiate between the value of those actions for your brand. Shares are worth a lot more than comments, and comments are worth more than ‘Likes’. To get a true picture, weight these differently to come up with a weighted engagement score for each post. The “Lifetime Post Stories by Action” tab gives you the summary by action. A solid content strategy looks to balance lightweight engagement (‘Like this post’), brand relationship (‘Comment on our post’), and advocacy (‘Share this post’). Posts may have different jobs to do, and evaluating in the context of the weighted actions taken gives you a good idea of what is working best.

One word of caution here - never use “People Talking About This” as a metric. Yes, it is featured prominently on your Page. However, it combines actions taken on posts (engagement) with Page-level ‘Likes’ (acquisition), meaning you can see results skewed by Fan acquisition campaigns.

Lastly you need to consider NEGATIVE actions i.e. people who don’t like your content, unfortunately, this is the flip side (usually unseen), but critical for you to track. When you post content, people can take several “negative” actions: hiding the post, marking it as spam, or unliking the page. These actions work hard against your Organic Reach. The “Lifetime Negative Feedback” tab tells you the negative actions taken on each post. Add the total negative actions and divide by the number of unique users reached by the post (on the “Key Metrics Tab” the “Lifetime Post Total Reach”). This gives you the percent negative per post. If you are putting paid spend behind content, this is the one metric you need to track in real time. Once you have a benchmark idea of the average negative feedback you get (it’s okay, almost everyone gets some), you can quickly see if a Page Post Ad is getting higher-than-normal negative feedback. This may be due to the content, but can also happen if the ad targeting is off. This can be especially true when a Page Post Ad is targeted to non-Fans.

So in summary  calculating the tracking all these metrics takes time, but it pays off in creating more engaging content and making sure your supporting media dollars are spent wisely. Aggregating and scoring this type of data gives you a clear lens into your content performance. Grouping the metrics by content and by type – target audiences, content, creative, etc. – helps show you what works overall, not just at a post-by-post level. There's a lot of powerful data to be found in 73 tabs of data, but it's also a lot to sift through. 

At Gravity Thinking we use a licensed tool that works brilliantly to do the heavy lifting for you by calculating these metrics (and over 200 more), then distilling everything down with our scoring algorithm, allowing you to see content performance in real time. When approaching big data, it’s not just about equipping yourself with tools. It’s about equipping yourself with the right understanding to take action. 

If you are interested in hearing more about this tool and for a face to face demonstration then please get in touch with andrew@gravitythinking.com or tweet us at @gravitythinking