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Facebook: Important Metrics & Measuring results

Some people (Priit) can play with stats forever. But for people less obsessed with numbers here’s couple of pointers that might help you get a better understanding of the value of your social media program.

So What are the most important metrics to follow?

Tab Views
In order to engage your fans more and more, brands create custom tabs on their fan pages. When you fans arrive on your page, they will see the custom tabs that you have created. Therefore, tracking the tab views is an important metric to figure out whether your fans are actually seeing your custom content. You can compare the number of people visiting your fan page with those who are viewing your custom tab content to get a clear picture.

Likes
Facebook Insights shows you the sources from which people are liking your Facebook page. For example: Like box and button, Ticker, Search, From your Facebook page etc.

User Engagement or Interaction
One of the most important metrics to track your brand page’s performance is to track the degree of engagement from users. You know that users are visiting your fan page. But what you actually need to track is whether they are taking an action while viewing you custom content. If you have uploaded a product video, are your fans clicking to view it? So, engagement is the action that the visitor takes while going through your custom content.

Clickthroughs
It’s great if you have a fan page for your brand. While using a Facebook page, however, you should make sure that it doesn’t prove to be a dead end for users. If your page is built in a way that engages fans and compels them to want to know more, you can increase the clickthrough rate to your website. A higher clickthrough rate indicates that users are interested to know more about your product.

Content Shares
You can achieve social media marketing success, if you can get your fans to share your posted content. You can imagine the viral potential of getting your content shared through News Feed. That’s why content shares is one of the most useful metrics to measure the success of your Facebook page.

Measuring results

Priit wrote a great article about how to measure your Social Media ROI, so the following is an outtake from his blog post: How To Measure Social Media ROI

The basic business metrics you should measure are:

• Number of transactions
• Number of customers
• Number of new customers
• Revenue
• Profit

Get these numbers tracked before you do anything else. You probably already have a specialist for this job, she’s called accountant. But the thing is, that for most of us, our social media activities influence these metrics only indirectly. Some of our social marketing goals may be:

• Website visitors
• Leads
• Brand awareness
• Newsletter sign-ups
• Facebook fans
• Blog comments
• Social mentions
• Visitor satisfaction index

Now, the trick is to find the connections between social results and dollars earned. Start with the simplest of correlations. Here are just a few examples:

How is the number of your monthly website visitors related to revenue. Segment that and tie website visits to revenue from online and offline segments. Segment yet again and find the most effective online revenue drivers. What you want to know is if site traffic increases X% then revenue goes up how much?

Find out if the customers who are your Facebook fans make purchases more often. Check if the Facebook fans are making larger transactions than average. What you want to know is if your Facebook’s fan-base grows X% then what’s the corresponding increase in frequency of transactions.

Start to monitor the social chatter and tie the number of mention on the internet to changes in sales volume. Segment that and find out what channels have the most impact on the bottom line.

If your sales are mostly online then it is easier to measure all those metrics. When you are operating offline then you have to conduct customer surveys and ask specific questions to figure out why they are doing business with you. You can also implement various incentives to track people from online to offline. For example we have done this for our client by giving Facebook fans special deals that can be used offline and then measuring the results of those activities.

After you have collected these data for some time, you will be able to make pretty good predictions how different social media activities influence you cash flow. A word of caution, don’t stop experimenting. Use 5-10% of your marketing budget for experiments and you will be ahead of the pack.

And, of course, make note of your spending on customer acquisition and establish a base-line. Include all marketing spending. Make note of how much is spent on different channels online and off. Separate the parts that are hard to measure (new logo, upgrading content management system, etc.).

ROI is about the R. Return. No return, no ROI or more precisely negative ROI (ROI = (return – investment) / investment.). One million Facebook fans won’t make any difference if you don’t know how to turn them into paying customers.

Now start measuring results!

 

Posted on: November 30, 2011