Business owners who manage one or more Facebook Pages have a tremendous asset that they may be ignoring: their weekly Facebook Page Update email. Each week, Facebook automatically sends you an email that summarizes your Facebook Page activity for the previous week. A successful social media presence and strategy requires far more metrics and insight than what is included in this email, but understanding what Facebook is telling you is an excellent start for small business owners who wish to understand the impact their efforts on Facebook are having!
First, the report you receive should have a section that looks something like this:
The report includes New Likes, Talking About This and Weekly Total Reach. Let’s go over each metric so that we have a complete understanding of what we’re being told.
New Likes
As the name implies, New Likes is the number of fans your Facebook Page has gained in the last week. These are new followers who have Liked your Facebook Page. If they like an individual post or story, that isn’t counted. Making sure that Facebook users Like your Page is critical to inserting those users into your future content marketing funnels, so you may want to implement a “Like Gate” which will ask users to Like your Facebook Page before continuing on to see your news feed.
Talking About This
This is a very interesting metric, as it measures unique Facebook users who have engaged your Facebook Page in some manner. It is the number of people who have created a story from one of your Page posts. Stories are created when someone likes, comments on or shares one of your posts. Each time a follower takes one of those actions, a story is created on their own profile that their followers might see, and they in turn might take some action.
Additional actions that can create a story include answering a question, responding to an event, mentioning your Page in a post, tagging an image, checking into your location or recommending your business.
The metric includes a percentage comparison to the previous week, either up or down.
Weekly Total Reach
Reach is defined by Facebook as the number of unique Facebook users who viewed any content associated with your Facebook Page, including posts, ads and sponsored stories.
When you create a new post, initially, the only Facebook users who could potentially see it are your followers. Due to Facebook Edgerank, not all of your followers will see your posts, and of course not every follower uses Facebook regularly. Of those that do see your post, when they like it, it creates a story that their own friends and followers can see, expanding your reach accordingly.
This metric also includes a percentage comparison to the previous week, either up or down.
Additional Reading: The Facebook Hack That Will 10x Your Reach
Facebook Insights Email Report Conclusions
Of the three metrics, your Talking About This measurement should be considered most important. While we always want to be increasing the number of new likes and expanding our total reach, Talking About This demonstrates how much interaction and engagement your Facebook Page created in the past week. Business owners should be looking at and comparing this metric regularly, and working to improve it. Each time you improve your Talking About This measurement, it means that your Facebook Page posts gained more Likes, Comments and Shares. Each time you increase the number of Likes, Comments and Shares, you increase your Weekly Total Reach and will likely gain New Likes as well.
In other words, by working to improve your posts and interacting more with your followers, you’ll increase your Page’s visibility on Facebook. Talking About This gives you great insight into how effective your efforts are from week to week.
Use the link in the email to see your complete Facebook Insights report and start to keep an eye on it. We’ll dig into all of the other metrics Facebook provides in another post.
Next time you get your Facebook Page Insights email, take a closer look and see how you did last week. What did you do to increase fan engagement? What’s been working for you?
Image courtesy of afagen, Flickr.
