What are some of the most important metrics to look at – a Facebook Page’s Admin Guide

Now let me get something straight from the start: I am not going to talk about Ads Campaigns metrics.  This post is entirely about insights you can access from your Facebook Page’s dashboard.

Likes

Not really that important. Nowadays your page’s likes count has almost no direct relevance for how your posts will perform. Besides the social proof aspect of a big follower count,  this particular metric is almost useless.

How to measure

There is a reason though why you must pay attention to the likes count: if it stays the same for about 2 or 3 months, that means one of two things:

• you are getting as many Unlikes as the number of Likes;
• you aren’t gaining any new likes.

Either way something must be wrong with your content strategy.

On the other hand you mustn’t obsess with this indicator. Some pages, like a celebrity, lifestyle or tv show for example, will always get many likes faster, without a lot of effort from the admins and editors.

Focus on content strategy and the followers will come!

Engagement

This is one of, if not the most important metric to look at. It shows you how successful your content is.

By looking at engagement you can find out how many reactions, shares, link clicks or comments you got.

More engament means your post will show up more often in user’s newsfeeds.

How to measure

There isn’t a lot of explaining to do here. You can check each post directly from your page’s feed or go to insights. If you are promoting a blog post it’s normal to get more link clicks than comments. If you are asking for an opinion it’s normal to get more comments than shares and so on.

A common mistake is to assume that a high like/follower count directly influences per post engagement. This is completely wrong! And you’ll se why as we talk about the next metric.

 

 

Reach

Reach shows you how many people have seen your posts. They can be both followers and non-followers of your Business Page. Also, reach can be both organic or paid, but we are going to refer just to the organic one.

Ever since 2014, organic reach has been drastically decreasing in an effort from Facebook to push more relevant content to users. Nowadays organic reach is usually lower than 5% of your total follower base.

How to measure

Keep in mind that the 5% rate is just an average. Some posts will reach a higher audience, while others can score even lower than that.

You can increase this metric through tagging other users or pages, using popular hashtags, check ins, posting at a specific time or choosing a preferred audience.

Your reach should (considering you have have an active page) average the total follower count on a weekly basis.

Impressions

Impressions describes the total number of times a post has been seen and is usually higher than the reach.

The bigger the proportion between impressions and reach, the more relvant your content usually is.

How to measure

I find it that a 50% to 100% higher impressions count means your content is performing well and your marketing efforts are not in vain.

Demographics

Demographics data shows you the location, languace, age and sex of the people who follow your page and / or interact with your posts.

It’s not much, but keeping an eye on this data allows to cater to your audience.

How to measure

Demographics might show you that the majority of the users who engage with your content are females, ages 35 to 44, from the UK. Knowing this you can now create specific content catering to the interests and characteristics of this particular group.

And in doing so, means you’ll be creating relevant content which will show up in more and more newsfeeds.

 

 

Conclusions

Don’t stress out about getting the Likes count up. Focus on creating high-quality and original content for your particular audience. Stimulate users to interact with your posts and make sure you listen and respond.

Never stop measuring and adapting to context. Facebook is rewarding those who stay relevant and as such you need to keep up with trends.

If you have any questions or would like to talk about other metrics as well, please leave a comment. Good luck!