4 Key Facebook Metrics You Should Be Using Right Now

Thanks for the data, Facebook. We appreciate it, but what we really need to know is what to do.

As a Page owner, you have the full export of Page and Post-level data to work with – a spreadsheet with 65 tabs at the Page level and 8 tabs at the Post level.

Numerous reporting tools, including many social media management platforms, repackage all this data, which is great if you want a lot of charts and graphs, but not so helpful if you’re just looking for the right metrics to measure the performance of your content.

We’ve developed a guide that looks at 4 key metrics you should be watching. Calculating and tracking metrics takes time, but it pays off in allowing you to create more engaging content and making sure your supporting media dollars are spent wisely.

Download the guide here:

Break Out and Reach Out to Non-Fans

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It’s challenging to consistently engage with your Fans on Facebook. It’s even more difficult to reach out to non-Fans without throwing your paid media dollars away.

So how do you break out, reach out, and grow your Fan base?

Like anything else, the answer can be found in data, data, and even more data.

Fan Profile Data – With 665 million daily active users* and 2.7 billion average daily ‘Likes’*, Facebook has become a gigantic vault of consumer profile information. Not only are savvy brand marketers able to count the number of Fans and ‘Likes’ per post, but with the right intelligence tools, they can also gather, analyze, and better understand almost everything about their Fans. It’s even possible to define a detailed profile description of the most engaged Fan segment(s) of a brand Page.
Post Performance Data – Now that marketers are armed with the knowledge about their most valuable Fans, they can go about creating content to amplify with Sponsored Stories or Page Post Ads. Best-performing posts serve to inform the paid media plan.
Paid Media Audience Data – To expand their reach to non-Fans, the final step is to target those who closely resemble the brand’s most engaged fan segment(s).

Once marketers have established the ‘right’ audience and message, they can begin to test and learn for the most efficient paid media campaigns. This not only drives scale on the Page, but ensures that new Fans are quality ones.

One of the keys to reaching non-Fans is fully understanding the entire Facebook News Feed ecosystem. To learn more, download our presentation here:

*Facebook 2013 Q1 Financials

Helpful, Human, Humble

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One of the great challenges in social media is for marketers to understand that they are neither broadcasting nor (directly) trying to sell something, but instead trying to become a valued member of a community. Whether it is on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, forums, or LinkedIn, your success will depend on understanding the underlying interests, motivations, and behaviors of your audience. How your fans/readers/followers/friends are using this knowledge can help inform your content and engagement strategy.

In addition to understanding your community, you need tools to analyze the effectiveness of different kinds of content/posts, and the relationships between them. For example, images work well, but so do “this or that” polls and open ended questions. At the same time, you can only post so often, and they can’t all be coupon offers or product pitches. Furthermore, when should you post certain types of posts, and how does this affect the rest of your content? By understanding these patterns of engagement, you can begin to optimize your posts by type, cadence, and distribution.

Finally, in social media (and in life), the 3H rule is critical. Be Helpful, Human, and Humble. (Also great if you can be relevant and humorous!)

I think this quote from Wendy Clark – SVP, Integrated Marketing, The Coca-Cola Company – captures it well:

“Be Flawesome = awesome w/ your flaws. Consumers aren’t interested in [your] corporate veneer. Brands must be real, authentic, human.”

To learn more about how to improve your content and engage your audience, check out our simple guide to working the system. Download the guide here:

Socialarc Expands Leadership Team

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Socialarc is at the forefront of social business, with market-leading services and technology that meet real business challenges. The very talented group of people at Socialarc has been the key to our success and we are pleased to announce three industry-leaders have joined Socialarc’s growing team:

Tom O’Brien / CMO: Tom was most recently SVP at NM Incite, the Nielsen/McKinsey social joint venture, and has been in social media since 2003 when he co-founded a prominent social media research firm. Tom has worked with a wide range of clients including Ford, Samsung, Toyota, Kraft, Pepsico, MTV and Microsoft. Tom’s work focuses on using social for brand positioning, competitive understanding, launch planning, campaign execution and measurement.

Andy Sessions / COO: Andy is responsible for Corporate Strategic development. Andy is Managing Director of Intercept Ventures, and his venture and investment banking experience includes TWVP (co-founder), Technology Crossover Ventures, Montgomery Securities and Goldman Sachs. He has invested in a wide range of technology companies including CNET, Control4, IWon.com (IAL), Rackable (SGI), Rackspace, Real Networks and Santur (NeoPhotonics).

Laura Lee / VP Engagement Architecture: Laura’s career has focused on strategic business and digital marketing management. She has held senior management positions at Ogilvy, McCann Worldgroup, Organic, Anthem and Citibank. She had led engagements for Bank of America, Lenovo, Microsoft, Yahoo! And iShares. At Socialarc, Laura is responsible for developing client strategy and leading our engagement architecture group.

We are also very pleased to announce that Chris Adorna has moved into the role of CTO. Chris has been leading our rapidly growing Creative and Technology practices. His background includes senior roles at startups like Yellowpages.com and Context Optional (Adobe Social) and agencies including Wong Doody, and Rapp. He has worked with clients including Bank of America, Sony, T-Mobile, Lexus, Schwab and Evite. In his new role, Chris helps us identify and develop the products and technologies that will help our clients win in social.

We will continue to invest to bring our clients the strategies, services, and emerging technologies needed to win. We are very fortunate to be doing really interesting work in a very dynamic environment!

You can find out more about our team (and our approach) at the new: socialarc.com

White Paper: 5 Best Practices for Effective Influencer Relationships

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The scientific definition of an ecosystem is a natural unit of living and nonliving components which interact as a system. The same can be said for social media, which is comprised of a collaborative network of evolving parts that interact with each other.

Influencers that matter to your audience, and your relationship with them, are a key component of your brand’s social ecosystem. There have been significant changes in the influencer landscape over the past two years.

Here are 3 key developments:

1. COMPETITION FOR ATTENTION
More brands are trying to reach influencers, with widely varying degrees of sophistication. This leads to more competition for each influencer’s attention, and puts a premium on developing relationships with influencers.

2. FROM HOBBY TO BUSINESS
What was once primarily a sideline is now considered a business by more and more influencers. As a result of this shift, influencers have raised the bar on what they will publish and ask for sponsorship more frequently – they expect to be compensated for their time.

3. RISE OF THE SOCIAL ECOSYSTEM
“Influencer” used to be pretty synonymous with “blogger”. Now those influencers are on Pinterest, Tumblr, Twitter, and more. Influencers have developed their own social ecosystems leveraging multiple social platforms that are relevant to their audience.

To keep up with that evolving ecosystem your strategy needs to evolve too. A key part of your social strategy is making sure you take the right approach to Influencer relationships.

We cover these in our new white paper, download it here:

Building a relationship with your influencers is a key component to successfully reaching and expanding your audience. Help increase the success of your campaign by making sure you develop those relationships the right way.

Facebook – It’s all about the News Feed

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You’ve probably seen the stat that only about 15-20% of your content actually makes it into your fans’ News Feeds. However, Facebook changed its EdgeRank algorithm on September 20th, and now even less makes it into the News Feed. Here is what happened for one brand we work with, looking only at organic post reach:

Facebook Ecosystem

The reach is the percent of the fanbase that organically sees individual posts. Before the change – 15-27%. After the change, a big drop in Organic reach. The response rate stayed the same – about 5-7% of people that saw the post interacted with it. The problem was that a lot fewer people saw a specific post. To fix this, we dialed back on brand-promotional content and increased the mix of our most engaging post types. You can see the trend line moving in the right direction.

This change to EdgeRank was well-covered in many blogs as brands watched their organic reach drop significantly. You were always reaching only a fraction of your fan base, so amplifying your best content with some paid support was important before and is even more so now.

There is some debate on how the algorithm actually changed, but the essential take-away is that as more content goes through people’s news streams, Facebook has to keep the feed as relevant as possible. That means your content is competing with all the other brands a fan Likes, plus all of their friends’ updates. Expect it to continue to get harder to break through, putting even more of a premium on quality content.

Facebook is also testing a “Pages” feed. It isn’t available to all users yet, but you can see what it looks like here. Even with that, you still are going to want your content in the users’ main News Feed, and a smart use of paid media support using Page Post ads can help get you there.

There are two keys to effectively using paid support:

     1. Create really great content: This seems like a no brainer, but it isn’t. Your content
         has to connect with your fans. Increasing interaction rates is the only way to drive
         organic reach. Otherwise, you are simply pouring good media dollars after poor
         content creation.

     2. Amplify your best: Resist the temptation to always make a Page Post ad out of your
         most brand-centric content. Use the content fans engage with the most and you’ll
         see an increase in reach across all of your content.

To make it all work, you need to keep a close eye on all of the metrics, and how they work with each other. For example, here are Engagement Frequency Reports for the same Page over two timeframes:

30 Days ending September 30th:

Facebook Ecosystem

30 Days ending October 31:

Facebook Ecosystem

Over this time period the total number of people engaging went up. But, as we saw, the number of people seeing posts went down significantly. When the “Engaged Once” number drops too low, the content stops getting shown in fresh News Feeds. That’s why you need to look at all of the metrics. On the surface the news looks good – people are engaging more often. Post metrics also look solid, with total interactions trending up. But that narrow analysis misses the fact that EdgeRank is showing content to the same “superfans” and your Page reach dropped. Since “light” users are unlikely to be seeing much of your content, this is a place where fan-targeted paid media can drive back up reach and engagement.

It is critical to make data-driven decisions about your content. What works best shouldn’t be guesswork.

Facebook closes the gap – do you need a social media management platform?

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The Social Media Management Systems (SMMS) space has had a busy summer. Salesforce buys Buddy Media, Adobe takes Context Optional, and Oracle pulls in Vitrue. That is a lot of competition to “own” the marketing stack. Cory Treffilietti had a good read on this over at MediaPost.

What about Facebook in all this? They won’t own the marketing stack, but they have a big impact on SMMS adoption and use. While the SMMS platforms have provided a lot of functionality that native Facebook didn’t provide, the gap has gotten a lot closer.

Here are the things that an SMMS platform typically provides for Facebook management and thoughts on how the gap has closed in today’s Facebook world:

Global/Geo Pages:
This was one of those “killer features” that made a management platform compelling to global brands. That gap was largely closed when Facebook launched Global Pages. Global Pages do many things offered by an SMMS platform, as well as some things they generally don’t. For example, with Facebook’s Global Pages, the Local versions get their own Cover Photos, Photo Albums, Events, and featured applications. The bad news? Global Pages aren’t available to every brand yet. You need spend threshold on FB media, making this a big move for many but not all.

Publishing:
Getting content into the fan’s News Feed is the most important thing a brand can do. Facebook’s capabilities for post scheduling, filters, and moderation continue to improve. Native Facebook also allows you to target posts by demographics, a feature few SMMS platforms offer. On the other side, SMMS platforms have advanced filters that can be a community manger’s best friend. Most SMMS platforms will be better at publishing and moderation, but the utility gap is less than it used to be.

Page Tab Applications:
The short story is that in today’s Facebook world, it is all about optimizing the News Feed. 57% of Facebook’s monthly users are on mobile – they see your content in their News Feed not on your Page or on apps. If you deliver a Page application, it should be really compelling and that usually means custom development. This is still a clear SMMS advantage, but the apps and promotions themselves are less important today as spend shifts from fan acquisition to fan engagement.

Analytics and Reporting:
SMMS platforms provide varying levels of analytics. The change here is that many brands are using the platform reporting as supplemental to creating customized reporting directly off of the Facebook Insights export. Advantage goes to the platform vendors, but again the gap narrows.

We work with brands that have millions of fans and run on the native Facebook interface, and we work with several of the major SMMS platform vendors on other pages.

Here are some considerations to evaluate whether an SMMS platform is a requirement. You definitely need one if:

     1. You use the SMMS platform to manage across multiple social presences – Facebook,
         Twitter, G+, Linkedin, etc.

     2. You have local country pages but at least 50% of the content they serve is global
         content across all Pages (not geo-targeted).

     3. You don’t have regular moderation resources, including weekends. At least for now
         the SMMS platform filters will keep your Page cleaner than native Facebook.

     4. You manage a defined content approval process that includes multiple review and
         approval levels across several teams.

     5. You need prebuilt templates for applications that live across all Pages, and do not
         plan on extensive customized apps.

If you don’t slot readily into at least a couple of the above, the choice between native and platform has become a closer call.

Is Your Social Strategy Framework Really About Tactics?

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We see a lot of “Social Strategy Frameworks” (do a quick Google search to see what we mean). Most of them are very colorful, with lots of interconnected lines (how social!) and industry buzzwords.

Pretty? Yes. Helpful? Not so much.

Usually there are two big problems. First, the framework you used is about tactics, not strategy. Second, there isn’t a process for actually getting to a strategy.

Things like social platforms, tools, content, measurement, and so on are tactics. Before you get to those, you need to know what conversation you want to have with your audience – each and every audience you have. The “what the heck am I going to talk about” guides platform choices (which impact measurement plans), media choices, content calendars and the rest. We love frameworks because they bring a discipline to the process.

An effective framework should guide you on a journey that results in a guiding brand statement. For every audience you should be able to clearly articulate who they are; what they care about; the message you want to deliver; and why it is going to be of value to them.

Your social strategy is the intersection between what the brand wants and what their audiences want. From there the tactics fall out much more easily.

Here is the Social Strategy Framework we use to help us get there:

The Framework guides you through a process:

Insights

Think of this as three things:

• Your brand: What are the business objectives and success metrics?

• Your competitors: What are they doing in the social space? If they are going left, where do you go right?

• Your audiences: Who are they? What do they care about? Value? Where are they and what are they doing?

Strategy

The all-important intersection between brand goals and audience “wants.” This is the audience’s “Why should I care?” We develop the brand statement for each distinct sub-segment of your audience. Unless your target is “gamer moms,” you really don’t want to use the same message for gamers and moms, unless your target is “gamer moms.”

Tactics

These are what fall out of the strategy. The output tends to be dense documents with lots of detail and data supporting the choices and recommendations. But take our word for it – these don’t really require heavy lifting (well, not that much) if you have a clear strategic vision.

Many times you need to move fast and make tactical choices before the strategy is in place. But don’t neglect building the right long-term strategy. Your social efforts will be way better for it.