How Do I Know if My Facebook Content is Performing Well?

Creating valuable content for Facebook and other social media platforms is essential for any business these days. But it isn’t enough just to have a presence. You also have to make sure that your content is valuable, performing well, and reaching your audience. Analyzing social media metrics is all about knowing where to look and what to look for. What metrics should you be looking at to gauge your Facebook content and its success? Let’s start with the metrics found in the Page Insights section of the platform.

Page Insights

The metrics shown in Facebook’s Page Insights answers all of the questions you should be asking about your Facebook content. To find Facebook Insights, you go to your Facebook page and click “insights” on the top menu. In the overview, you can pick whether you want to see data for today, yesterday, the last seven days, or the last 28 days.

Who Is Your Audience?

Since Facebook Insights divides audiences into four different groups, these definitions are useful to know when you look at audience metrics. When Facebook talks about “people engaged,” they mean the people talking about your page, liking posts, commenting, or sharing your content. The people who have had your posts or mentions show up in their feed are “people reached,” and your “fans” are simply people who like your page, whereas “followers” are the people who follow your page. You should be able to see metrics for all these groups.

Important Metrics to Take Note of:

Reach and Engagement

Reach and engagement tells you how many people see your posts or interact with them, as well as which posts were hidden or reported as spam. You’ll be able to see what posts got the highest engagement of people commenting, liking, or sharing the posts.

Actions

Actions tell you what people do on your page, like how many people click your call-to-action button or how many clicks through to your website.

People

You’ll be able to see what demographics visit your page, how they find it, and when they visit it.

Views

See what sections of your page people look at, and how many are viewing your page in general.

When Your Fans Are Online

This shows you when people who follow you are online. You likely have people who follow your page from many different time zones, and they won’t be online at the same time within their time zones either.

Post Types

The number of people who see or engage with your posts can vary depending on the type of post, like a video post, image post, or link post. You can go back in time as far as two years to see how different types of posts have performed over time.

Pages to Watch

You can add a competitor’s page in this section to compare your engagement metrics to those of a competitor with a successful social media presence. You will see an overview of how posts from other pages do, and it will give you valuable information about what to post next.

What to Do with Your Metrics

It is not enough to track your Facebook content performance, you also need to use what you find out to change the way you create content. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to figuring out whether or not your Facebook content performs well. It all depends on what exactly you need to happen. Are you looking to have your page mentioned a lot? Do you want people to engage with your content, or do you just want your posts to show up in their feeds so that they can click on through to your website? Are you reaching a different audience than you intended? Regardless of your goals, below are a few ways to get started with changes based on your metrics:

The Positives

Look for the common thread in the posts that did well and received a lot of engagement. Then try to mimic that type of post in the future. Creating great content is all about running little experiments over and over again, seeing what does well, and then replicating high-performing content.

Looking at your competitor’s content on a fairly regular basis is also a sound idea to stay on top of industry trends.

The Negatives

Keep an eye out for negative engagement, posts that people hid, or reported as spam. Try to decipher why, and how you can avoid it in the future. Look for spikes in people unfollowing your page, and what was posted that day. It might be a coincidence, but it might also be that you are posting content that annoys your audience or that they aren’t connecting with.

Facebook Content That is Valuable to Your Audience Matters Most of All

The performance of your content is obviously very important, but the greatest measurement that you need to discover is threefold: Is this content valuable to my audience? Am I serving them with this content and helping them with their most immediate problem? Is it leading to further conversations, clicks, and the like?

When the answer is yes to all 3 – you’ll know your content strategy is on the right track!