We have posted a lot of articles so far about Facebook marketing. We have tried to explain to our readers – entrepreneurs and small business owners – why it is important to tap into the enormous audience represented by this social media platform if you want to find and engage potential customers on a tight budget.
Indeed, given the cutthroat competition in every industry and every niche, no company can survive on the market without proper online marketing strategies. When it comes to Facebook, things seem to be rather simple. After all, everyone has a Facebook account, right?
That is true, but there is a vast difference in posting on a personal profile and sharing content on a business page. You want to know that your efforts yield the expected results and that you get a good ROI for your Facebook ad campaigns. You need to be aware at any moment how well your page thrives, how many people engage with it and what are the results of their engagement. For this reason, you need to keep your eyes on various metrics. We will show you which are the most important.
1. Reach
If you are ready to start celebrating your 10,000th like on your Facebook page, you may put away the champagne bottle for a while and go check the Reach metric. Likes in themselves do not tell you much. For instance, someone makes a Facebook profile, likes your page because they saw an interesting photo or article, but that’s all. That user may not effectively unlike your page, but they will not engage with it in any way either.
The Page Reach metric, however, shows you how many people viewed your page or any of your posts in their news feed. This is one important metric to take into consideration. If your Reach is in the range of thousands, then you may pop the cork on that champagne bottle.
2. People Talking about the Page
This metric is showed right next to the Likes number and it says a very useful thing for your marketing efforts: how many people took an action of sorts on any of your posts. They either liked, shared or commented on your posts, thus making your page visible to their friends.
People talking about your page are active users, which have a high likelihood of following through with your CTAs and converting into customers.
3. Organic Reach
This is the most coveted, and the rarest type of reach these days. It means that people found out about your Facebook page by looking at their friends’ Timelines, getting a notification about a post from your page which was liked or commented on by their friends, or simply by visiting your Facebook page after discovering your business name or website.
This is free reach which costs you nothing, and it is becoming increasingly scarce. Facebook is changing the way people see posts in their news feed, prioritising posts from personal accounts (friends) and paid (boosted) posts from pages.
4. Paid Reach
This metric shows how successful (or not) your paid ad campaigns are in bringing more people on your page and increasing the visibility of your posts. You need to watch this metric very carefully during and upon the completion of these campaigns and note how many people have effectively viewed your page and posts, how successful your boosted post was, and what type of content is more engaging for your fans.
5. Click-Through Rate
This metric is specifically important for ad campaigns which contain a link taking people out of Facebook (most typically, to a landing page to complete a call to action). Since it is one of the bidding options for choosing the way you want to pay for Facebook ads, you have to pay close attention to this metric if you want to get a good ROI for your ad campaign.
These five metrics are very important for marketers and business owners running Facebook pages. As you have noted, we did not include the Likes among these categories for the reasons specified above. Likes are a number which tells you how many people clicked the ‘Like page’ button. It does not tell you if these people still engage with you, or even remember the name of your business at all.