How effective is your Facebook™ marketing? You take a look at the analytics panel of your page and the numbers look pretty good. But are they truly relevant? More importantly, will they be relevant in the near future, considering the constant changes Facebook™ makes to its ranking system?
The social media platform learned a lot from its mistakes and is now paying more attention to the way users interact with content shared on their news feed. Apart from the fight against fake news and fake accounts, Facebook™ wants to regain its private users’ trust by prioritising content they are likely to enjoy, such as posts from their friends and family members.
So, let’s take another look at the Facebook™ metrics you monitor. Do you think that Likes are important? In a series of purges, Facebook™ cancelled the likes from inactive or fake accounts and many pages saw their numbers drop spectacularly. This shows how unreliable the metric is, despite your efforts to attract only followers who are likely to become customers.
The New Social Media Paradigm: Above All, Be Social
The Facebook™ metrics you should actually monitor are those telling you how social you are in relation to your followers. In a world of automated social media posting, paid ads and boosted posts, what really matters is how much activity you have in a bi-directional manner: not just from your account, but also from your followers.
This is also the key focus expressed by the Facebook™ team: turning the platform into a place of dialogue and meaningful human interactions.
With this idea in mind, these are the Facebook™ metrics you should monitor carefully, because they are truly important in 2019:
1. Engagements
Engagements are users’ interactions with your posts, in the form of:
Likes
Reactions
Comments
Shares
It is important to monitor engagements in connection with Reach. The Reach metric represents the number of people who saw your posts on their news feeds. A high Reach with low engagements means that your content is not at all adapted to your followers’ likes and interests. Thus, you must immediately investigate and discover what is wrong with your content mix, or with the audience you are trying to attract.
2. Reactions
Reactions form a part of engagements, but they are worth monitoring in detail. This is one of the new Facebook™ metrics and many business owners and marketers still do not go into details in analysing the numbers.
Facebook™ users can respond to your posts using one of five reactions: Like, Love, Ha-Ha, Wow, Sad and Angry. Each post displays the top 3 reaction emoticons underneath it. So, just by scrolling down your Facebook™ page, you can get a feel of how your followers react to your content. If you get lots of Like and Love, you’re doing great. But if Angry and Sad are predominant, you should start investigating why.
Facebook™ also ranks posts by the nature of the reactions they get: positive or negative.
3. Page Views
This is one of the most overlooked Facebook™ metrics and it has already been around for years. It tells you how many users actually looked at your page, not just at a post appearing on their news feed.
If you have a large number of Page Views, coupled with many Likes, then your page is truly a magnet for leads. It means that your posts are interesting enough to make people learn more about your page and follow it.
4. Actions on Page
Every Facebook™ page has a customisable button at the top. You can define this button as one of the following:
Sign Up
Contact Us
Learn More
Shop Now
Install App
Actions on Page is the metric measuring how many users clicked on this button. The larger this number is the better for your business – it means that you have a healthy traffic funnel to your website.
5. Video Metrics
Video already is the king of content on social media, so how good are you at it? You will see it in the Video sections of your Page Insights. The two key Facebook™ metrics for video are Minutes viewed and 3-second video views.
You will also find a Top videos section – it shows you the videos with the highest engagement rates on your page.