How to Improve Your Facebook Engagement Using Controlled Experiments

Are you wondering what type of Facebook post works best?

Are you struggling with getting engagement or reach on your Facebook posts?

You may have heard that you need to post more photos or more questions or more photos with questions…

But what really works best for your audience?

In this article, you’ll learn how to find out which types of Facebook posts work best for your page.
Why Experiments?


Running controlled experiments from time to time will help you discover what works on your page so you won’t have to take someone elses word for it.

It’s also a great way to help you come up with a posting structure that may help you streamline your content creation in the future.
#1: View Insights for Ideas

In your Insights section, you do have some data on your best post types (under Posts), but that can be a function of what types of content you have been posting lately. So you may not get the whole picture if you haven’t been posting many links recently. But it’s a good place to start your investigation.



Take a look at the best post types for your page.



Another good place to start is to look at the Posts section and click on one of the posts. You will get a lot of information on your individual posts. The example shown here is a photo tip, which typically does very well on my page.



Clicking on a post will give you a lot of information.

What I wanted to see is how posts did in a more controlled experiment. If I posted similar information with a link or a text post, would it do as well? Here’s an idea of how you can set up an experiment on your own page to do a little investigation.
#2: Set Up Your Experiment

Start with an outline of types of posts that you want to test and length of time. I ran two different time periods to test the number of posts per day. The longer your testing period, the better your results. But for the purpose of this post, I chose to run my test this way:

Length: Posting 5 times per day for 3 days

Types of Posts: Text, link, photo

Post times and formats:
6 am: Informative post with a link and a tag of another Facebook page (text post would remove the link preview, photo post would have the link in the status area)
9 am: Tip (link post would include a link to the tip, photo post would include a photographic representation of the tip)
Noon: Longer post (more text, but also would include a photo or link if needed)
3 pm: Question
6 pm: Humorous post

For the second experiment I posted 3 times a day with slightly later times: 10 am, 1 pm and 7 pm.

If you’re going to be a purist about this testing, you would post the same information each time and vary the post type each time. But that might not be so fun for your fans.

Once you’ve done your posts, you should wait a day to allow for all the results and then you can start assembling your data.

First, download your post-level data in your Facebook Insights area. Click Export Data, then select your date range and make sure you’ve selected the Post-level data button.



Download your post-level data.

Now you’re going to need to gather the data on four different tabs of the Excel spreadsheet.


Use the different tabs on the Excel spreadsheet to see the data.
#3: Gather the Data

I wanted to know about comments, likes and shares, as well as the clicks, reach and hides for each post. I found that information on each of these tabs within the spreadsheet:
Lifetime Talking About This: Comments, likes and shares
Key Metrics: Reach
Lifetime Post Consumers by Type: Clicks
Lifetime Negative Feedback: Hides and unlikes

One thing to note on the Lifetime Post Consumers by Type is that you’ll see Link Clicks, Other Clicks and Photo Views. The Other Clicks incorporate when someone clicks anywhere on the post that isn’t the photo or the link—they may click on the headline, the text in the status area or on a See More link if you have a long post.

And a note on the Lifetime Negative Feedback: You’ll have a column for Unlikes of Your Page and the “xbutton_clicks”, which is the Hide button. I take the sum of these columns since they have a similar effect—the person is not consuming your content in the news feed anymore.

Now put these statistics into one spreadsheet so you can compare.



Assemble the data into one spreadsheet.

Sum up the days of data so that you can see what type of post “won” the day.Highlight the winners for each day. Obviously in terms of reach, you may be seeing the same people for each post, but it still equates to potential eyeballs on your posts.
#4: Draw Some Conclusions

From this data, you may see patterns. One thing that’s obvious is that the status updates are the best at comments, likes, reach and other clicks for the two posting schedules. So I need to keep that in mind when doing my posting. But I did see that the link posts did OK in the reach for their posting schedules. I’m not sure how the link posts got photo views in the second round of testing so that was unusual.

The other thing you can do is compare the time slots between the posts and see if a certain type of post does better in one time slot. I noticed that the midday photo posts seemed to perform well compared to the other times during the day that I posted photos. After running this experiment, I might make sure my midday post has a photo.
Final Thoughts


By doing more controlled experiments, you can also find out what works best for your page. I would recommend using more data and trying different types of posts—maybe add a video post or test some different tagging strategies.

In any case, it was a fun exercise and I felt like I learned a few new things. I also confirmed my thoughts about the status updates getting a little bit more engagementand reach.

What do you think? What types of experiments have you tried running on your page? How did they turn out? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!

Twitter Adds a Custom Timeline Feature

Twitter added a custom timeline to their bag of tricks! This feature allows you to create custom content and embed it on your blog. Using your Favorites or a custom search, you can create a unique story using your Twitter conversations that can boost your brand’s story, amplify a Twitter campaign, or simply extend the life of an online event.

From Twitter, “Embedded timeline widgets give you the ability to embed a collection of Tweets (known as a timeline) on your own website. There are four types of embedded timelines available, all of which look and feel like timelines on twitter.com:”
User Timeline: Display public Tweets from any user on Twitter.
Favorites: Show all Tweets a specific user has marked as favorites.
List: Show Tweets from public lists that you own and/or subscribe to.
Search: Display customized search results in real time (perfect for live events, conferences, brands, etc.).

When you are in Tweetdeck, you have a new option to add a custom timeline by selecting the new icon on the left sidebar.




You can also easily add tweets from your Favorites to a custom timeline by selecting the details on the tweet and then adding it to custom timeline. You could use this to create a testimonial page for your blog by saving nice tweets that clients sent or comments about your product or services. Using a hashtag is a really important piece to tie together your content and a hashtag search would create a relevant and interesting custom timeline.



You can also access a new panel of widgets at the bottom of your Twitter header on your profile page.

How you use your Favorites section just became more relevant. Applause to Twitter for adding a great new feature. I’m definitely going to be using this. How are you going to use the new custom timeline on Twitter?

Photo credit: Big Stock Photos

How to Improve Your Facebook Marketing Using Facebook Insights

Do you manage a Facebook page?

Are you overwhelmed by the amount of statistics you have access to in Facebook Insights?

Would you like to know the statistics you need to track to help you boost your growth and visibility?

In this article, I’ll show you six ways to improve your Facebook page performance with statistic comparisons.

Getting Started

I’ve already shared with you the 6 Facebook metrics that you need to focus on to better understand your Facebook page performance. But understanding how you’re performing is only the first step of the process.

What really matters is not only to understand the key metrics, but also to understand how you can improve them!

This article will focus more on how to improve the performance of your Facebook content with the fan base you already have. If you want to increase your fan base, you should check out this great article from Andrea Vahl.

By looking at each key Facebook metric individually, it’s very hard to understand how you can improve it. But when you compare one metric to another relevant metric, you can see what’s wrong.

The Metrics You’ll Need

All metrics used in this article can be downloaded into an Excel spreadsheet from Facebook Insights. These metrics are presented as a percentage to allow you tocompare one metric to another and see the evolution of that metric over time.

By using the Facebook Insights spreadsheet download or one of these free tools, you can calculate and compare metrics and percentages to find ways to improve the performance of your Facebook page and its content.

#1: Recover Your Fans Reached Percentages

Fan Reach is probably one of the most important metrics to follow to measure the performance of your Facebook page.

You spend a lot of time and energy to recruit your fans so you want to make sure they see your content.

When the percentage of your Fans Reached is below average, but your Engagement and/or People Talking About scores remain good, your content isn’t the problem. The issue is that EdgeRank no longer shows your content in the news feed of your fan base.

In this example, the percentage of People Talking About is above average, the percentage of Engagement is slightly below average, but the percentage of Fans Reached is way below average. This is a sign that the quality of the content is not the main issue. Fans were lost along the way and you need to get back in front of them again.

In this situation, the best solution is to use promoted posts and sponsored storiesto get your new content in front of your fans again, have them engage and fix your EdgeRank.

Your Fan Reach should quickly go back to normal and you won’t have to invest in promoted posts and sponsored stories for too long.

Takeaway: If your Engagement metric is relatively good, but your Fans Reached and People Talking About metrics are lower, then consider using promoted posts and sponsored stories to get your content in front of your fans again.

#2: Regain Your Organic Reach

Fan Reach is a subset of Organic Reach. Because Organic Reach includes people who visit your page or view your content on a widget, but aren’t fans yet, it has to be higher than your Fan Reach. But sometimes it’s the same as or just slightly higher.

For Page 1, Organic and Fan Reach are almost equal, which shows that very little visibility comes from outside the news feed. For Page 2, Organic Reach is more than twice as much as Fan Reach, which shows the healthy generation of traffic from outside the news feed.

If this is the case, you’re not sending enough traffic to your page from outside sources.

Use a Like box or another call to action to put your Facebook page and its content in front of people who read your newsletter or visit your blog or website.

Having a Like box on your blog or website is a good idea. Include your content stream to give more visibility to your latest Facebook posts.

As more people are referred to your page from outside of Facebook, your Organic Reach rises farther above your Fans Reached metric.

Takeaway: If your Organic Reach metric is only slightly higher than your Fans Reached metric, work on sending more traffic to your Facebook page.

#3: Raise Your Engagement Levels

Engaged users (or consumers, as Facebook calls them) are the people who click on your content to view a photo or play a video. They are also clicks that lead to a like, comment or share. These types of clicks turn your engaged users into “storytellers.” The People Talking About metric is referred to as storytellers.

Storytellers are a subset of engaged users, which means that you’ll always have fewer storytellers than engaged users. On average, 20% to 35% of engaged users are storytellers.

On average, the percentage of storytellers compared to the number of people engaged varies between 20% and 35%.

If your percentage of storytellers is below this average, you’re good at getting people to notice your content, but not good at making them react to it with a like, share or comment.

To generate more engagement reactions, tweak your content to ask questions,publish content worth sharing and compel your fans to like it! Next, do an audit to spot existing content that’s doing well and create similar posts in the future.

As the average number of storytellers per post rises, so does your viral exposure. If you do an excellent job, the number of storytellers could even be nearly as high as the number of engaged users.

The best-performing pages can even have a percentage of storytellers very close to the percentage of engaged users. That means that almost all engaged users created a story, which is great news for the page!

Takeaway: If your People Talking About metric is lower than the 20% average of your Engagement metric, tweak your content to encourage more reactions.

#4: Lower Your Negative Feedback Numbers

Negative feedback has a great impact on your EdgeRank and should be closely monitored. A page with good content but high negative feedback has a lower reach than a similar page with the same level of quality content but lower negative feedback.

Negative feedback doesn’t necessarily mean that your content isn’t good. It does mean that the number of people who don’t want to see your posts is too high. This may be because you post too often, or because the “voice” of your brand makes some people feel uncomfortable.

For example, a charity that helps homeless people find a home had a very strong voice that shed light on poverty and the unfairness of certain situations. While the tone seemed to work well for a TV or print campaign, 0.4% of people didn’t respond well to the stories in their news feed.

The percentage of negative feedback was 4 times higher than the accepted average and had a negative impact on the page’s reach.

On average, negative feedback is 0.1% of the number of people reached. If you are above that threshold, your viral reach will be affected.

The page began to focus on the success stories the charity was able to contribute to, rather than the injustices it was fighting against. In less than a month, negative feedback fell back to normal, Organic Reach increased by 25% and viral reach increased by 80%.

If your average negative feedback is too high and your content isn’t spammy, try changing your “voice” and test new content strategies.

Takeaway: If your negative feedback metric is higher than 0.1% of the people your page reaches, try a new content strategy.

#5: Increase Your Clicks

Occasionally, the number of engaged users doesn’t seem to translate into clicks through to your content.

When you have good engagement and a very high percentage of storytellers, but very few clicks, the goal is to publish more "clickable" content.

The issue relates to the value of your content and its ability to encourage users to click on that content. Remember that clicks are tracked only when users watch a video, enlarge a photo or click on a link in your post. Also, clicks are one of the actions EdgeRank looks at to rank the affinity between your page and your fans.

In the spreadsheet downloads of your posts' insights, view how people clicked on your content by content type.

To encourage more clicks, publish more videos and images and don’t forget toinclude links in the text used to describe your photos where appropriate. If you publish a lot of photos, the second step is to work on the quality of your photos so people want to see a larger version and not the small one that the news feed displays by default.

Inserting text into pictures is a tactic some pages use with great success.

When users click more often to view your videos, images and content, you also get a higher EdgeRank score!

Takeaway: If your Click-Through Rate metric is much lower than your Engagement metric, remember to make your videos, photos or links worth clicking on.

#6: Extend Your Viral Reach

Viral Reach is the number of people you reach because your fans like, comment on and share your posts.

Unfortunately, viral metrics have been removed altogether from the new Facebook Page Insights since September 2013.

You can find Viral Reach metrics under the Key Metrics tab. It’s labeled Lifetime Post Viral Reach.

If you want to have more visual graphs, you can also find Viral Reach metrics in third-party analytics tools, which still have access to that data via the Facebook API.

Viral Reach varies significantly from one post to another.

Improving your Viral Reach metric recruits new fans and increases your page visibility with people who don’t know your brand. For some pages, Viral Reach is a greater indicator of visibility than Fan Reach.

On average, Viral Reach equals 25% of Organic Reach. Pages with many engaged users and storytellers can have a Viral Reach greater than Organic Reach!

Viral Reach is influenced by likes and comments, but most affected by shares. This is because EdgeRank doesn’t show most likes and comments in the news feed, but it does display all the shares. For this reason, a share has much more weight than the other engagement actions.

If your Viral Reach is below average, you need to make sure your content is worth sharing. Here again, you need to audit your existing content and see which pieces triggered the most shares, and find out why.

For example, when you post numbers or use good-looking infographics, you’ll get more shares than plain text or links. The reasons infographics motivate fans to share are too varied to provide one-size-fits-all advice. Test for what works and what doesn’t and track this comparison often.

Takeaway: If your Viral Reach metric is significantly lower than your Fans Reached metric, you need to work on getting your content shared more often.

Your turn

Now that you understand how to compare key metrics to reveal weaknesses in your page, use them to apply some simple fixes and boost your page’s performance.

What do you think? What metric comparisons do you find helpful? How have you boosted page performance in the past? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

4 Social Analytics Tips to Improve Your Social Media Marketing

Would you like to find out when your social media followers are most active?

Do you want to know which social network drives the most leads to your website?

There are many social media statistics you can track, but it’s important to track the data specific to your business’s use of social media.

Track the right metrics for your community and you’ll better understand how and when to share information, as well as what type of content drives the most traffic to your website.

In this article, you’ll learn how to track and measure four important social media metrics to help you improve your social media marketing.

#1: Determine the Best Times to Post Updates on Twitter and Facebook

Twitter

Because Twitter moves at such a rapid pace, tweets get buried quickly. Knowing when your followers are online plays a crucial part in your tweet’s visibility and success.

Luckily there are some great tools to analyze the activity of your followers.

Tweriod looks at the recent tweets of your followers and provides you with analytics and data that show when your followers are the most active.

Once you connect your Twitter account to Tweriod, it runs an analysis and summarizes the best hours of each day for you to reach your followers with your tweets. The report is delivered to you by email or a DM when the results are ready.

Tweriod results show the optimal times for you to tweet.

Besides recommending the best hours of each day to tweet, Tweriod also gives you an overall analysis you can review to get a sense of your community’s most active days.

Tweriod analytics show your followers' daily activity.

Tweriod also gives you the ability to synchronize this data with your Buffer account to automatically update your auto-scheduling hours.

Tweriod is free for accounts with up to 1000 followers and offers a monthly subscription if you have more followers or are interested in premium features.

Use the data from Tweriod to adjust the days and times you post on Twitter.

Facebook

With Story Bump, EdgeRank and the sheer volume of posts that roll through the general news feed, it’s getting difficult to make sure your fans see your page posts. Tomaximize the lifespan of your posts, you need to know when your fans are most likely to see them.

Facebook Insights offers a simple way to find out when your fans are most likely to be active on Facebook.

To find the best hours to share updates on your Facebook page, pull up the Insights dashboard, click on the Posts tab, and choose “When Your Fans Are Online.”

The Posts tab in Insights shows when your fans are most often online.

Here, Facebook shows you easy-to-read graphs of your fans’ diversity, including the average number of fans who saw your post in any given hour.

Insights has easily readable graphs.

That’s it. Now, you just have to post during your strong hours and highlight your most important posts during your peak exposure times.

#2: Find the Magic Number of Facebook Posts per Day

Many studies show the average brand should post about 1-2 times a day on Facebook. You need to know if that’s true for your page.

Find the magic number of posts to share on your page, and you’ll dramatically affect your engagement and community growth.

Facebook’s new Insights dashboard gives you information about your recent posts and the frequency of engagement. To view the information, click on “See All” from your page to reveal the Overview tab.

Access your Insights dashboard.

Now, export the Overview data into a spreadsheet file directly from the dashboard by selecting “Data Type: Post-Level Data.”

A view of the Facebook Insights dashboard Overview tab.

In the spreadsheet, group the posts by day and compare the average Lifetime Post Total Impressions and Lifetime Engaged Users columns.

For each day, look for the lower engagement numbers to discover which post count is decreasing the average metrics you measure.

That is your magic number of posts to share each day.

#3: Measure the Click-through Rate

If you’re active on social media, you’re likely to share a lot of content from your blog, website, YouTube channel or other media platforms.

When you share a link to your various platforms, your goal is to have people click on your link. The click-through rate (CTR) your links receive is most likely your primary metric for measuring success.

To measure your CTR, you need a URL shortener to track clicks.

Bitly is a free URL shortener with a set of tools to create shortened links, share your links and measure the CTR on your links.

You can shorten links from within the Bitly dashboard or use an extension for Firefox or Chrome to automatically shorten and share links straight from your browser.

After you’ve shortened a link with Bitly, click on it from the library at any time to get detailed information on its CTR, click sources, geographic distribution of clicks and more.

This Bitly dashboard shows a CTR of 44 and other data on platforms and demographics.

This map shows where the clicks on a Bitly link originate.

On the Bitly stats dashboard, you get both aggregated and individual statistics about the links you share from Bitly. Aggregated stats show complete global activity on a link and individual stats show activity specific to your shares of the link.

There are other tools to measure your CTR, but Bitly’s analytics give you more detail than most, for free.

Bitly shows you click-through rates on every link you shorten.

Spend some time analyzing the data behind your Bitly links to find trends in CTRs and shares that will help you deliver content suited to the needs and interests of your community.

#4: Compare Lead Sources and Conversion Rates

Most brands’ social media strategies use more than one social media platform to drive traffic to their websites and generate new leads.

Although each platform has its place in your strategy, you won’t receive an equal ROIfrom each one. You’ll want to find out which platform generates the best ROI so you can put more effort into your marketing on that platform.

UTM Link Building and Google Analytics can help you track the leads and conversions from each social network. UTMs are tags you add to a URL that make it easy to track and monitor in Google Analytics.

Use the Google URL builder to create a measurable URL that Google Analytics can segregate into campaigns.

Google's URL Builder.

Google’s URL Builder page has some helpful hints on how to use each of the UTM parameters:

• Campaign Source. This helps Google Analytics identify the source of your traffic as a search engine, newsletter or other referrer.
• Campaign Medium. This specifies whether the link is used in an email, a CPC ad or another method of sharing.
• Campaign Name. This associates your URL with a specific product promotion or strategic campaign such as a spring sale or other promotion.

Build unique URLs for any landing page on each of the social networks used in your strategy. You’ll be able to differentiate among leads that come from your Twitter bio, your tweets or Facebook.

If this seems too complicated, you’ll want to get the help of someone with the appropriate technical skills.

To see which social network provides the most leads or conversions for a specific campaign, go to your Google Analytics dashboard and check out your campaigns.

Google Analytics Campaigns overview.

Set up your goals, then look under Traffic Sources > Campaigns to see which source and medium drives more leads to your various landing pages and the conversion rate from each of them. Eventually, you’ll see which source (social network) brings you more leads or more signups or sales (conversions).

Anytime you share an inbound link on social media, measure it with custom UTM parameters to get full ROI information on leads and conversions.

Summary

You can track many metrics on social media, but the metrics you choose to measure should reflect your business goals.

I recommend tracking these social media metrics because they give you the information you need to better market your business and products.

What do you think? What metrics do you track to measure the success of your social media efforts? Are there tools you have found to be helpful? Join the conversation below and let me hear your thoughts!