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.
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