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We will quickly go through some basic concepts of Facebook and then some free Facebook Analytics tools. First, let us back up; how is social media different from regular online media? There are two primary differences:
- Social Media is more interactive vs Regular media having one direction information flow
- Information is disseminated differently. In Social Media, one way of thinking of information dissemination is to think of it in terms of a Social Graph.
There are three main data points used when analyzing social media:
- Connect: How many followers do you have?
- Reach: How far has your information propagated?
- Engage: How many likes, comments and shares have yours posts generated?
If we look at these three data points from a Facebook perspective:
- Connect: is the number of fans
- Reach: It is the number of users who have been served your post
- Engagement: Likes, comments, shares, #Link clicks and #views of a movie
To determine if your followers are engaged, you can compute the engagement ratio or engagement rate:
Engagement rate = #Actions on Post / #Followers. Actions here can include like, shares, etc.
Social media Analysis encompasses more than just looking at quantitative data – it also involves looking at qualitative data. If you are attempting to understand user behavior, looking at the qualitative data will prove to be much more helpful. What is qualitative analysis? You are attempting to measure quality without looking at numerical figures. For example, on a Facebook post you may see a large number of comments related to it. But this doesn’t tell you much. What if a huge percentage of these comments are negative in nature? To truly understand customer behavior in this scenario, you will need to research the comments to ascertain why people are being negative. There are social media analysis tools that automatically judge if a comment is positive or negative.
From a very high level standpoint, what are the main uses of Social Media?
- First, it allows a brand or company to listen closely to their customers. You are gaining valuable feedback from your customers. Some possible metrics to track: the number of customer posts that include a particular group of keywords, the number of posts that include your product name, the number of posts that mention your competitors in a positive light
- Second, it allows for viral marketing. Viral marketing is basically your marketing message reaching a large number of users in a very short period of time. Sales promotions normally do not work well when it comes to viral marketing. Share information that is useful and beneficial to users – this type of information is more likely to go viral rather than a sales promotion.
- Third, it allows for active support. It is a great medium to enhance user satisfaction – you can communicate directly with users who have posted negative or positive comments. Some possible metrics to track: the number of users you have directly communicated with, the number of posts you have made, the types of questions being asked by users.
Now onto some free Facebook analytics tools that can help to further clarify some of the above ideas. These free tools are very easy to use and give you some fairly good data points to work with. The four tools I will cover are LikeAlyzer, Sociograph.io, Agora Pulse and Facebook Insights. I am giving you a very brief overview of each tool, you will need to dig deeper by using the tools yourself. I will attempt to make things simpler by using a lot of pictures to explain each tool.
The first tool is LikeAlyzer. Go to likealyzer.com, enter the URL for your Facebook page in the empty textbox. For example, you can enter https://www.facebook.com/Starbucks/ in the textbox to see the data statistics associated with the main Starbucks page. Below are the results from LikeAlyzer for the WACA Facebook page:
The above same page, but with data from the bottom portion of the above page:
Note the information about your competitors in the extreme bottom right corner of the above screenshot.
The next tool Sociograph gives you information about your audience. And it does this primarily through visual graphs. Type Sociograph.io in your browser URL to access the site. Note that you will need to login into this tool using your Facebook user id and Facebook password to access the data related to your Facebook page.
We next have the tool called Agora Pulse. Go to https://www.agorapulse.com/ to access the tool. Agora Pulse gives you some free tools to use. One such free tool allows you to compare your Facebook Page against a benchmark.
After you pick the page you want to analyze, you will need to wait for a few minutes.
Note, the metrics below about the posts that have been made to your Facebook page.
The last tool I will cover is Facebook Insights. Insights can be directly accessed from the Facebook Page you are analyzing.
In conclusion, I hope the tools I have covered will act as a starting point in analyzing your presence on Facebook.
