Moving beyond the overview of Facebook analytics we are now starting to get into the meat and potatoes of what you will find in the Facebook Insights (Analytics). With the Likes section you will be able to clearly see how many likes your Page has gained or lost each day based on a specific date range you’ve given. With this information you will learn where and how people are joining your Facebook page.
Unlike the overview where you only see a specific date range now that you have the ability to dig into the data you can set your date range of what you want to look at. This allows you to go back and look at trends and analysis over specific periods. For example, we will routinely look at the same period in the last year or even the entire last year for the information that we are seeking.
Having your likes (Facebook Fans) increase is always a great sign of people interested in your product or service that you offer. A constant increase like this client we took over a month ago shows a great sign of steady and increased growth. This marketing based on more frequent posts, including a link from their website to Facebook, and including Facebook information in their monthly newsletters has started to pay off for them.
But... there’s always a BUT isn’t there? We encourage people to take a “like” (or Facebook Fan, Twitter Follower, etc.) with a grain of salt. Although these likes are great you want to get likes that also include engagement with your product. Better yet you want them to purchase your product or service. Facebook keeps track of people that like and share your posts. It is up to you to keep track of where your customers are coming from and how they’ve heard about your company. This information you gather will help build your audience further by focusing on areas that are working for you.
For our company in Valparaiso Indiana one of our key “likes” doesn’t come from Facebook at all according to Facebook. We have a large segment of customers that will see our posts and then pick up the phone or stop on into our office. They mention they saw a specific post and want us to help them do it or understand the information in more detail. Although we joke with them (we are family after all) that they should like or share we know they won’t as they like what we call “old fashioned social networking”. For those that don’t know what that is it’s when you actually talk to people rather than just email or commenting on a social network. The point here is to not gauge everything on fans alone to your page as there are other ways to gain likes (and business).
Knowing where your fans come from is extremely important. Now only does it tell you what is working for you but what isn’t. If you conduct a large paid marketing campaign to increase your fans and get little or no fans that tells you that campaign how you have it setup is failing your intended action. If you see a growth in your organic likes (ideal) that is great. An organic like is an unpaid for new fan to your Facebook page.
The dreaded unlike. We don’t like these. No one does. These though could be a positive item though (if there’s not a ton of them). You want to engage people that are interested in your product or service. By removing the people that are not interested in your services you are targeting those that are interested. This can lead to a higher likelihood of getting people that will more likely purchase from you. An unlike though may be someone interested in your products though. You just may have flooded their Facebook feed so much they have left your page so that they can go to your page at their convenience rather than what Facebook feeds (we have to think positive!).
We love this as it tells us how people learned about our page. Was it they clicked a link from our website, saw a post on a friend’s page that they shared, or clicked a link from one of our email marketing campaigns. When they landed on our Facebook page they liked us and are truly interested in what we have to offer them.
Our uncategorized mobile are when people access and like our page through a mobile device. More and more we see these types of users coming to us not only on Facebook but our website as well.
We do on occasion run a promotion or boost a post as we want to get the good word out about what we’re doing or offering. This could be a new hire, new product, or something else that we’re offering from Valparaiso Indiana for all of Northwest Indiana. These are people that found what we were announcing of interest to them that they liked our page.
Through search is interesting as we are seeing at least one new one per month from people doing a specific search for us. These people have a vested interest in us as they typed in criteria to specifically find us.
Knowing where your likes (Facebook Fans) are coming from can help you grow your audience, target your posts, and be more agile to serving your client’s needs. This will take you some time to fully understand and the more you dig into it the more your will understand about your customer’s needs. If you would like some help in helping your customers or are so busy (we hope so!) and need someone to help you on your social media JM2 Webdesigners is here to assist you. You can reach us at @BUSINESSPHONETOLLFREE@, through email at @BUSINESSEMAILADDRESS@, or through our contact form here.