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Which metrics are most important for your Facebook page's performance?
You have a Facebook page for your business and you are posting consistently. You also see your followers growing every week. But how do you know if your page is driving enough brand awareness?
It is important to know which metrics are indicators of success and what is their benchmark. Knowing the benchmark for any metric is important for two reasons:
You are able to measure yourself against a target and aspire towards meeting that target.
The benchmark gives you a realistic picture of the result you can expect from your marketing efforts.
This is a two-part post: in this post I will talk about key metrics; in the next post, I will talk about strategies to improve those metrics.
Post reach: Reach of each post is the most important metric for your Facebook page. Reach is defined as the unique number of people in whose feed your post has appeared. In the example below, you can see that the reach is displayed at the bottom of each post.
Facebook differentiates between organic reach and paid reach, so you will be able to tell how many people saw your post organically vs how many saw it through a boost post ad. Organic post reach has been steadily declining over the years with new updates to Facebook's algorithm. According to a report by Hootsuite in early 2020, the organic post reach stood at about 5%. Which means that if you have 1000 followers of your page, only 50 are likely to see you post.
Remember, this is an average across multiple posts. Some of yours post may perform better, while some may perform worse. However, if the majority of your posts perform worse, it's time to rethink your content.
Another component of checking your reach is the audience that the majority of your posts are reaching to. This can be found under Insights -> People -> People Reached. In the example below, the 65+ age group are seeing your posts most often. Are these people your intended audience? If not, then improve your content to appeal to the audience you want to target.
Engagement rate (by follower): Engagement rate (by follower) on the post is the sum of all the likes, comments and shares you receive on it, out of all your followers. According to a social media survey by RivalIQ conducted in early 2020 across industries, the average engagement rate is 0.09%. If you have 1000 followers of your page, only 0.9 (or approximately 1 person) is likely to engage with it.
As before, this is an average number. You may find more engagements for some of your posts.
Like reach, the engagement can also be tracked by the demographics of the people engaging. This can be found under Insights -> People -> People Engaged. In the example below, the 65+ age group is most engaged, with most of them being women.
Page likes: Once you have analysed your reach and engagement against the benchmark, then proceed to track page likes. If you start with page likes, you will find yourself stuck improving a vanity metric. Whereas, improving reach and engagement will channel your efforts towards increasing the relevance of posts for your audience. Page likes will automatically follow from that.
There is no benchmark for how much your page following should be as it depends on how long you have been posting for and how often you post. However, if you see increase in your likes consistently every week, then you are on the right track.
There are many more metrics to track for your Facebook page. But if you are just starting out, these three are sufficient to improve upon. In my next blog, I will provide tips on how to improve these metrics.
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