When you are trying to lose weight, it’s important to set a goal and occasionally step on the scale, or measure your waist to measure your progress. You wouldn’t go through the motions without knowing if you are reaching your goals, right? We suggest approaching your social media goals in a similar way. Facebook Analytics are a great way to help you evaluate your progress as a company and see if you’re accomplishing your social media goals!
Post Engagements, Page Views, Reach, Actions on Page, etc. – these can be difficult to understand when you first start looking at your analytics. We wanted to give you a general overview of what these graphs and numbers represent.
When you first open the “Insights” tab on your Facebook page, the top section will look like this:
It can seem like a lot, so here is a breakdown:
- Actions on Page: On the right-hand side of your page, you can see an option to direct people to an email, phone number, or other means of contacting you. This statistic shows the number of people that have clicked that button.
- Page Views: This analytic measures how many people are clicking through to your page, searching for your page, or viewing the page as a whole. It doesn’t measure who saw your post or shared your content. Just the physical amount of people visiting your profile.
- Page Previews: This shows the number of times people hovered over your page name or profile to see a preview of the content on your page.
- Page Likes: This one is pretty self-explanatory: this is the amount of new page likes received.
- Reach: The number of eyes on your content. Reach can be broken down in two ways: organic and paid. This will help you understand if you are reaching enough people to meet your goals.
- Recommendations: Simply put – the number of times people have used Facebook’s “Recommendations” feature to suggest your page/business.
- Post Engagements: Engagements can be defined as likes, comments, shares, or link clicks on a specific post. By using this statistic, you can better gauge the kind of content your audience likes to interact with as well as which types of content to avoid.
- Videos: This shows video views of more than 3 seconds. If you are posting a lot of video content, this number will be very important to you.
- Page Followers: The number of new people who have followed your page. This is usually similar to Page Likes, but a person can choose to follow a page without liking.
Each Page/business is likely to have different goals/benchmarks for their analytics. The challenging thing about setting goals in social media is the number of variables for each business/target audience. As you view your analytics each month, you can refine your goals to be realistic for your company and audience.
And, just like with weight-loss goals, if you have a setback, we suggest trying something a little different next month!