Managing a Facebook page is a major part of many companies’ marketing and communication programs, but the data we use to measure the effectiveness of those efforts is sorely lacking. Facebook consistently changes what’s measured and how, adding complexity and incongruence to an already squirrely data scenario. For example, People Talking About This is the mathematical coin of the realm these days, but is a steaming gumbo of aggregated data that rolls together 13 different behaviors into one, catch-all metric.
If you really care about your brand on Facebook, you can and should analyze better. There are two ways to get there. First, investigate third party metrics solutions that use the Facebook data API to create cleaner, more intuitive, and more useful visualizations. Pagelever is probably my favorite – and I’m an investor in the company – and their brand-new tool that manages the success of status updates in real-time is a mind blower.
You May Be Thinking About Facebook Wrong
The other big, important thing you must have to do Facebook better is a change in mindset. Think about Facebook less as a customer acquisition vehicle, and more as a loyalty, retention, and customer insights platform.
To help you make this shift, this weekend I published a new ebook called Knockout: Use Conversation Mining and Facebook Data to Thump Your Competition. You can download it for free right now. Will you please do that?
In the ebook I make the case for overhauling your entire Facebook strategy, and then actively combining numerical data with key brand insights derived from mining your fans’ actual posts on your Facebook page.
4 Benefits of Combining Numbers and Words on Facebook
By combining conversations and numbers your company gains four important advantages:
- An early warning system for issues
- The ability to make faster course corrections on promotions
- Better product marketing inputs
- Cues to better target and tailor your content
Your customers – in their own words – are telling you what they want and need on your Facebook page. Yet, the vast majority of brands only measure Facebook with likes, PTAT, and the occasional “engagement” bar graph. Please download Knockout! and let’s start doing better together, okay?
Many, many thanks to social intelligence company NetBase for all of their help on this project, including case studies and screen shots, and creating my visage as a retro comic book character.
At the end of the ebook there’s even an offer where NetBase will give you a free conversation analysis of your fan page. Check it out!