The

Complete
Guide to
Facebook
Analytics
How to analyze the
metrics that matter
Table of Contents
Introduction Advanced Analyses
How to Optimize for Graph Search
Definitions
Engagement How Graph Search Can Simplify Your Facebook Strategy
Engaged Users Analyze to Take Advantage of News Feed Changes
Engagement Rate How Analysis Can Help Identify Opportunities
Reach Perform a Competitive Analysis in Your Industry
Impressions Conclusion
Stories Simply Measured Sample Reports
Consumptions Understand the Performance
Consumption vs Engaged Users of Your Brand’s Facebook Page(s)
Like Sources Benchmark Your Brand’s Facebook
Performance Against Competitors
Paid vs Organic Likes
Measure Your Customer Service Efforts on Facebook
Facebook Tactics Compare Your Efforts on Facebook
The New Facebook Insights Against Those on Other Social Networks
How to Increase Your Reach Additional Resources and Sources
How to Increase Your Impressions
Basic Analyses
How to Measure Your Facebook
Audience Beyond Fans
How to Determine Which Posts You Should
Promote With Facebook Ads
How to Measure the Impact of Visual Content
How to Deal With Negative Feedback
INTRODUCTION
Chances are, your target audience is somewhere among the nearly 9.6 million
users who log in to their accounts as least once per day. That’s good news
because Facebook is a gold mine for marketers. Consider these Facebook
numbers alone:
• More than 1.26 billion registered users
(1.19 billion of whom are active on a monthly basis)
• 350 million daily uploaded photos
• 4.75 billion average daily shared items
• 20 billion minutes of usage per day
3
But it’s not enough to know that your target audience is on Facebook – the key
is to reach and engage them and we’re going to show you just how to do that.
In this comprehensive eBook, we walk you through the most crucial Facebook
metrics you need to gauge the performance of your marketing efforts. Then we’ll
outline specific ways you can use these metrics to create actionable Facebook
strategies. Finally, because even the savviest marketers can find it challenging to
make use of all that Facebook data, we share examples of how to use our tools
to analyze and report on Facebook metrics yourself.
DEFINITIONS
You can’t measure what you don’t know, so we’ll begin by defining all the
important Facebook metrics and how they’re calculated. As a social media or
community manager, having a firm grasp on these Facebook metrics will help
you deliver better results with your Facebook strategy.

The Facebook Engagement Megaphone is a tool we use at Simply Measured,

which allows you to track the effectiveness of your post content throughout its
life cycle. It will act as a helpful visual as we define Facebook metrics.

The engagement megaphone outlines your Facebook activity; from your posts
and posts about your brand to engaged users, to engagement, to reach, and
to impressions. You can use this to find out how many people are seeing your
content, whether or not people are interacting with your content, and how many
new Page “Likes” your posts are generating.

4
Engagement
Content is king, but engagement rules. After all, if no one engages with your content, what’s the point of
creating it? That’s why your number-one priority should be to get people engaged with your brand content Our calculation for
engagement is different
on Facebook.

The good news is that Facebook isn’t a network for syndication; it’s a network built for engagement, and
recent feature additions show that engagement is more important than ever. The ability to reply to others’
comments, click on hashtags, and search the web were all designed to keep users on-site and discovering
than Facebook's
new content with which to interact.

How engagement is calculated

calculation.
On Facebook, engagement
Engagement includes clicks.
Likes + Comments + Shares
Why are our calculations
different? Clicks are not
available in the public
Three elements signify positive engagement with your posts:
Likes Facebook API so we exclude
The number of times people Like your posts, indicating how well your content resonates with people. them from total engagement.
Comments
The number of comments people make on your posts. While the number of comments is an important
metric, the tone of comments can provide insight into how people feel about your content, products, or
your overall brand.
Shares
The number of times people share your content, measuring how much your content is amplified
by those who see it.

5
 Brand Post Engagement Breakdown

Total Engagement on Brand Posts

20K Likes Comments Shares
18K
16K
14K
12K
10K
8K
6K
4K
2K
0

13

13

6/ 3

6/ 3

6/ 3

6/ 3
13

6/ 3
6/ 13

6/ 13

6/ 13

6/ 13

6/ 13

6/ 13

6/ 13

6/ 13

6/ 13

6/ 13

6/ 13

6/ 13

6/ 13

6/ 13

6/ 13

6/ 13

6/ 13

6/ 13

6/ 13

6/ 13

6/ 13

7/ 3
13
1

/1
1/

2/

3/

4/

5/

6/

7/

8/

9/

1/
17

27
10

11

12

13

14

15

16

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

28

29

30
6/

6/

6/

6/
What does engagement mean to you?
Engagement with your posts reflects three vital things:
• Your brand’s ability to capture users’ attention
• Your brand’s ability to create a connection with your content
• How many people see your posts

Engagement plays an even larger role in who sees your posts, because it is a major factor in Facebook’s
News Feed algorithm. This algorithm determines which News Feeds your posts are displayed in and
ultimately, how many users you’re able to reach. When users engage, the actions they take appear in
their timelines, making their connection with your brand visible to their friends. And that contributes to
awareness for your brand.

Engagement tells you a lot about your audience - which types of content they’re interested in and whether
certain segments of your audience interact more or less with content that is specifically tailored to them.
Engagement on certain types of posts can provide insight into the interests of a particular audience for
content targeting.

6
Engaged Users
When it comes to your audience on Facebook, there are far more important metrics than your number of
Page fans. The engaged users metric is one of them; it’s a key Facebook metric that measures how many
people are actively engaging with your Page.

Engaged Users
The number of people who engaged with your page
(including any click or Story generated)

How engaged users are calculated

The engaged users metric can be found within Facebook Insights at both the Page and post levels.
Engaged users aren’t just limited to your fans; anyone who engages with your Page is an engaged user.

What do engaged users mean to you?

Measuring engaged users goes a step beyond your Page’s fan count to tell you how many people are
interacting with your Page. Out of the people whom you were able to reach, these are the users who took
action on your Page – whether as a Like, share, comment, etc. Monitoring engaged users as a percentage of
fans over time can help you determine whether you’re growing an active or a passive audience.

Engaged users as a percentage of total fans indicates how active your audience is and how valuable your
fan growth is from month to month. For example, if the number of total engaged users is up each month as
a percentage of total fans, then the quality of your audience is improving. Even the number of engaged users
reflects how much your audience is choosing to interact with your brand.

7
 Total Reach & Engaged users
140K 7K
Engaged users Total Reach
120K 6K

100K 5K

Engaged users
Total Reach
80K 4K

60K 3K

40K 2K

1K
20K

0
0

13

13

13

13

13

13

3
/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1
3/

6/

9/

3/

6/

9/
27

27
12

15

18

21

24

30

12

15

18

21

24

30
4/

4/

4/

5/

5/

5/
4/

5/
4/

4/

4/

4/

4/

5/

5/

5/

5/

5/
4/

5/
Engagement with your posts impacts your ability to reach a larger audience. If you can’t continue to engage
users, they won’t continue to see your content. Those who engage on your Page are your most valuable
audience segment, since they are the ones consuming and sharing your content across Facebook.

Engagement Rate
Engagement rate is a metric that you can use to measure your effectiveness at engaging your audience. It
can tell you a lot about what content or which post types are the most successful and you can now access
this metric in the updated Insights tool.

You can calculate engagement rate in two different ways based on the available data:
• If you use public post data in a Simply Measured Facebook Competitive Analysis, you can compare
your Engagement as a Percentage of Total Fans against other brands on Facebook.
• If you work directly with the engagement rate metric within Facebook Insights, you can see your
brand’s engagement rate, whether for a single Page or multiple Pages.

8
The first option allows you to compare your post or Page performance to other brands on Facebook.

The number of
Again, this is using public data, not data from Facebook Insights.

The second option allows you to measure your own brand’s post performance as accurately as possible
using Facebook Insights data.
engaged users serves
Engagement Rate as a valuable metric
People who liked, commented, shared, or clicked on for measuring content
your post / people who saw your post (post reach) performance and the quality
of your audience.

Calculating engagement rate for posts using Insights data

Engagement rate is designed to measure the number of unique users who engaged with your content as
a percentage of the number of users that were exposed to it. Facebook Insights data provides in-depth
unique user totals for engagement actions on your posts, as well as the overall reach of your posts.
This allows you to calculate engagement rate based on more than Likes, shares, comments and clicks.

Example:
100 unique users engaged with a given post and 1000 users saw the post
Engaged users = 100
Engagement rate = 10%

9
Sample engagement Calculating engagement rate for posts without Insights data
When calculating your engagement rate in contrast to your competitors, remember that you don’t have
for Harley Davidson access to their Facebook Insights data. However, you can still draw meaningful insights by looking at
engagement for both posts and Pages relative to total fans.

% eng/total The Simply Measured solution is to perform a calculation for engagement rate called Engagement as
a Percent of Total Fans. This is a simplified way to calculate engagement rate to compare competitor
total engagement engagement rates to your own. So even if you don’t have time to delve into the reasons for engagement –
or lack thereof – this can provide you with the context you need to make informed marketing decisions.

Engagement Rate
Total Engagement (Likes + Comments + Shares) / Total Fans

33%
What does engagement rate mean to you?
Engagement rate on individual posts is a valuable metric for measuring the quality of content that you
post to your Page. Specifically, it allows you to compare engagement between two posts. Knowing what
share of your audience actually engages with content can indicate whether or not you’re reaching the right
audience as you grow fans over time.

Engagement as a Percentage of Total Fans allows you to compare engagement on your Page with Pages
1.6 Million that have different audience sizes, making it useful for competitive analysis. Comparing your engagement
rate to that of your competitors can provide insights about the quality of your audience and your content
effectiveness compared to others in your industry.

10
Reach
Often the first Facebook metric that marketers focus on is the number of fans for a Page. When it comes
to measuring the value of your audience though, what matters most is how many people are seeing your
content. That’s where reach comes in.

Overall, reach is the primary metric for determining how many people can possibly see your content. It’s a
powerful performance indicator for tactics that enable your brand to connect with users on Facebook.

Reach
The number of unique people who have seen content
associated with your page

How reach is calculated

There are three types of reach: organic, paid and viral. Understanding and measuring each of these is
important to gauge how and why your audience changes over time.

Organic Reach
The number of unique people who saw your content in their News Feeds, tickers, or on your Page.

Paid Reach
The number of unique people who saw your paid content.

Viral Reach
The number of unique people who saw your post or Page mentioned in a Story published by a friend.
These stories can include Likes, comments or sharing on your Page, answering a question or responding
to an event.

11
 Reach Breakdown by Type
Organic Viral Paid
140K

120K

100K

80K

Reach
60K

40K

20K

13

13

13

13

13

13

3
/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1
3/

6/

9/

3/

6/

9/
27

27
12

15

18

21

24

30

12

15

18

21

24

30
4/

4/

4/

5/

5/

5/
4/

5/
4/

4/

4/

4/

4/

5/

5/

5/

5/

5/
4/

5/
Measuring reach by type can help you pinpoint the factors that contributed to content views. If organic
reach increased, it might be the result of more fans or increased engagement with content. Changes in
viral reach can indicate how shareable your content was, and paid reach can tell you whether changes in
reach were due to ads on the network.

Reach can be viewed for your Page as a whole, or for individual posts. The difference is how many unique
users saw an individual post versus those who saw other pieces of content – such as an eBook or report
– associated with your Page.

What does reach mean to you?

Reach measures your brand’s effective audience. It’s a more accurate measure of your Facebook audience
than fans, since not all your fans see your posts and many users who do see your posts are not fans of
your Page.

12
Impressions
The largest challenge for brands on Facebook is making it into users’ News Feeds. Impressions are a solid
metric for understanding how many times your posts are seen and how frequently users are exposed to
that content.

Impressions
The number of times content associated with your page
is displayed

How impressions are calculated

Like reach, there are three main types of impressions on Facebook: organic, paid and viral.

Organic Impressions
The number of times your content was displayed in a user’s News Feed, ticker, or on your Page.

Paid Impressions
The number of times your paid content was displayed.

Viral Impressions
The number of times content associated with your Page was displayed in a Story published by a friend.
Stories can include liking, commenting or sharing on your Page, answering a question or responding to
an event.

13
Sample impressions It’s easy to confuse reach and impressions since both measure the visibility of content and both measure
organic, paid, and viral content.

breakdown by type Impressions vs. Reach

Paid 500K
Total Impressions Total Reach

450K
Viral
400K

350K
Organic
300K

250K

200K

150K
450K 100K

420K 50K

13

13

13

13

13

13

3
/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1
3/

6/

9/

3/

6/

9/
27

27
12

15

18

21

24

30

12

15

18

21

24

30
4/

4/

4/

5/

5/

5/
4/

5/
4/

4/

4/

4/

4/

5/

5/

5/

5/

5/
4/

5/
275K
The key difference between impressions and reach is that impressions measure the number of times
your content is displayed, while reach measures the number of unique people who saw your content. For
example, if five people each saw a post twice, the result would be ten impressions (times displayed) and a
reach of five (unique people who saw it).

What do impressions mean to you?

Impressions measure your ability to expose people to your content on Facebook. This can help you
understand not just how many users you’re reaching, but how frequently those users are seeing your posts
or content associated with your Page.

14
Stories
What is a Facebook Story? If you’re active on Facebook, you see them everyday and probably create your
fair share.

Facebook Stories are updates from friends about their engagement with a Page, person, event, etc. and
they appear in your News Feed.

Stories
Updates from friends about their engagement with pages,
people, etc. that appear in News feed.

How are Stories created?

Engagement actions that create Stories include: Likes on a Page, engagement on a post, posts on a
Page, joining an event, tagging or mentioning a Page, check-ins at a location and other Page interactions.

By viewing trends around Stories associated with your brand, you can identify how effectively your posts
are driving awareness for your Page.

Segmenting Stories by user wall posts and engagement on your Page can inform you of actions users are
taking that drive awareness of your Page.

15
 Stories About User Generated Content

New Page Like Page Mention User Post

700

600

500

Stories Created
400

300

200

100

13

13

13

13

13

13

3
/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1
3/

6/

9/

3/

6/

9/
27

27
12

15

18

21

24

30

12

15

18

21

24

30
4/

4/

4/

5/

5/

5/
4/

5/
4/

4/

4/

4/

4/

5/

5/

5/

5/

5/
4/

5/
For example, a high volume of Stories about a specific user post could indicate that an influential user
posted or that an engaging discussion took place.

What do Stories mean to you?

Stories created about your brand posts build awareness for your Facebook Page. The more people
who engage with content on your Page, the better the chances that one of their friends will see a Story
associated with it. When people engage with posts on your Page, a description of how they engaged
appears as a message in their friends’ News Feeds. For instance, the message may say, “Bob liked X
Company’s Page” or “Susie commented on X Company’s Page.”

16
Consumptions

Consumptions
When people think about Facebook engagement, most think of Likes, comments and shares. That’s because
these are the primary actions we take as users, and it’s what we see associated with each post. They’re also
the engagement metrics most often used by marketers to assess performance.

However, Facebook Insights offers a broader measure of engagement that goes beyond Likes, comments
and shares. It’s called consumptions. How is it different? It includes clicks.
don’t include liking a
Page in the Timeline
Consumptions and they don’t create Stories
Clicks anywhere in your post in the News Feed; they are
(whether the click generates a Story or not). limited to clicks on your posts.

How consumptions are calculated

The consumptions metric can be found within Facebook Insights at both the Page and post levels.

Within Facebook Insights, the consumption metric is broken down into four segments:
• Link clicks
• Photo views
• Video plays
• Other clicks
(which includes clicks – whether Likes, comments or shares – that generate Stories)

17
Viewing how clicks on your posts are segmented can provide additional information about what types of
content are engaging people on your Page. It can also put the volume of other engagement actions in
context with the number of Stories created. For example, you could look at how many people viewed an
enlarged version of a photo on your post versus how many people liked, commented on, or shared it.

Consumptions by Type
Photo Views Video Plays Link Clicks Other Clicks
700

600

Stories Created
500

400

300

200

100

13

13

13

13

13

13

3
/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1
3/

6/

9/

3/

6/

9/
27

27
12

15

18

21

24

30

12

15

18

21

24

30
4/

4/

4/

5/

5/

5/
4/

5/
4/

4/

4/

4/

4/

5/

5/

5/

5/

5/
4/

5/
What do consumptions mean to you?
You might be wondering why you should care about clicks that don’t create Stories in the News Feed.
The answer is simple: clicks get factored into the News Feed algorithm. That means measuring clicks on
your posts gives you a more complete view of engagement, and a better idea of whether your posts will
continue to appear in users’ News Feeds.

When cross-referenced with other key Facebook metrics, consumptions can prove extremely valuable
in measuring content performance. For example, by pairing consumptions with impressions, you can
establish a click-through rate for each post or content type. And that allows you to measure the frequency
of engagement with your content.

In addition, you can pair the number of consumers (unique people who clicked) with reach to measure the
percentage of people who actually saw and engaged with your content.

18
Consumers vs. Engaged Users
We already reviewed engaged users, so let’s go over consumers and how the two differ. Although the
consumers metric is perhaps lesser known, it can actually offer more in-depth insight when it comes to
content performance.

Consumers
The number of people who clicked on any of your posts
(whether the click generated a Story or not)

How are consumers defined?

Consumers are people who clicked on your posts (anywhere within a post), while engaged users are
those who clicked on or created a Story anywhere on your Page (this includes liking your Page). Since
consumer engagement is limited to posts and engaged users can click anywhere on the Page, the number
of engaged users on your Page will always be equal to or greater than the number of consumers.

While both metrics are available within Facebook Insights at the Page and post levels, the number of
engaged users and consumers should almost be equal at the post level.

What do these metrics mean to you?

Both metrics can be used to measure audience engagement and content performance. However, because
of the subtle differences in how each metric is calculated, each has a specific use.

Since the engaged users metric includes Stories generated by clicks on your Page and not just within
your content, it is a more complete measure of total engagement on your Page. This makes it great for
evaluating how engaged the audience is on your Page.

19
As mentioned earlier, consumers are limited to engagement with your content, not your entire Page.
This makes consumers the most accurate metric for measuring post engagement. In addition, consumers
can be segmented by the type of engagement action taken, including:
• Link clicks • Video plays
• Photo views • Other clicks

Total Consumers

Photo Views Video Plays Link Clicks Other Clicks

This breakdown, found in the Simply Measured Facebook Content Analysis, gives a greater level of
insight into how someone engaged with your content and what type of post it was (link, photo or video).
Again, remember that clicks generating Stories (including Likes, comments and shares) are included in
“Other Clicks.”

By comparing consumers to post reach, you can calculate the percentage of people who actually saw your
content and chose to engage with it. In other words, you can determine what percentage of your audience
was engaged at an individual post level. That means consumers is a better metric than engaged users for
measuring content performance.

20
Like Sources
A growing audience on Facebook is a sign of a healthy community. But you need to do more than
measure the number of new fans to understand how your audience is growing and identify effective
tactics for sustaining growth. You need to determine how users are finding your Page. To do that you’ll
need to analyze your Like Sources.

Like Sources
The places where people can Like your page

How Like Sources are calculated

Like Sources can be found within Facebook Insights, via the Facebook Insights tool and the Facebook
Insights data export.

The number of unique people who like your page is broken down by location. In addition, Like Sources
within the Facebook Insights tool are broken out into five segments:
• On Your Page
• Page Suggestions
• Ads and Sponsored Stories
• Your Posts
• Others

21
Facebook Within the Facebook Insights data export, Like Sources can be segmented even further. Dozens of
sources exist; however, only the sources your Page was liked from will appear in your data export.

Insights Tool Facebook provides the following description for some of the most common Like Sources in its Insights
developer documentation:

Ads & Sponsored Stories

Page Suggestions

On Your Page

Your Posts

Others

This isn’t the complete list. For example, Facebook further segments mobile sources into mobile ads and
mobile page suggestions. This does, however, give you an idea of the granular breakout that is available
within the Facebook data export.

22
What do Like Sources mean to you?
Like Sources can help you understand how users are discovering and liking your Page, and provide
context for how your other digital marketing components impact fan growth. For example:
• Are external connects (e.g., clicks on social plugins) from your website effectively driving users to your
Facebook Page?
• When you make changes to better integrate social plugins, do you see more Likes?
• What percentage of new Likes is driven by Facebook Ads and Sponsored Stories?
• Is the third-party app from your latest campaign contributing to fan growth?
• How many users liked your Page from a mobile device?

These are questions you can answer with data from Like Sources. From there, you can make more
informed decisions about tactics designed to grow your fan Page – and better measure the overall impact
of your social strategy.

23
Paid vs. Organic Likes
Facebook advertising is a growing trend, with most brands devoting at least a portion of their social media
budget to advertising on the network. According to Business Insider, 74% of survey respondents in August
2013 said their Facebook marketing budgets include spending on paid ads. That number is up from 54%
in June 2012.

For brands that advertise on Facebook, it’s important to be able to segment social media performance by
paid vs. organic activities. This includes measuring audience growth, also known as paid Likes.

Paid Likes
The number of people that liked your page from an Ad or a
Sponsored Story

How paid and organic Likes are calculated

Paid and organic Likes are broken out within Facebook Insights’ Like Sources, which we reviewed earlier.
Like Sources can be viewed within the Insights tool or the Insights data export, where the number of
unique people who liked your Page is broken out by location.

You can find the following three sources of paid Likes within Like Sources:
• Ads
• Mobile ads
• Sponsored Stories

The sum of the three sources represents the total number of paid Likes for your Page.

24
 Daily Paid Likes by Source

1,000
Paid Likes Ads Mobile Ads Sponsored Stories Sponsored Stories
900

800

700
A breakdown of Paid Likes can
display how audience growth is
trending for each source.
will disappear in
600

500

400
April 2014.
300 In its place, social context will
be automatically added to all
200

100

0 Facebook Ad types.
3

13

13

13

13

3
/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1
1/

3/

5/

7/

9/

17
24

26

28

30

11

13

15

19

21

23
9/
9/

9/

9/

9/
More information here.

9/
8/

8/

8/

9/

9/

9/

9/

9/

9/
8/

Organic Likes are Page Likes that cannot be attributed to Facebook advertising. You can calculate organic
Likes by simply subtracting paid Likes from total Likes.

To analyze organic Likes further, you can segment Like Sources to identify whether Likes occurred on
your Page, or were generated via a social plugin, third-party app, etc.

What do paid and organic Likes mean to you?

When you advertise on Facebook, it becomes more difficult to report on audience growth that is driven
organically. Nevertheless, for social marketers, it’s important to both understand the impact of paid
advertising and avoid attributing paid Likes to successful community management tactics. Segmenting
paid Likes from total Likes allows you to do just that. By doing this, you can accurately report on
community growth while still being able to identify trends in organic growth.

25
 Daily Paid Likes vs. Organic Likes
Paid Likes Organic Likes
1,000
Segmenting Paid Likes can help you spot
900
successful tactics for organic growth.
800

700

600

500

400

300

200

100

13

13

13

13

3
/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1
1/

3/

5/

7/

9/

17
24

26

28

30

11

13

15

19

21

23
9/
9/

9/

9/

9/

9/
8/

8/

8/

9/

9/

9/

9/

9/

9/
8/
Organic growth trends can be used to identify successful tactics for building your audience. Segmenting
fan growth also makes it possible to calculate benchmarks and set goals based on your Facebook
advertising budget.

Measuring paid Likes against your advertising spend can provide a benchmark you can use to forecast
future audience growth, depending on your Facebook advertising budget. You can also use this
benchmark to determine how much you should allocate to your Facebook ad budget.

The challenge of measuring paid ads and forecasting performance isn’t limited to Likes. Paid advertising
also affects engagement, reach and impressions. Segmenting performance for each of these metrics can
help you measure the impact of Facebook advertising on your Page.

26
FACEBOOK TACTICS
Now that we’ve reviewed how different Facebook metrics are defined, let’s
put these metrics to use so you can make more informed decisions, improve
campaign performance and enable success.

27
The new Facebook Insights
We’re kicking off this section with an overview of the new Facebook Insights since it’s changed the
Facebook metrics game quite a bit. In June 2013, Facebook updated its entire Insights tab for page
admins. Here are the big differences that you need to understand.

PTAT (as we knew it) is gone

People Talking About This (PTAT)

40K

35K

30K

25K

20K

15K

10K

5K

13

13

13

13

3
1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1
1/

3/

5/

7/

9/

17

27
11

13

15

19

21

23

25

29

1
6/
6/

6/

6/

6/

7/
6/

6/
6/

6/

6/

6/

6/

6/

6/

6/
Chief among these changes is that the PTAT (People Talking About This) metric has been broken down
and replaced with the sum of its parts:
• Page Likes
• People engaged
• Page tags and mentions
• Page check-ins and other interactions

28
Easier navigation…but no contextualization

With the new Insights, you get new views and navigation. That means you can easily toggle between
several specific views. You can check out a high-level overview of your results on one tab, then easily
navigate to other important metrics and KPIs with the click of your mouse. That’s the good news. Though
Facebook Insights delivers an impressive amount of data, it can be daunting to put it into context because
Insights’ tabs only help organize high-level metrics. This is where social analytics software like Simply
Measured comes into play; it puts all your metrics in one report so you can contextualize your data.

Page and Tab visits

Nate Smitha, our Marketing
Conversion Manager, explains
why this is a good thing:
“PTAT was an aggregate metric.
It combined important engagement
components, and gave you an abstract
number of how many people were
talking (i.e., creating stories) about
your page. But the PTAT metric didn’t
help you understand how these stories
were being created, so it wasn’t a metric
This is our favorite part of the Insights section. Under the “Visits” tab in your handy new navigation bar, “Page
that marketers could use to make very
and Tab Visits” allow you to see which of your tabs are being viewed. Why is this cool? If you’re promoting
actionable decisions.”
a photo-based campaign, or running a promotion in another tab, you can benchmark that against others on
your Page. This allows you to optimize your content much like you would on your website.

29
All posts published

The Posts tab offers some great content analysis, complete with previews of visual content, reach and
engagement stats. Of course, Facebook wouldn’t leave you high and dry without a way to capitalize on this
insight through your ads budget. If you’re managing Facebook Ads, this is a great feature for you. It allows
you to see your highest-performing content from an organic click-through perspective, so that you can
quickly boost visibility of a post in your ad campaign.

People

The People tab gives a great demographic profile of your audience, including a benchmark of “All Facebook.”
While this isn’t new, it gives you an interesting way to understand your fans. As you create personas of your
ideal customer, content consumer, or audience member, tap into this info to build richer profiles.

30
How to increase your Reach
Many factors impact the reach of your content. Facebook’s News Feed algorithm determines which of
your fans see your content, and, further downstream, which fan engagement actions – such as Likes and
shares – are shared with the friends of your fans.

To improve the reach of your content, you can:

• Grow the number of active and engaged fans on your Page
• Post content that can quickly and easily be consumed
• Limit the amount of negative feedback your Page receives (For more on negative feedback, check out
“How to deal with negative feedback” on page 47).

How to increase your Impressions

To improve organic impressions, you need to make it into News Feeds more frequently and optimize
your marketing tactics for Facebook’s News Feed algorithm. Specifically, just as with increasing reach,
you should:
• Grow the number of active and engaged fans on your Page
• Post content that can quickly and easily be consumed
• Limit the negative feedback you receive (For more on negative feedback, check out “How to deal with
negative feedback” on page 47).

Paid advertising on Facebook can also drive impressions. For marketers, this highlights the importance of
understanding what’s driving brand exposure on Facebook.

31
BASIC ANALYSES
Now that we’ve outlined and defined all the important metrics,
we’re ready to put them all to work for us.

32
How to measure your Facebook audience beyond fans
When it comes to measuring your audience on Facebook, there is more to it than just fans. Fans can be
bought – lured with offers and promotions to Like your Page. The fact that they liked your Page doesn’t
mean that they’re true fans of your brand or that they’re engaged with your content.

Most social marketers know that there is more to understanding their audience than a trended fan count,
but many still don’t know what they should be measuring to get the complete picture. Without actionable
insights, it’s impossible to steer audience growth, tailor content to your audience or maximize engagement.

Audience analysis is about understanding the following:

• With whom you’re connecting
• What type of content resonates with them
• How you can more effectively build a community around your brand

Here are five tactics that will get you focused on the right metrics and give meaning to your Facebook
audience analysis.

1. Measure the audience you actually reach

Those who see content associated with your Page are not limited to your fans.

For that reason, reach — which measures the unique number of people who saw content associated with
your Page — can give you a better idea of your effective audience.

Reporting on reach over time can help you understand how the sharing of your content impacts your
ability to attract and engage your audience. Without reach, you can’t accurately measure your potential to
engage people or convert them into customers.

33
 Reach Breakdown by Type
Organic Viral Paid
140K

120K

100K

80K

Reach
60K

40K

20K

13

13

13

13

13

13

3
/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1
3/

6/

9/

3/

6/

9/
27

27
12

15

18

21

24

30

12

15

18

21

24

30
4/

4/

4/

5/

5/

5/
4/

5/
4/

4/

4/

4/

4/

5/

5/

5/

5/

5/
4/

5/
You should segment reach by its three main types – organic, paid and viral – to understand how your
content was shared. It’s important to measure each reach type independently because each indicates
different things.
Paid Reach
Reflects how many people were exposed to a Facebook Ad and will likely be dedicated
to driving product awareness and sales rather than engaging your community
Organic Reach
Fluctuates based on changes in new fans and engagement with your content but is more likely than paid
reach to generate engagement. Monitor organic reach to ensure it’s growing over time
Viral Reach
Changes in this metric can indicate how shareable your content was

34
2. Analyze your engaged users
Engaged users are the people who took action on your page or with your content. Growing this audience
each month is important. As your number of total fans increase, you want to also grow the number of
users who engage with your content (engaged users). In other words, as your fan count grows, you want
the percentage of engaged users to steadily scale. If you were to grow your audience with users that didn’t
engage, the value of that audience growth would be negligible.

When paired with reach, the percentage of engaged users can indicate when engagement is being driven
by successful content strategies, such as the right content format or efforts to increase content visibility
through promotion (e.g., paid reach).

Engaged users as a % of Total Reach

7%

6%

5%

4%

3%

2%

1%

0%
3

13

3
/1

41

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1
7/

27
1

10

13

16

19

22

25

28

31

12

15

18

21

24
8/

8/
8/

9/

9/

9/

9/
8/

8/

8/

8/

8/

8/

8/

8/

9/

9/

9/

9/

9/

35
While it’s important to continue growing the number of engaged users, it’s also important to understand
how effective you are at engaging those who see your content. You can do just that by measuring
engaged users as a percentage of reach. The more engaged your audience is, the more likely you’re
reaching the right audience with the right content.

Paid advertising can skew this percentage by inflating paid reach. To avoid distorting this ratio, you can
measure engaged users and organic reach at the post level for all posts that weren’t promoted.

3. Create context for fan growth

Although the number of total fans isn’t the primary metric for measuring your audience, new fan growth
can still serve as a community health indicator. With the right context it can help you identify tactics to
organically increase your audience size too.

By analyzing Like Sources, you can determine where within Facebook people were or what device they
were using when they liked your Page. You can also segment Like Sources to help you identify whether
fans were acquired via a paid source (such as paid Likes) vs. an organic source (e.g., organic Likes).

Daily Paid Likes vs. Organic Likes

Paid Likes Organic Likes
1,000
900 Segmenting Paid Likes can help you spot
800 successful tactics for organic growth.
700
600
500
400
300
200
100
0
13

13

13

13

13

13

13

13

13
/1

/1
4/

6/

8/

1/

3/

5/

7/

9/

1/

3/

5/

9/

1/

3/
17
30

9/
2

9/

9/

9/

9/

2
9/
8/

8/

8/

9/

9/

9/

9/

9/

9/
8/

36
Reporting on organic fan growth reveals the number of fans you were able to earn, irrespective of how
many ads you ran. Organic growth trends can help you identify events, content and tactics that contributed
to fan growth. Newsjacking defined:
Brand journalism that allows you
Further analyzing organic Like Sources can also help you determine whether your digital properties are
effective at driving users to like your Page. For example, are social plugins on your website effectively to take breaking news stories and
driving users to your Page? Does better integration of social plugins on your site result in more Likes? inject them with your own ideas to
generate attention for yourself or
4. Identify your fans
To identify who your fans are, establish an audience baseline using Facebook Insights demographic data.
your brand.

Page Fans: Demographic Profile Page Fans: Top Countries

35K
Male Female U.S.A. Canada Other Mexico India Philippines

1%
30K 3%
4%
25K

20K

15K

10K

5K
91%
0
13-17 18-24 25-34 35-44 45-54

Then put this data to use. For example, knowing where your fans are located can help inform decisions
about what kind of content you share and when you publish it. Say a sizeable percentage of your
Facebook fans are in San Francisco and the San Francisco Giants win the World Series. You could use
that as a newsjacking opportunity to drive fan engagement. Or consider Ford as an example; when it
realized its Facebook Page had a strong following in Germany, it announced on Facebook that it would
introduce the Ford Mustang into European markets.

37
If you’re a B2C brand, just be sure to confirm that age and gender demographics match your target
audience. Then use sales data to pinpoint the products your social audience is likely to be interested in.

Once you’ve established a baseline, go beyond fan demographics by building buyer personas that map to
certain products or content topics. Measure engagement with content that ties back to personas as part
of your regular audience analysis.

This type of analysis can give you a deeper understanding of who your audience is and what content will
resonate with them.

38
5. Discover when your fans are most active
There are a couple of ways to figure out when your fans are most active. The first is built into the
Facebook Insights tool.

39
Facebook’s recently redesigned Insights tool displays:
• How many of your fans were online each day of the past week
• The average number of your fans who saw any posts by hour

This is an extremely valuable tool, but it’s important to note that it measures when your fans viewed any
Facebook posts, not just posts specific to your Page.

The upside is that fan activity isn’t biased by when you post; the downside is that it’s limited to your fans
and does not include engaged users.

If you have a well-established Page and a sizeable Facebook fan base, it’s likely that a large portion of
your audience isn’t active with your brand on a weekly or even monthly basis.

Before making major changes to how you time your posts, you should validate your findings by analyzing
post reach and engagement with your content. This approach is more time consuming, but will help ensure
you know when people are most likely to engage with your content.

40
How to determine which posts you should promote with Facebook Ads
Facebook Promoted Posts are a great marketing tool for amplifying the reach of specific content. Before you
start allocating ad dollars though, you need to determine which content is worth promoting.

In this section, we outline five ways you can analyze the data from your Facebook Page to guide your
Promoted Posts game plan. The more insights you glean ahead of time, the greater the likelihood of
success when you execute.

1. Give new life to old content

Analyze your content over a historical time period (3, 6, or even 9 months ago) to find posts with high
engagement. These top-performing legacy posts have the potential to be successful when promoted.
Running a Facebook Content Analysis report will give you an idea of which types of posts and what kind
of post content generate the most engagement.

41
Here, we see that multimedia posts performed much better than posts with links, generating over twice
the engagement per post.

In addition, we can analyze how people engaged on those posts.

2. Recast lower-performing content

Next analyze your lowest-performing content to identify posts that drove little or no engagement.
Knowing what hasn’t worked gives you the opportunity to recast that content and then give it new life
with promotion.

3. Expand the reach of popular content

You can also analyze your content to identify content with high engagement. Then capitalize on those posts
with paid promotion to increase exposure and improve the success of your overall advertising strategy.

42
4. Figure out what works for your industry (and your competitors)
Analyzing your competitors’ Facebook content can also help determine which content types and topics to
promote. Identifying top performers and understanding what content your competitors use to successfully
drive engagement gives you more options when putting together your promoted-content strategy.

Fan Page Comparison: Engagement on Brand Posts

Link Photo Status Video Other CONTENT TYPE PERFORMANCE

Most Engaging Content Type
12K
Engagement per post

10K
Photos
2.5M interactions, 88% of all engagement
8K
Most Commonly Posted
6K
4K Photos
387 posts, 58% of all posts
2K
0 Best Performance: Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola Sprite Pepsi

Photos
9,258 interactions, .43% of the brand’s engagement

5. Figure out what works on other channels

By determining what works well on other social channels, you could uncover posts that deserve a spot in
your promoted plan on Facebook. For example, analyze your top-performing Tweets by engagement, and
use your best Twitter content as a base for a few Facebook Promoted Posts.

Evaluating and measuring your current content performance gives you a pre-launch prep list, and sets your
campaigns up for success – before you spend any money. When you do launch, you will be starting off
with a smarter, data-driven plan that will save you time and money.

43
How to measure the impact of visual content
You’ve probably noticed by now that visual content is one of the most widely used and widely engaged-
with content on the internet. Visual content has become more and more impactful as a way to reach
potential customers, fans and followers. But with so many services for creating and distributing images,
and so many types of visual content, how can you tell which works the best?

Here are some quick ways to analyze your visual content and create a strategy based on past success.

Measure consumptions by post type

Post Consumptions Over Time

Photo Views Video Plays Link Clicks Other Clicks

30K

25K

20K

15K

10K

5K

0
13

13

13

13

13

13

13

3
/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1
1/

3/

6/

9/

2/

5/

8/
27
12

15

18

21

24

30

11

14
5/

5/

5/

5/

6/

6/

6/
5/
5/

5/

5/

5/

5/

6/

6/
5/
With Facebook Insights, you can delve into how many photos are viewed, videos watched and links
clicked. Try different types of content and track how they perform over time. This data can be found in our
Facebook Page Insights Report.

44
Measure total engagement against post engagement

Total Engagement on Brand Posts Engagement Per Brand Post

Total Engagement Likes Comments Shares

0
Status Posts

15
Links

44
Photos

11
Videos
120K 100K 80K 60K 40K 20K 0 0 500 1,000 1,500 2,000 2,500

Measure engagement type overall compared to per-post engagement on your various content. Perhaps
you see huge engagement on photos but have also posted your photos four times as many photos as any
other media. In such cases, it helps to know how successful your photos are on a per-post basis, breaking
down Likes, comments and shares. You can measure this in our Facebook Fan Page Report.

45
Measure engagement on Instagram

Engagement Outside of Instagram

Twitter Facebook
4.5K Tweets 615
4K per photo 9.8

Total Engagement
3.5K
Facebook Likes 23,698
3K per photo 376.2
2.5K
Facebook Comments 0
2K
per photo 0.0
1.5K

1K Facebook Shares 15
per photo 0.2
500

/4

/1

/8

5
/2

/1

/1

/2

/1
-8

-9

-9
-7

-8

-8

-8

-9
9

26

2
2

12

19

9/

9
2

7/

8/

8/

9/
7/

8/

8/
Since Facebook acquired Instagram, the two companies have created a very synergistic relationship so
it’s in your best interests to track how your Instagram photos are performing on Facebook (which you can
do using our Instagram Account Report). Then compare this to the performance of your Timeline photos
within Facebook to form a solid Instagram strategy.

46
How to deal with negative feedback
Facebook doesn’t have a dislike button, but the negative actions users can take can have serious
implications for your brand. Namely, negative feedback ultimately limits the reach of your brand posts
because of how the Facebook News Feed algorithm works.

Let’s break down what constitutes negative feedback on Facebook. Then, with data from the Simply
Measured free Facebook Insights Report, we’ll show how to find out how much negative feedback you
receive and how to address the related data.

What is negative feedback on Facebook?

There are four main types of negative Facebook feedback, each posing different consequences for your brand:

1. Hide Clicks: When fans click to hide a specific post from appearing in their News Feeds

2. Hide All Clicks: When fans click to hide all posts associated with a single company or
brand from appearing in their News Feeds

3. Report Spam: When fans report one of your posts as spam

4. Page Unlikes: When users choose to unlike your Page

47
Segment negative feedback actions
Segmenting negative feedback can help you understand how it’s affecting your brand. For example, a fan
hiding an individual post is much less severe than if they were to hide all of your posts. When a user hides
all of your posts, you lose the ability to share content with them in the future.

Negative Feedback by Type

Hide Clicks Report Spam Hide All Clicks UnLike

1.2K

1.0K

800 Negative Feedback

peaks are red flags
600 for brand content

400

200

13

3
/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1
0/
27
1

12

15

18

21

24

11

14
5/

5/

5/

5/

6/

6/

6/
3
5/
5/

5/

5/

5/

5/

6/

6/
5/
That said, viewing individual feedback metrics like “Hide All Clicks” can give you an accurate picture of how
many of your fans are opting out of seeing your content. On the other hand, tracking Page unlikes can
show your effectiveness at retaining fans. When trended over time, peaks in negative feedback indicate
when you’re receiving too much negative feedback. By cross-referencing this with the type of posts and
content you published around that time, you may be able to identify the root cause (see Analyze negative
feedback by post below).

48
Create benchmarks for your brand
Acceptable levels of negative feedback vary by brand. The volume of negative feedback you receive can be
influenced by how much reach your posts get, the size and quality of your audience, and your industry.

Hide All Clicks Compared to Average

Hide All Clicks Average Hide All Clicks

70

60

50

40

30

20

10

0
13

13

13

13

3
1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1
1/

3/

5/

7/

9/

17

27
11

13

15

19

21

23

25

29

31
5/
5/

5/

5/

5/

5/

5/
5/

5/

5/

5/

5/

5/

5/

5/

5/
Since these factors are unique to your brand, one of the best ways to determine acceptable feedback levels
is to establish benchmarks based on the average volume of negative feedback you receive, either by day or
by post. Then set goals for decreasing your negative feedback average to help maximize your post reach.

49
Analyze negative feedback by post
Go a step further than negative feedback Page totals to analyze actions taken on specific posts. Your per-
post average will help you flag posts with higher-than-average negative feedback.

Once you identify which posts receive the most negative feedback, determine the post attributes most
likely to cause fans to hide your content, flag it as spam or unlike your Page. Going forward, avoid those
post attributes.

Account for reach

Negative Feedback Rate (Percentage of Reach)

Feedback as % of Reach Hide Clicks Report Spam Hide All Clicks UnLike Page
300 .45%

Volume of Negative Feedback

.40%
250
.35%

200 .30%

.25%
150
.20%

100 .15%
.10%
50
.05%

0 0%

3
/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1
7/

17

27
1

11

13

15

19

21

23

25

29

31
5/
5/

5/

5/

5/

5/

5/
5/

5/

5/

5/

5/

5/

5/

5/

5/
The more people who see a given piece of content, the more likely it is that someone will find fault with it.
In other words, a post with twice as much reach is likely to receive more fan engagement, but also more
negative feedback. You can account for this by measuring negative feedback as a percentage of Reach.

Peaks in your negative feedback rate show when more users respond negatively relative to how many users
saw your content. This is a powerful metric for determining how much negative feedback is too much.

50
ADVANCED ANALYSES
Facebook’s Graph Search provides an alternative to the major search engines.
Since the service is still (fairly) new, at least from a marketing perspective, it can
be hard for businesses to pinpoint how to best optimize for it. The answer is that
while you optimize to appear in the major search engines using SEO (search
engine optimization), you optimize to appear high in Graph Search results using
GSO (Graph Search Optimization).

51
How to optimize for Graph Search
Graph Search ranks content based on specific user-driven metrics, such as engagement on outbound
content, so these are the ones you should focus on. With The Facebook Page Insights Report from
Simply Measured, you can analyze these metrics to optimize your Graph Search rankings.

Here are four key metrics to focus on while ramping up your GSO.

1. Engagement on outbound content

Outbound Messaging and Engagement Over Time

Engagement Details
Admin Wall Posts Stories Created About Admin Posts
4K Total Stories 23.7K
4
3.5K Likes 94.7K
Comments 9,513

Outbound Messages
3K

Stories Created
3
Clicks 95.1K
2.5K
Shares 8,611
2K
2

1.5K
Averages Per Post
1K 1
Stories per Post 438
500
Likes per Post 1,753
0
0
Comments per Post 176

13

13

13

13

13

13

3
/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1
3/

6/

9/

3/

6/

9/
Clicks per Post 1,760

27

27
12

15

18

21

24

30

12

15

18

21

24

30
4/

4/

4/

5/

5/

5/
4/

5/
4/

4/

4/

4/

4/

5/

5/

5/

5/

5/
4/

5/
Shares per Post 159

Hand-in-hand with how people engage with your Stories and posts is the engagement on your outbound
content; by that we mean content that you’ve posted on your Page. Since the goal with Graph Search will be
to have your brand-generated Page, posts and comments show up at the top, it’s important to focus on this
metric. Facebook bases priority in News Feeds on a number of factors, one of which is the number of Likes
your content has gotten from the searcher’s network of friends (or even friends of friends, as a secondary
level). Focus on content, stories and comments that are garnering the most Likes and overall engagement.

52
2. Page fan demographic profile

Page Fans: Demographic Profile Page Fans: Top Cities

50K Male Female Seattle, WA
45K
40K 15,824 Anchorage, AK
35K
30K Portland, OR
25K 42,115 11,731
20K Fairbanks, AK

15K
8,725 Los Angeles, CA
10K
5K
Other
0
2,977
13-17 18-24 25-34 35-44 45-54 2,323

Your demographic metrics give you insight into the type of users interacting with your brand, valuable
information that makes it easier to cater to your market. Graph Search favors localized content so if you’re
a brand with more than one location, claim brand Pages for each. If your Page caters to a specific location
or type of clientele, optimize your “About” tab to reflect this by making your profile rich with relevant
content and keywords.

53
3. Stories on user-generated content

Stories About User Generated Content

New Page Like Page Mention User Post
700

600

500

Stories Created
400

300

200

100

13

13

13

13

13

13

3
/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1
3/

6/

9/

3/

6/

9/
27

27
12

15

18

21

24

30

12

15

18

21

24

30
4/

4/

4/

5/

5/

5/
4/

5/
4/

4/

4/

4/

4/

5/

5/

5/

5/

5/
4/

5/
The results served up by Graph Search are based on a user’s connections to friends. Stories generated by
users are a very important metric in this regard. With that in mind, make your Page and content sharable,
and give users an incentive to promote your brand to their network. Contests and promotions that
encourage mentions of your Page are one good way to appear in Graph Searches of a user’s connections.

54
4. Top keywords from comments

Comment Keyword Analysis

Total Comments 4,045

Facebook 1,020

Sale 975

Analytics 567

Data 430

Like 231

Seattle 90

Software 87

Focusing on the keywords appearing in comments can help you in two ways. For one, you can cater
content to the conversations people are having, and drive search relevance by better engaging your
active audience. Secondly, if the conversations aren’t driving more traffic to your Page, you can launch a
keyword-relevant campaign that steers conversations toward topics that will help your GSO ranking.

How Graph Search can simplify your Facebook strategy

In 2013, Facebook announced that posts and status updates are now part of Graph Search results.
This update to the search platform allows users to search content including photo captions, check-ins
and comments.

While this feature only allows users to search content visible to them – including posts from friends and
publicly shared content – it also means Facebook marketers can more easily plan campaigns and ad
spend based on relevant conversations.

55
Check out our powerful What does this mean for marketers?

Facebook Analytics As a social media manager, you have to dig through an abundance of data to understand how well you’re
engaging your intended audience. On Facebook alone, Insights can be overwhelming, Ads Manager is
complex, and identifying conversations and topics that your audience is talking about can be daunting –
unless those conversations directly involve your brand.

The good news is that these users are already talking about your brand. While you want to keep them
engaged, happy and purchasing, you still need to reach new users.

There are several ways the new Graph Search functionality can help you do this. While it’s no replacement
for a solid reporting tool that helps you get more from Facebook Insights, these new Graph Search
features can help simplify your job as a social marketer.

56
1. Search for key terms
By searching “Posts about The Voice,” for example, NBC would be able to see all public posts and
conversations about its show – something it wasn’t able to do in the past. Posts about The Voice

This type of information can give brand and social media managers great insight into the way their fans
are talking about their company, offering, etc., even when they aren’t tagging the actual Page. To continue
with this example, NBC’s brand and social media managers could also search on each of the celebrity
coaches from the show to identify who resonates with fans, helping shape decisions for their next season.

This opportunity isn’t just for giant national broadcasters. Even a small- or medium-sized business can
identify conversations within its particular industry. For example, if you sell tools, you can search for “Posts
about handsaws” and find out which competitors, features and projects people are talking about in relation
to handsaws.

2. Search by location
If you run a brick-and-mortar store, you’re bound to be more interested in local traffic than you are in
Posts written in Seattle, WA
Facebook fans from across the country. With the new Graph Search functionality, you can search by
location. Let’s assume you run Mom and Pop’s Hardware Store in Seattle, WA.

“Posts Written in Seattle, Washington” could deliver insight into what people are talking about in general in
your city (around the time of the 2014 Super Bowl, the answer was “Seahawks”). You could narrow it even
further by looking at “Posts written at Mom and Pop’s Hardware Store” to find out what customers are
saying about their experience in your store.

57
 3. Search by time
Posts written at Mom
and Pop’s Hardware Store Say you ran a sale at your hardware store last month. Just search on “Posts written at Mom and Pop’s
Hardware Store from last month” for posts from that time frame to get a sense of whether or not potential
customers were aware of the sale.

4. Search your own content

Posts I commented on Want to make sure you don’t miss a response when you participate in Facebook conversations? Now
you can search “Posts I commented on” or “My posts from last year” to identify the places you engaged
with fans.

So there you have it – once you’ve used Graph Search to identify the conversations to target, you can
track success, allocate ad spend and use your analytics to form future strategies.

Analyze to take advantage of News Feed changes

In its most recent attempt to make branded content feel more organic, Facebook announced that it has
updated the way Page interactions display.

The update will treat Pages even more like people. If one Page tags a second Page that a user has liked,
that post may appear in the user’s news feed, even if they don’t like the first Page.

While the intent of this change is to create a more organic and natural newsfeed for Facebook users
(the network ran a survey and found that these stories received high scores), the implications are also
awesome for brand pages looking to expand their reach or grow their engaged audience. This change
brings Facebook closer to Twitter’s prerogative; validating the fact that users are less resistant to brand
interaction than was once assumed.

58
Here are some ways to ensure your page increases its odds of success with this update.

1. Identify Pages that already interact with your Page:

Pinpoint brand Pages that already drive engagement for your brand by mentioning your Page, and
leverage this attention.

2. Tag pages in posts when you may have similar audiences:

This can help grow your audience organically, and gain added exposure for your content among a segment
you wouldn’t have reached otherwise.

3. Discover new or related audience segments:

Identify other brands in your space who engage their audience at a high level, and leverage this attention.

Seems simple enough. But what’s next? Aside from guessing, how can we identify brand Pages to involve
in our engagement strategy? Here are four types of analysis, using four different Simply Measured reports
to help you plan your Page-targeting strategy.

59
How analysis can help identify opportunities
1. Discover the pages mentioning you:
Finding pages that are already mentioning your Page gives you an opportunity to develop content that
builds that relationship, and now, leverage their audience.

Using Simply Measured’s Facebook’s Fan Page Report, we are able to identify the “top posters” of any
brand page, whether we have admin access or not. Using Ducati’s Facebook Page as an example lets
take a look at their top posters by both engagement and number of posts:

Top Posters by Total Engagement Top Users by # of Posts

(The users whose posts on your wall have recieved the (The users who have posted most
most engagement) frequently on your wall)

Ducatisti Integralisti 1,052 Ducatisti Integralisti 8

Zacks Garage 37 Ducatisti Integralisti 5

Franck Carini 29 Valentino Rossi Fan Club 3

Ben Kreten 19 Alpinestars 3

Melanie Kreten 17 SPEED 3

Juan Carlos 13 Alex Tondini 3

Kelly Cook 9 Ben Kreten 2

Vijay Nalanaglu 8 Franck Carini 2

Yumi Kawaguchi 7 Juan Carlos 2

60
Right away, it’s clear that Ducatisti Integralisti is both the most frequent poster on Ducati’s page, and that
their posts have received the most engagement of anything posted on Ducati’s wall.

To get a closer look at that engagement, we can open this report in Excel, and flip over to the “Posters” tab.

Ducatisti Integralisti is
Of the engagement on Ducatisti Integralisti posts to Ducati’s wall, 219 were shares and 786 were Likes.
This suggests that there is both an overlap of Page fans, and interest. This is key to Facebook’s News the most frequent poster
Feed “relevancy” algorithm. According to the announcement from Facebook:
on Ducati’s page.
“We look at many factors to make sure the most relevant stories appear in Since Ducatisti Integralisti is a
News Feed, including which posts are getting the most engagement (such as Ducati-focused site, this isn’t
“Likes”, comments, shares and clicks) across all of Facebook. We also consider surprising, but it’s very possible
which posts are getting the most engagement from people who Like both the that not everyone who Likes that
Page that posted and the Page that was tagged.” page also Likes the Ducati page.
Ducati could take advantage of
2. Find large pages catering to similar interests:
this potential by tagging Ducatisti
If you have a large list of competitors or industry “frienemies”, there’s a good chance that they’ve reached a
large group of potential customers that you haven’t. Find out who they are, and how they’re doing it. Integralisti in their Page Posts. With
Facebook’s newest change, this
Competitive analysis is one of the most versatile and under-utilized types of analysis. There’s a lot you can
gives them a new potential to show
learn from your competition, and in this case, a lot you can leverage.
up in relevant feeds.

61
 Fan Page Engagement Comparison Over Time on Brand Posts
6K

Fan Interactions (Likes, comments, posts,

5K
Honey Bunches MOST ENGAGING POSTS FROM PEAK

4K Cheerios From 5/13/12 by Special K

4,830 Interactions
Special K
3K From 5/11/12 by Cheerios
Cap’n Crunch 2,317 Interactions
2K
Frosted Mini-Whe... From 5/21/12 by Special K

1K Kellogg’s Frosted... 2,683 Interactions

Kashi
0

13

13

13

13

3
1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1

/1
1/

3/

5/

7/

9/

17

27
11

13

15

19

21

23

25

29

31
5/
5/

5/

5/

5/

5/

5/
5/

5/

5/

5/

5/

5/

5/

5/

5/
With the Facebook Competitive Analysis Report, you can add competitors or successful companies in your
space, and identify trends in engagement. Once you’ve done that, you can have a good understanding of
how and when to mention them in a Post, and leverage their audience.

In the above example, Special K had the most engaging Tweet, leading the way with a post about Mother’s
Day. If I’ve determined that I’d like to attract the audience that engages with Special K’s Facebook Page,
this presents a great Mother’s Day theme for me to use, as opposed to only talking about our products,
which may compete for market share.

3. Learn when to time your mentions

Once you know which Pages you’re looking to leverage, it’s time to focus on tactics. How do you plan on
doing this?

While Facebook offers a plethora of public data on your Page and your competitor’s Page, you can also
access data that’s private to you as a Page admin. The Facebook Page Insights Report can give you some
great data about when to plan your attack, so to speak.

62
 When Are Your Fans Online?

Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday

250.0 M
Top Time
# of Fans Online

200.0 M

150.0 M 8am - 9am For Online Fans

100.0 M 7am - 8am For Brand Posts

50.0 M

0
12am 3am 6am 9am 12pm 3pm 6pm 9pm

In the optimization section of the report, you can identify the peak times that your audience is logged into
Facebook. If you’ve done your homework, this will mirror the data for industry-aligned pages you’re looking
to target. Pick your times wisely. Mention other pages at peak times to ensure it displays in their fans’
News Feeds.

63
4. Test and measure everything
Once you’ve started your campaign, and are mentioning other brand Pages, it’s time to measure.
Did it work? Which one worked the best?

Using the Facebook Post Insights report, you can determine which posts led to the highest engagement.

Post Consumptions Over Time

Photo Views Other Clicks Video Clicks Link Clicks

30K

25K

20K

15K

10K

5K

12

12

12

12

12

12

12
1

/1

/1

1
1/

3/

6/

9/

2/

5/

8/

/
27
12

15

18

21

24

30

11

14
5/

5/

5/

5/

6/

6/

6/
5/
5/

5/

5/

5/

5/

6/

6/
5/
Analyze whether or not tagging the brand pages boosted your engagement per post, or if it stayed
relatively flat. This will help you understand the value of engaging with specific pages.

Make sure you take into consideration your overall content goals when it comes to Facebook. You’re
looking to see which post drove the most engagement, but also what type of engagement. If tagging a
specific Page led to a lot of photo views, but no link clicks, which was the goal of the content, it may be
time to reevaluate or try a different angle.

64
Perform a competitive analysis in your industry
Social media puts an incredible amount data at your fingertips – especially when it comes to analyzing
your industry as a whole. We’ve built reports that help you benchmark engagement across channels,
measure share of voice, and analyze your competitors content from all angles. From this, we’ve created a
guide on how to analyze your competitors using Facebook data, which dives into:

Competitive Benchmarks
We can help you find out how you stack up against competitors in your industry based on key
metrics like engagement.

Competitive Analysis
We tell you how to find out why your posts or your competitors’ posts perform well.
This includes sentiment around campaigns like promoted posts, or specific topics.

Competitive Insights
We help you discover how to use this data to find out how to modify your Facebook strategy
to outshine the competition.

65
CONCLUSION
Now that you know what each of the Facebook metrics means and how to
analyze them, it’s time to put that knowledge into play. If you don’t currently
have a tool to help you dive into all of your Facebook data, we’d love you to
try Simply Measured’s full suite of powerful social media analytics reports.

66
SIMPLY MEASURED SAMPLE REPORTS
Simply Measured provides a measurement and reporting solution that
aggregates social media data and web analytics from more than a dozen
sources and presents it in a single dashboard. We’ve provided samples of
reports used by more than 30 percent of the top 100 global brands and over
80,000 users who are Simply Measured customers.

Answer questions about Facebook Page performance and engagement, as well

as fans, posts, “Likes”, comments and engagement trends. Dig into the most
effective posts and the impact they’ve had on your Page and your audience.

67
Understand the performance of your brand’s Facebook Page(s)
Facebook Page Insights Report *This report requires authorization from your Facebook Page
Facebook Post Insights Report *This report requires authorization from your Facebook Page

Multiple Channel Facebook Analysis Report (Mashable)

Facebook Content Analysis Report (Cheerios)

Facebook Domain Insights Report *Requires use of Facebook Social Plugins

Instagram Account Report

Benchmark your brand’s Facebook performance against competitors

Analyze the audience, content and engagement trends of any Facebook Page, allowing you to understand
your competitive position, performance and market share compared to your competitors.

Measure your customer service efforts on Facebook

Dive into individual user posts, track response rates and times, and analyze a dedicated customer service
Facebook Page in relation to your main brand Page to understand your customer service effectiveness.

Facebook Customer Service Analysis (Home Depot)

Compare your efforts on Facebook against those on other social networks

Measure your efforts on Twitter in context with Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, YouTube, Google+ and more.
Compare audience size and growth, as well as post engagement across all major networks.

Complete Social Media Snapshot (RedBull)

68
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES AND SOURCES
http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/29/4783702/the-faces-of-facebook-natalie-rojas
http://investor.fb.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=802760
http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AMDA-NJ5DZ/2301311196x0
xS1326801-13-3/1326801/1326801-13-3.pdf
http://socialbarrel.com/facebook-photo-library-now-250-billion-user-photos/53315/
http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/24/facebook-growth-2/
http://www.businessinsider.com.au/marketers-are-spending-more-ad-dollars-on-facebook-2013-9
https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/under-the-hood-building-graph-search-
beta/10151240856103920
http://www.insidefacebook.com/2013/04/22/graph-search-optimization-the-new-seo-and-what-it-
means-for-social-advertisers/
http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2013/03/creating-content-facebook-graph-search/

69
ABOUT SIMPLY MEASURED
Simply Measured is a fast-growing team of data geeks dedicated to making
the world of analytics and reporting a better, more beautiful place.
Want to try Simply Measured?
Our goal is to put the tools to understand business data in the hands of
business users. We think reporting should be simple, beautiful, and accessible
for everyone – not just data scientists. Our software streamlines the process
Request a Free 14 Day Trial
from data to deliverables and eliminates the countless hours spent on everyday
reporting tasks. We do this by putting cloud data sources at your fingertips,
providing a marketplace of best practice reports, and generating beautiful
deliverables on the web, in Excel, and in PowerPoint with a couple of clicks.

Copyright © 2010–2014 Simply Measured, Inc. All Rights Reserved.