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At a time where story upon story involving Facebook is hitting the headlines, it’s no surprise that some people are questioning whether to continue using Facebook as a marketing tool. Sure, some people may have decided to stop using their personal Facebook page during this time, but those people are very few and far between. Facebook is still one of the most used websites each day, worldwide.
While most branding agencies will stand by the fact that Facebook is an incredibly useful platform for businesses, not all businesses will need to be using it in the same way. It’s important to take a step back and make sure your Facebook activity is helping you achieve your marketing goals. Here’s what to keep track of, depending on your business goal.
Are You A New Business Looking To Increase Awareness?
If so, there are a variety of ways to check that what you’re doing on Facebook is helping to boost brand awareness.
If you are noticing an increase in reviews, that means people know about you (and your Facebook page). Be sure to respond to reviews to show appreciation to the people who have taken the time to leave you a helpful review. Alternatively, if the reviews you’re receiving aren’t helpful or positive, here’s our advice on how to handle negative reviews.
Do You Need People To Take Action?
When the goal of your marketing it to get people to contact your business, or buy your products online, then your Facebook referral traffic is what you need to watch.
You can either do this via Facebook itself, or Google Analytics (or a similar web traffic tracking tool).
Within Facebook there are two areas to track website clicks. When looking at your Facebook page within Business Manager, you can select Insights at the top of the page to view a variety of…well, insights. One of those is “Actions On Page”. This tracks the number of times somebody has clicked on information within your bio, for instance calling your business or visiting your website.
Alternatively, you can view individual post analytics, to see how many link clicks there were from that post. This is useful so that you can see what kind of content encourages people to click through.
On Google Analytics, you can set a time frame to view data for, and then look into the source of your website traffic from that period. Provided, you’ve had people visiting your website from Facebook, you’ll see it listed. You can then compare that number to previous months or years to track whether your Facebook activity has increased referral traffic over time.
Are Your Marketing Initiatives Based Around Branding?
It goes without saying that any marketing or branding agency would wince at the idea of a strategy that wasn’t inline with that business’ brand. No matter what your business goal, your marketing activity must work with your brand.
When your goal is purely branding, you’ll want to monitor your activity slightly differently. It will still be important to watch referral traffic, and new reviews but your reach, net page likes and total engagements will be of higher importance.
New reviews are still fairly important if your goal is branding, but website clicks – much less so. If for instance, your website was purely there to have an online presence, but nobody could buy your products from the website, then it doesn’t matter if you have thousands of website visitors a day, if nobody is thinking to go and visit your business.
Content marketing is often a priority for businesses working on branding. Why? Well, because the more entertained your audience are, the more likely they are to keep your brand at front of mind.
Engagements
Engagements will show how many times people have reacted to, or commented on your post. If these numbers are consistently low, or begin to drop, it could be time to think about creating new interesting content to post. Another plus is that the more engaging your Facebook posts are, the more likely it is that your audience will share it with others, thus extending your reach.
Page Likes
Whether you are running a paid page likes campaign or not, you should keep a close eye on your page’s net likes (from within Insights). If you are noticing that each day your total page likes are dropping, your content clearly isn’t resonating with your fans, and is thus leading them to unlike your page. Page unlikes could, however, also be due to seasonality. If you run a business based around skiing for example, you may well see a drop in page likes over summer, when skiing is far from many people’s minds. Only the most dedicated of fans will want to see skiing related content in the off-season.
Does Your Facebook Activity Need A Refresh?
If you’re not quite sure how to improve your Facebook analytics, create engaging content, or define who your audience are, it could be useful to find a marketing or branding agency to work with. Our marketing and branding agency has experience of working with clients with varying business goals and budgets. If you’d like to find out more about how we could help with your branding and social media marketing, give us a call on 604-559-7509 or stop by our marketing and branding agency in Downtown, Vancouver – we always have chocolate!