Statistics, Tips & Tricks 5 ways Facebook statistics can save you time December 10, 20135 minutes Geir We all want to save time. And most marketers use Facebook. But do you know Facebook statistics can save you time? Here are 5 ways Facebook statistics can be used for all. I am a huge fan of clever use of statistics to do more stuff in less time. I strongly believe the next generation marketeers know how to makes sense of statistics. In my mind a geek will be more important than the creatives for a marketing department. The importance of Facebook statistics feels that important to me so I’m giving you my top 5 tips on how to save time and understand Facebook statistics. At least, this is how I do it for my pages. My top 5 list is created based on 24SevenSocial Monitor and the free tool pagealyzer.com 1. Simplify and find your one important factor Engagement % from pagealyzer.com The never-ending question, how is my page doing? Find a single factor you want to measure your page success with. Yes, its highly generalized and it will not give the ideal picture of your activities. But it will be easy to understand and easy to measure. And as we all know, those who understand are motivated to keep working. Others may advise to create some more advance metrics, but I strongly recommend starting as easy as possible. I tend to prefer either reach or engagement (rate) as the most important factor. Engagement measures how many interacted with your content. Reach measures how many have seen your content. Somehow the same thing. (For finding rate, simply divide by the number of fans — engagement rate = engagement / fans at a given time) How to find: Reach and engagement is found free in Facebook insight or any of the million tools out there. For example our free tool pagealyzer.com 2. Compare your page vs competitors Color Line vs Stena Line PTAT % benchmark Always good to know how you to are compared to competitors, right? It is easy to get lots of information on how your competitors are doing on Facebook. The illustration shows an example benchmarking two competitors (Color line and Stena line). There are plenty of stats to choose from, but I prefer looking at PTAT % (Number of people talking about the page / number of fans) and fan growth (new fans). With PTAT % you are able to compare pages regardless of the size. It gives an indication of their current activity. Please note! Use it as a guidance on what to look more into. How to find: The screenshot is from 24SevenSocial Monitor. A tool that allows you to monitor unlimited number of pages. Free for all customers. 3. Find inspiration to new Facebook updates If you are administrator of a Facebook page, I bet you have wondered…”hhmm….what can i possibly post to get some engagement?”. At least…I have. And still do. Why you start by looking into what has worked for others. Add all your competitors, pages you find amusing or anyone else you feel like checking more into to your monitoring tool. Then simply check the dates of the peaks and see what others have done. Hey – I’m not saying you should steal, but looking at other people’s success will be of great help. (important note, other people’s success is not what they say have worked or what you read in the case studies…but its based on what your monitoring tools tells you. I believe in facts, not intentions.) How to: – Add a page to pagealyzer.com and you will get the top three posts last month. – Add the pages to 24SevenSocial Monitor and check in once a month. – Create a spark file with posts you come over 4. Don’t fall into posting routines Interactions per day In general it is best to post when the fewest pages post and the most people read. Based on the fact that most pages post when the community managers are working, the best time to post are afternoons and weekend. But this varies a lot from page to page. That’s why you must test what works best on your brand. I tend to not focus that much on this factor in the beginning, but rather focusing on testing lots of different days and time of day. Don’t be consistent, go wild and test test. After a while you might find patterns. But with no post quantity you can not get valid results. So how can this save you time? Well, in two ways. Firstly, stop evaluating which days and time of day to post, just vary a lot instead. Post at all times possible and see what happens. Secondly, when you have done lots of posts at different times, you may start seeing patterns. Those patterns will help you reaching out to more people with the same post. 5. Check customer support quality Response time and Response rate Are you using Facebook for customer support? In social media the users expect pretty much immediate response. That’s why it’s important to keep track of your response time. The response time is found on pagealyzer.com What is a decent response time? Well, that is hard to generalize. I will leave that up to you guys to figure out yourself. Use stats you understand Statistics are cool and can be used in a variety of ways. I have listed five of my favourite ways. But you should find stats you understand, make sense to your business and at the end of the days save you time. Mastering statistics, or anything else in life, motives and will help you dig into more details. So start off as simple as possible. Want to talk to us about Facebook marketing? Click here