When managing social media pages for businesses, have learnt from my COMM 464 class that we have to make sure to constantly check our social media campaign’s progress by regularly evaluating key performance indicators of each social media pages. Most social media pages gives fairly accurate analysis of your social media performance based on the REA (Reach, Engagement, Amplification) model.
In Facebook, this can easily done by checking on the ‘Insights’ section of the Facebook page which gives the numbers from indicators, e.g. Facebook page likes, post likes and comments, etc. I personally believe that Facebook page likes are not a strong enough indicator of the loyalty of customers, in comparison to Facebook engagement indicators (e.g. post likes, comments, shares). This is because only ‘true’ followers are usually more inclined to respond to businesses’ posts, thus helping to provide organic engagement numbers and reduce the chances of accounting passive followers as the business’ online fan. Also, engagement from users are more likely to lead to 2-way communication between them and the business itself, if the business actually respond to comments, etc. This will not only help improve bond between the business and the user who engaged with them, but also with those who viewed the business’ responses as they would all feel the business cares about its customers and becomes a part of a community in itself. Thus, further indicating that Facebook engagement provides better feedback on your social media posts as the numbers highly correlates with the responses that your specific posts generated. Not only that, in class we have also been told that many businesses buy Facebook page likes to show that they have strong followers, on the surface level, but have low engagement rate as a result of having ‘fake’ followers. Thus, Facebook page likes can be more easily deceiving than post engagement.
In the statistics below, we can see that McDonald’s lead in the amount of Facebook page likes. However, Subway has the most Facebook engagement. If you were to evaluate the effectiveness of their social media page, which indicator would you emphasize more in evaluating their social media activity and presence? I would again, choose to put more weight on engagement as this easily tells us how active and responsive their social media platform is.
Alas, it’s important to always check up with your social media analytics to constantly improve your social media page’s effectiveness. Although the amount of data and statistics may be intimidating at first, I find them to be very useful as a tool to gain real-time customer feedback towards a business’ social media campaign. What’s even better is that most of the data are available for free either through the social media page itself or using other analytics page like HootSuite. So what are you for? Analyze your social media page now!
Source: http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/see-how-top-fast-food-chains-are-performing-facebook-and-if-fans-are-liking-it-161236