I will concede here that I am a bit of a numbers person, and yet, I still think that people do not understand the importance of their own statistics on their own pages or social media accounts.
This is the most important tool in your marketing tool box. Get to know it, visit it regularly, track the trends, see what works. We are much happier to have an ‘expert’ tell us what we should be doing on social media, than we are looking at our own statistics and checking what our actual followers and customers actually like.
Below are the statistics on a recent post I shared on my ‘No Respect, No Relationship’ Facebook page. Now I am not saying that reach is the ultimate or only goal on social, but it is certainly one important metric. I am merely using this example as it happened to me recently. I hadn’t done much work on this page as it is a project I haven’t had time to invest in for a few months. You might notice that my version of the post has 17 likes and no comments, but it was shared 11 times mostly to private groups I cannot access.
This was a ranty post that I made without really thinking about it on a page I have not spent much time on, and this is a classic example of two things. Firstly, on Facebook like many social media platforms ‘real life’ and personalised posts win over carefully curated but sterile posts, and secondly followers are over rated. This page has 39 followers, when I posted that post there were less.
Now I am not in this blog saying that Facebook is the most important platform, whatever platform you are on they will give you access to statistics. The platforms want you do increase engagement, it serves their purposes to give you information about how you might do that. Also there is a place for curating followers and a use for that, but as you can see from this post Facebook does not really ‘reward’ followers it rewards engagement. Once your post gets engagement, Facebook gives it more reach, more reach helps you get more engagement, and so on and so forth. This is one of the main reasons why the timing of posting is so critical, post at a time that you get initial engagement to kick it off.
But my main take home point here is, do you actually look at your statistics? Do you look at them regularly? Would you recognise a spike if there was one? And while we are on the topic of Facebook, collecting statistics and recording them is important but sometimes you also just need to have a feel for things.
Some things cannot be reduced to numbers. If you are doing your own marketing then I would submit that this part of Facebook Insights, the Posts page, is the most important thing for you to check. Why? Because what people like really isn’t a numbers game, and producing content that people like will be rewarded by Facebook because it drives engagement (see previous statement). When you look at the posts page look at what worked, and what you thought was brilliant but it tanked. Ask yourself the questions in the graphic above. Get to know what your audience likes, and then be prepared for them to pivot and suddenly love or hate something surprising.
You don’t have to visit this page every day, or even every week. You just need to visit it often enough to learn from it, and think about what you have learned when you make your next post.
If you want more information about successfully posting on Facebook or other social media platforms then read this blog.
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