How We Measure Facebook
From my last posts you can see that I have written about Facebook analytics before, but I thought it would be good to put it all in one post! I shared these with the Social Media Club of Lawrence during a presentation and got many requests to blog about.
I calculate these stats weekly for the Facebook pages that I help manage. This helps us stay strategic with our content and set goals for the future months. I keep this data in one big, happy spreadsheet.
First, I always export the data and save it in case I need to refer back to it in the future.
- Average Weekly Active Users
- Daily active users/number of fans x 100
- Then add the numbers together and divide by 7.
- This gives me a percentage of the average number of fans who were active that week.
- Total number of updates
- Does my average weekly users count increase the more I update? Yes!!
Total Fan Count
- You have to know how much you are growing!
- Total Impressions
- Impressions received for each post, added together.
- Top External referrer
- Always Ottawa.edu, which is good because that is proving that Facebook is a valid way to stay connected to our constituents.
- Top Internal Referrer
- Usually “search”- people searching our name on Facebook. I have noticed this number increases when our commercials are running.
- Sometimes the “Facebook stream,” which means we got new fans from current fans who liked or commented on our posts and it showed up in their feed.
- Sometimes “profile page,” which means we got new fans because someone saw our logo or name on some else’s profile.
- Best content that week based on post feedback
- Feedback/ impressions x 100
- Best content based on daily active users
- Just because you didn’t get a like or a comment, doesn’t mean people didn’t see it. An “active user” is anyone who clicks, likes, visits, or comments on your page that day.
- No math needed here, just look at the numbers Facebook provides.
- Photo views
- They say if you put a photo with each post, you get more interaction. This is helping me test that.
- Video views
- When I upload a video on Facebook (not YouTube), this is how I tell how many views it got.
Most Popular Days of the Week
- I determine this by looking at Daily Active Users. I keep track of these days to see if I can find a pattern.
Things I have noticed( Feel free to prove me wrong if you don’t agree):
- Facebook analytics are two days slow. So, the current analytics on your page are actually from two days ago.
- Sometimes things seem inconsistent. For example, sometimes when I’m looking at my exported data, it tells me that the page got less likes or comments on posts on a particular day and I know it got more. To combat that, I go back to my page and use the data provided on the post.
Understanding Facebook Page Insights Part 3- Impressions
Facebook can be very helpful in generating awareness and motivating consideration. (Steve Goldner) In fact, most social media is great at this. But, we’re talking about Facebook right now. Facebook Insights contains a stat called Impressions. It can be found by clicking on “interactions.”
What are impressions?
Simply put, the number of times your post was shown to Facebook users. Impressions can come from a user’s news feed, a visit to a page, or through an Open Graph social plugin. It is not, how many users saw your post, which is why your impressions count is often higher than your fan count. For example, a fan may visit their Facebook homepage many times during a session and each time the post is rendered it counts as an impression. That means, one user could have seen your post five times, while another may have only seen it once or not at all.
Click here to actually read Facebook explain it all.
How can WE use this stat?
Let’s say there is an event coming up and we are trying to get the word out. Since you’re trying to generate awareness and motivate consideration, the impression stat can give us insight into how far our message reached. Not how many people saw the message, but at least how many times your message showed up somewhere on Facebook.
So, if the soccer coach asked you to get the word out about her tournament, this is a stat you can relay to her. And, hopefully the rest of the marketing efforts that coincided with this event can offer a similar “impression” count.
And, we can keep track on a weekly basis. For example, calculate the total number of impressions for a certain time period.
A great way to actually find out exactly how effective your message is, is to survey your attendees by simply asking “Did you hear about this event on Facebook?”
The thing to ask now is- What are ways to increase the number of impressions? But that is another blog post.
Integrating Facebook Updates With Our Commercials
Hopefully you have heard some of our radio commercials that are airing right now through January 27.
They are promoting MBA, EDU and the university in general for all of our APOS locations.
During this time, it is common for people to search on Facebook for the university. Social media helps with conversion. So, if potential students find your page, it is a good idea that we are integrated with the radio commercials.
This is a big week for the enrollment teams in reaching their goals.
Indiana- it is great that your latest update is the MBA day in the life video.
Here are some ideas for updates:
- Get an MBA, or EDU professor on film- ask them what topics they are excited to teach this semester. OR, ask them to give work related MBA tips to potential students. Upload the video to your Facebook page.
- Simple update- Enrollment is going on right now! What class are you taking next semester.
- MBA focused update- Hopefully you are hearing our commercials!! In them we say that Ottawa University MBA students are actively serving throughout the world. What is your job?
- EDU- “Last semester some or our education students worked on a project with mentally handicapped students, we are excited to announce they will be doing the same thing next semester.” (This is just an example I came up with)
- General- “We have an internal saying that we are for people not for profit, we want to wish all of our students good luck for started classes next week.”
Don’t feel distressed if you aren’t getting much response. I admit, that it is difficult to get a response when picking out a specific group of students. But, the engagement isn’t necessarily in the goal in this situation. The goal is to be integrated with the radio commercials.
In the meantime, I am editing an MBA video called “Cubicle Confession.” I interviewed one of our KC students who works at Garmin. I will share the video with you when it is finished.
Understanding Facebook Page Insights Part 2- Daily Active Users
Exporting your Facebook insights offers additional information that you may find valuable. In my last post about Facebook insights, I talked about how you can find the percentage of your fans who interact on your page on a specific day. Keeping track of this number can give you insight into the engagement on your page. Maybe once a week you go back through these stats, do some calculating to come up with a weekly number. Hopefully the number increases because you have been creating interesting content.
Another way to get information by using daily active users stats is by looking at the data provided in the exported version of your page insights.
What is Daily Active User?
“Daily Users who have engaged with your Page, viewed your Page, or consumed content generated by your Page (Unique Users).” Facebook
Side note: “unique users” in the web-analytic world means individual people. This number does not count the people who visit over an over again. For example, 500 individual people visited your page.
Once you export your data, open the excel spreadsheet provided. The first data it offers you is Date and Daily Active Users by specific number NOT percentage of users like you would have calculated before. You will probably notice variation in the number of daily active users. For example, since I don’t update our page on the weekends, I can see the number of active users significantly declines on those dates. Each day is different based on several things- the content I put out, the day itself (New Years will probably be low), time of year can cause it to increase or decrease (summer time is lower).
How this information can help you:
Look for highs and lows and then go back through your page and see what content you put out on those days. An interesting thing I have noticed for our main facebook page is that on days where I make more than one update, the number of daily active users can be almost 200 more than days I simply make one update. Since my goal is always to increase engagement, updating twice a day may be something I attempt to do more often.
Understanding Facebook Page Insights Part 1
Facebook gives you analytics on your page so you can understand your fans’ activity, demographics, what content they like, etc.
It is important to keep track of these stats so you can make your page successful by aligning it with your goals. Go here to access your insights: www.facebook.com/insights
The basics:
Monthly active users- how many of your fans were actually active on your page.
Total Likes- how many fans you have.
Daily new likes- how many new fans you got yesterday.
Here is a simple tip for using some of this information strategically.
Lifetime Total Likes/ Daily Active Users Graph:
- With some simple math, this graph can tell you the percentage of daily active users you have. AKA, the percentage of fans who are interacting on your page daily. If one of your goals is to increase engagement, this number is helpful. Roll your mouse over a specific date to populate the number. Take daily active users divided by lifetime total likes on that same date. For example, 582/2000= 29 percent. Nearly 30 percent of our Facebook fans interacted on our page on Mon, Dec 13th.
- To get a broader view of your fan interaction, take monthly active users divided by total likes. Do this every month on the same day. Keep track of this number on an excel spreadsheet so you can see how your engagement is growing or isn’t growing over time. Don’t worry, it is normal to fluctuate a bit.
Enrollment Advisors and Video
Enrollment Advisor, Mary Melton, (I’m sure you know her) took the Flip Cam to a visit day the music department did at a couple Kansas City area high schools. She brought the footage up to me and we edited the video together while I taught her how to use Windows Movie Maker. We placed the video our YouTube channel and, of course, the video is now on her Facebook profile and our main account. We can also use this video on our website. And, I’m sure Todd Wilkinson will love to place it on the Jazz Studies Facebook page as well.
Music is a large part of our recruiting efforts, and this is a small but great example of how using social media (video with the convenience of a YouTube link) can be integrated in with your larger goals. Its important to stress that you don’t have to be a professional video producer to make an effective video for the social media space. Your audience expects these videos to be candid and offer a behind- the-scenes look of the real Ottawa.
What this video could do:
- It could help with conversion. If a potential student is deciding between two schools, the additional information provided in this video could tip scales in our favor that much more.
What this video won’t do:
- Get millions of views. This video is for a very niche group of people- potential students who are considering playing music in college. Its not likely this video will go viral and get us on The Today Show.
Come get the Flip Cam anytime!
All About The New Facebook Profiles
Facebook made changes…again. This time there is a complete redesign of profile pages. It is exhausting keeping up with them. Honestly, I think these changes are great and most important- easy to understand. To get the updated profile right now, you have to be friends with someone who has it. When you click on their profile, at the top of the screen, it will ask if you want it as well. Then Facebook takes you through a guided tour of the changes.
An interesting change is how you can organize your friends. There is now more focus on putting them into lists. So, for example, you can make a list of the students you are recruiting who are interested in Biology at Ottawa University. AND, if you would like to make status updates specifically for only them to see, you can customize your status update to that list.
Here is a quick video that shows some of the changes. Conclusion, I think the changes are pretty to easy understand and they make the profiles look good with the most relevant information on top.
If you want an in depth read about the new profiles, read this post by Inside Facebook.
That Was Rude- When to Delete a Facebook Comment
One of the tenets of social media is transparency. Meaning you must be open, honest and accountable. In the beginning of modern-day social media when blogging first appeared, many thought you shouldn’t even delete a sentence you wrote and later wanted to change. You simply had to strike through it letting your reader still see your original thought. (embarrassing comment here)
Luckily that isn’t practiced as much any more since so many people and companies use blogs for business reasons.
But, transparency in general is still a huge part of social media. Your fans, followers and blog readers should to be able to leave a comment with the reasonable expectation that their comment is going to be somewhat uncensored and even acknowledged by the site owner. This is the part of social media that makes brand managers and head of companies so nervous about our new modes of communication. They assume you can’t monitor this kind of interaction. But, you can.
Here is what you need to know about responding to and deleting comments on Ottawa’s Facebook sites.
Page and Group Administrators
Unfortunately, Facebook does not allow you to approve comments before they appear on your page. It currently doesn’t even alert you to when your page got a new comment. This is why it is important to monitor your page daily.
Our Policy for Deleting Comments
We only delete comments off our main page if the comment is rude and could hurt someone’s feelings. We want our social sites to be a place to celebrate Ottawa University, but if someone is generally disagreeing with a post or uses a questionable tone in a comment, we don’t delete it.
It is very rare that I have to delete comments off our main Facebook page. But, I do when the person has broken our page rules or Facebook’s rules. We post clearly on the page that “profanity, rude remarks and racial slurs will be removed and reported.” 
In Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibility, it states,
- You will not bully, intimidate, or harass any user.
- You will not post content that: is hateful, threatening, or pornographic; incites violence; or contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence.
- You will not use Facebook to do anything unlawful, misleading, malicious, or discriminatory.
Another time to delete a comment is when a spammer has made an unsolicited comment on the page and they are attempting to sell something to our Facebook fans.
When to block someone
- If after you delete someone’s comment and they keep coming back with additional rude comments. In this situation the person is page lurking, waiting for you to delete their comment so they can repost immediately.
- They are harassing you in inappropriate ways, or you feel uncomfortable.
- They have shown a consistent behavior of rude comments. In this situation you have had to delete this person’s rude comments at least once or twice in the past and have come across another comment that needs to be deleted. They haven’t gotten the message, so its time to block them.
Profiles
If you are using a profile for professional purposes, don’t engage in personal conversations not related to work with friends or family on your Facebook wall. For example, a friend posts a comment on your wall that says “Want to go out this weekend?” Discussions like this on your professional-use Facebook profile are not appropriate. This goes for photos and videos as well.
In general, if you are questioning anything that is on your wall, just ask about it and we can talk it through. Deleting comments should be used with caution because you could lose the trust of your audience.
Using Twitter in the Classroom
Twitter is a great tool to encourage classroom discussion and interaction. Do you have some quiet students in the class? Are you looking for a way to make interaction fun and relevant to the students? Use Twitter!
A recent study done by a professor at Lock Haven University revealed that Twitter increased interaction among students. “Twitter was used for class discussions after class, homework assignments, reminders on activities, exams, deadlines, etc and academic support. Classrooms that used Twitter had greater participation from students than those who weren’t…Student feedback was excellent. At the beginning, most were hesitant to mix social media such as Facebook accounts with school work because it would interrupt their study time. However, with Twitter they were able to stay on top of their workloads…In addition, students that were reluctant to ask questions in class or even from other classmates, were able to get the support they needed via the Twitter streams and discussions….Other results include increase in GPA and grades for the students that were using Twitter as well as student interaction with classmates of different backgrounds….Another goal Dr. Junco had with this experiment was to encourage educators to integrate social media in their classrooms to continue to engage students in a way that is familiar to them. The results of the study were published in the Journal of Computer Assisted Learning in a November issue. The video below was produced with information on this study.” (Learning Today)
Here are 3 tips for using Twitter in the classroom:
- Create a hashtag for students to follow. For example, your class number.
- Display the hashtag stream using the classroom overhead, so the students can see the conversation about the topic on the wall. Address any question that comes through the stream.
- Encourage the use of Twitter search for finding great and recent articles or real-time thoughts on a topic.
- Make it part of their grade to interact on Twitter with a question once a week.
- Start a Twitter Chat and offer extra credit. Twitter chats have a set time they meet on Twitter, they use a hashtag, and cover a topic designated by the chat leader. They usually last an hour, but of course you can make them as long as you want.
Here are some great videos about professors using Twitter in the classroom:
- UT-Dallas Twitter Experiment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WPVWDkF7U8&feature=player_embedded#!
- Academic Excellence in 140 Characters: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVOY2x81_bg&feature=player_embedded
How To Allow Your Facebook Fans To Tag Themselves in Photos
A great way to get the word out about your event or service, etc., is by allowing and encouraging your Facebook fans to tag themselves in your photos. Why is this valuable? Because when a person on Facebook is tagged in a photo, it shows up in the news feed of THEIR friends that they were tagged in a photo on your page.
To allow your fans to tag themselves in your page photos, you will have to adjust some page settings.
1. First, go to your Page and below the profile photo, click Edit Page
2. When you are the edit page, look at the address bar and select the id number for your page. Copy that number. Save it and put it aside. See below.
3. Now, take the below URL and paste it in your browser, but replace “REPLACEME” with your page id number that you saved from the above step. Hit “enter”
http://facebook.com/pages/edit/app_settings.php?id=REPLACEME&aid=2305272732
4. Once you hit enter, you will be taken to this page. Check “allow fans to add photos” and “allow fans to tag photos”
I got this information from another blog, Flyteblob.com located here: http://www.flyteblog.com/flyte/2010/10/facebook-marketing-make-your-facebook-page-photos-more-social.html
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