Social Media Measurement with Dr. Liz Gross
I created this course to address what I think is a key piece of social media strategy missing on most campuses—tying social media efforts back to department and institutional goals. In order to be effective marketers and communicators, we need to move beyond vanity metrics (likes, comments, followers, and shares), and connect social media work with more tangible outcomes that resonate with campus leaders.
Most of my students are not social media newbies —many of them are accomplished professionals. But when the 4 weeks are over, all of them have clarified their social media goals, identified what metrics matter and how to measure them, and created a simple report that can communicate their success to stakeholders.
Today, I’d like to give you an idea of what’s possible when you take the time to follow this approach by sharing a few hard-to-find Facebook metrics to assist with your social media analysis.
Why export Facebook Insights?
Do you rely on the Facebook Insights dashboard, or another social media measurement tool to get data about the your page and posts?
If you’ve never exported your Facebook Insights, you may be missing out on data that can help you learn more about your Facebook community or the performance of your posts.
Here are five reasons to export Facebook Insights today, with specific instructions to help you find the data you need within the massive Excel spreadsheet provided by Facebook.
#1 Find out when your fans are online
Sure, the Insights dashboard gives you a graph that shows when your fans are online, but that only includes that data from the last seven days.
If you want to see if your fans’ schedules change based on the time of the semester, or when classes are not in session, you need day-by-day, hour-by-hour data.
You’ll find it in the Facebook Page Insights export, in the very last tab, daily liked and online. Each row represents a day, and each column represents an hour (0 = midnight, 1 = 1:00 a.m., etc.).
You can use this information to:
- Calculate the true organic reach of your posts within an hour of publication by dividing your reach by the number of users that were actually online (if your fans weren’t online, they were never going to see the post).
- Determine when to post for the best potential reach, and know if that timing varies based on the day of the week or the time of the year.
#2 Report your daily, weekly, or monthly reach
Relying on post-level data to paint a clear picture of your reach is short-sighted.
Most of us don’t expect to reach every fan with every post, but we should have an expectation of reaching a certain amount of our fans each day, week, or month.
Download the Facebook Page Insights export and scroll over to columns AD-AF to see the daily, weekly, and 28-day reach of posts from your page. A quick calculation of any of these columns divided by column B, lifetime total likes, will give you post reach as a percentage of your total likes.
If you pay to promote posts, you can continue to the right to view similar columns that break down your organic and paid reach.
#3 Quickly identify your top-performing posts
Whether you use reach or engagement rate to determine your top-performing posts, it can be cumbersome to scroll through the Facebook Insights dashboard to view posts that are more than a week old.
If you download the Facebook Post Insights export, you can view the data from up to 500 posts at once. To identify posts with the highest reach, simply sort the spreadsheet by column H (columns I and J break reach down into organic and paid).
To sort by engagement rate, first you’ll need to do a quick calculation. Insert a new column into the spreadsheet, and divide the total lifetime engaged users of each post (column N) by lifetime post total reach (column H). Format this column as a percentage, then sort to identify your most engaging posts.
#4 Learn what posts generate negative feedback
Did you know that you can what posts cause people to hide, unfollow, or report your page?
Download the Facebook Post Insights export and scroll to column R, lifetime negative feedback from users. Sort this column from highest to lowest and you can quickly identify what posts, if any, resulted in more negative feedback than normal.
#5 Pinpoint your true potential reach
Worldwide, about 65% of Facebook users log in every day. If your primary audience is college students, the number is probably much higher than that. But no matter who your audience is, it’s unlikely that all of them log in every day.
If you download the Facebook Page Insights export, you can tell exactly how many of your fans were logged in on any given day. Check out column BT, daily count of fans online—this is your true potential reach on any given day. You can divide this column by column B, lifetime total likes, to quickly calculate the percentage of your fans that were online.
Download your Facebook Insights export today
To download your Facebook Insights export, visit your page as an admin, click “Insights” at the top, and then “Export” in the upper right. Choose the date range you’d like to export, and indicate whether you want your report at the page or post level.
Meet the Faculty: Dr. Liz Gross
Higher Ed Experts is a professional online school for digital professionals working in universities and colleges.
When you take a professional certificate course with us, you get a chance to upgrade your skills by working on your projects, interacting with classmates just like you and getting detailed personalized feedback from your instructor.
Dr. Liz Gross is a Social Media and Market Research Strategist for a federal student loan servicer.
Liz received her Ph.D. in Leadership for the Advancement of Learning and Service in Higher Education from Cardinal Stritch University. Her dissertation research examined the relationship between communication methods and the frequency and content of college student interactions with faculty. She is also a graduate of the Higher Ed Experts Web Analytics certificate program.
Dr. Liz Gross teaches Higher Ed Expert’s 4-week online course on Social Media Measurement for Higher Education.
Tags: Higher Ed Experts Faculty, Higher Ed Marketing