Three Facebook Metrics to Track

901 million worldwide users. Nearly 500 million mobile users. Over $2 billion in annual advertising revenue.

Yep, we're talking about Facebook.

As Mark Zuckerberg continues to build his social networking empire, we'd like to share a few ways to measure the paid and organic success of your Facebook marketing efforts.

Engagement: 'Talking About This'

Through a series of new rules and regulations, Facebook is placing more value on one metric above the rest:

Engagement

Facebook wants to reward brands with highly engaged online audiences, hence their new 'talking about this' metric.

The 'talking about this' metric rewards brands that have developed a loyal following of users on Facebook, as opposed to big brands who have users that 'like' the brand page but rarely visit or interact with the brand on a regular basis.

Segmented Likes

By plugging into Facebook advertising tools like Compass Labs, marketers are able to measure top-performing keywords, media preferences and see a customer profile of who is 'liking' your brand page.

Why is this important?

Well, you want to make sure that your advertising is attracting the correct type of customer to engage with your brand.

For example, we were running a campaign for a national retail brand. The campaign was generating five times more likes than when the client managed the program in house ... but half of the likes were coming from 13 - 17 year olds who are unlikely to turn into paying customers.

By catching this fact early, we were able to segment that age group out and only target Facebook users that were older and had a higher HHI (i.e. those who would actually buy the products we were offering).

Redirected Sales

We're beginning to measure sales on a clients website that were referred from Facebook advertising.

By creating a custom tab with an offer, deal or coupon, we can measure users who not only 'like' the brand page but who interact with the custom tab and then purchase a product or service on our clients website.

Using our algorithm, we are then able to place a number on the value of a 'like' for each individual brands Facebook page, much like Eventbrite did.

Do you know the value of your social marketing efforts?

If not, give us a shout