How to Market Facebook, Even With the Constantly Changing Algorithm

Facebook seems to constantly update the algorithm it uses to display Facebook pages in News Feeds. As such, this site continues to keep marketers on their toes, especially in regards to organic reach. With Facebook's millions of users, there are always ways to continue to find new likes as well as new clients and customers. Below are a few tips.

Sets Goals and Make a Plan

Start by making goals that make sense for Facebook. How many new ‘likes’ do you want for your page each week? Do you want your followers to share your content more? Or perhaps comment more on your page? Get your marketing team together or start brainstorming before you outline these goals so you can start forming a plan to align with your brand. This plan should include a day-by-day content schedule as well as a budget, both for your time and your finances.

While it's reasonable to set aside at least a half hour a day to work on Facebook, also consider whether you're willing to try out targeted paid ads, which will help you find customers outside of organic reach.

Track Performance

Consistently keeping track of how each of your posts and status updates are performing is key to making Facebook work for you, no matter how much Facebook has tinkered with the algorithm. Generally speaking, text posts typically perform the best, be sure to keep an eye on Facebook Insights. Currently Insights shows the ‘total reach’ of each post, as such you can easily tell if a photo of your latest dish reached more people than say, a link to your latest restaurant menu.



Additionally, the current Insights page also shows how your fans are engaging with your page, particularly comparing how many clicks a post received compared to how many shares, likes, and comments. This is the best way to measure what works for your page as well as what doesn't. For example, if your infographic of how rae PIDs measure gas levels in different spaces was liked an shared more than an image of your company’s calibration tools, then you know infographics are often — and currently — a better bet when it comes to updating your page.

Since the algorithm for distributing your posts does change, you'll need to keep a careful eye on these insights to see if how you're reaching your fans is changing, and then adjust your content schedule accordingly.

Build Your Industry Connections

Social media sites are about building a community and spreading the love by sharing more than just your own product pages and content. To make this aspect of Facebook marketing work best, be sure to use your Facebook page as your company page, rather than through your individual personal page. To do this, click on the tool sign at the top right of Facebook, and choose which page you'd like to currently manage. Then, you'll effectively be commenting and sharing as your company page.

Next, start building your community by liking other pages in your industry, other than competitor. These pages will then appear in your company's News Feed, and you can see what they're sharing.

As your company page, you can also like and comment on their posts. What's even better is you can share their content to your company page. This is important to do for multiple reasons. For one, your page's fans want to see more than just links to your own website. They'll see more value in your page if you're sharing other industry-related news, such as, if you’re a travel company, why airline ticket prices to Europe are going down. Additionally, if your industry connections see you've shared their content, they're more likely to share yours. This is another wonderful way to reach and engage more people in your community.

Facebook's algorithm may force you to rethink your marketing plan and content strategy, but it's still possible to tame the Facebook beast. By following the above steps and trying new Facebook features, you can still reach potential new fans and continue to grow your business.

An Introduction To Facebook Insights

Facebook has many excellent features built into it as standard... and they're all free!

One of the best and most useful features for business use is Facebook's 'Insights' service which is automatically built into every business page.

You'll frequently hear me emphasising that businesses need to use business pages, not personal profiles for commercial use and this is yet another good reason why.

If you use your personal profile for business, you cannot access the wonderful Insights service... and that's like trying to run a business with a blindfold on!

Facebook Insights Whistle Stop Tour

In very simple terms, Facebook Insights provides detailed analytics for your business page.

This information is like gold dust for your business - it allows you to measure what's working and what is not - which means that you can target your efforts and if applicable, your advertising spend, in the right direction.

To get started, navigate to your business page and click on the 'View Insights' button in the top menu:

This will take you to an 'at a glance' overview page giving you details of Page Likes, Post Reach and Engagement for the past week:

Facebook leaves nothing to chance, giving you simple to understand graphs showing your latest data.

This data removes all 'finger in the wind' guesses about what's working on your page and what is not.

It can be pretty brutal is something falls a bit flat ... but if you can't measure it in your business, then you're using guesswork, and that's not a clever way to do things!

As you navigate through the Insights menus you will be able to access this vast array of data:

• Total Page Likes as of Today
• Net Likes: What Changed
• Where Your Page Likes Came From
• Post Reach: The number of people who saw your posts
• Likes, Comments, and Shares: These actions will help you reach more people
• Hide, Report as Spam, and Unlikes: These actions will decrease the number of people you reach
• Page and Tab Visits: The number of times each of your Page tabs was viewed
• Other Page Activity: The number of actions people took that involved your Page
• External Referrers: The number of times people came to your Page from a website off Facebook

Each set of data is presented in a clear, easy to understand format, so you don't need to be a data whizzkid to grasp what's going on:

One of the data sets that I always find particularly interesting is the age profile and gender split of my business page audience:

Why Use Insights?

Insights data gives you precise and accurate information about what's going well and what is not.

It is particularly useful for figuring out what works well with your audience and what does not.

This data will save you spending time and effort on wasted tasks, and ensure that your energy is directed to the right place.

Facebook gives plenty of support on how to use the Insights functionality and you can even export and store your page data:

Facebook Releases New Page Insights

Last week Facebook began rolling out its new Page Insights to all users, an extension on the select few who were given access to the page in June. The new and updated Page insights have built on highly requested features and feedback from the select early users of the new Insights feature, in order to provide a better feature to all Page Owners. This appears to have been an active attempt by Facebook to try and simplify its platform for brands and advertisers, helping administrators to understand how people are choosing to engage with the content they publish.

First of all, Facebook is splitting up the People Talking About This (PTAT) metric into separate elements: Page Likes, People Engaged (the number of unique people who have clicked on, liked, commented on, or shared your posts), Page tags and mentions, Page check-ins and other interactions on a Page. The Virality metric was also renamed Engagement rate and now includes clicks as part of its measurements in order to help admins better gauge overall post quality.

Facebook have also introduced tools to publish better content on its Insights page. They have created a post-specific score card, so that marketers can evaluate positive and negative metrics side-by-side for each post. By positive interactions they mean all likes, comments, shares and clicks. On the other hand, negative interactions are when someone chooses to hide a post, hide all posts, report as spam, or unlike the page. This will help advertisers or brands to see how users are engaging with their posts.

The new Insights page also allows you to see information about how people are interacting with your page. It now allows you to see not only who you've reached – but also who you've engaged. This helps Page administrators to identify how content resonates with different audiences and allows them to make more informed decisions about their Page content and strategy. The new page feature does not only show you how your visitors came to your Page, from Facebook via Timeline, Photos Tab etc. but it also lets you see how much traffic has been driven from a website off of Facebook, such as google.com. This is now providing a much better service, comparable with Google Analytics.

Facebook is keen to introduce these changes because they want to make sure that brands are reaching the right audience on Facebook, giving them more of an incentive to post and advertise on the network and increasing revenue. Facebook is still keen to generate feedback from its users so they have left the option to 'Send Feedback' if you don't like one or more of the changes.

What do you think?

Do you think the new Facebook Insights page will be a benefit to small businesses?

Using the new Facebook Insights to improve audience and customer engagement.

In June of 2013, Facebook began the roll out of their latest updates to “Facebook insights”, their first since October 2011. In case you have not heard of the term “insights” before as it relates to Facebook, in its most basic form it is the Facebook page owner’s access to an in depth behind the scenes view of how well a page is performing. The revamp however has brought about a number of changes that should help page owners greatly in taking actionable steps to improve their understanding of audience behaviour and engagement which hopefully will eventually become “customer” behaviour and engagement.

Before getting into how to benefit from these changes, here’s a breakdown of the main updates:

The overview page has a much more user friendly layout providing a more “insightful” view at one glance. The original tabs were “Overview”, “Likes”, “Reach” & “People talking about this”. These have now been replaced with “Overview”, “Page”, “Posts” & “People”.



Fig 1: Old insights on the left Versus “New” insights on the right.

In the new “Page” tab, there is a more extensive offering of additional information available than with the original “Likes”. Most of the data that was previously available is still there however it is now divided into more user friendly sections “Page Likes”, “Post Reach” and “Page Visits”. One of the newest features available is the “benchmark” which allows you to graphically compare previous performance at a glance.

The old “Reach” tab is no longer a metric looked at in isolation. In the new metrics, reach is looked at in terms of page, posts and people in turn, which makes a lot more sense allowing the user to measure the success of each strategy employed to extend reach in multiple ways.

In the new “Posts” tab, it has become a whole lot easier to see exactly how well each of your posts have performed not only in terms of clicks and shares, but reach and engagement. You can now also see exactly when your audience is online and when the best times are to post and what kinds of posts work best tailored to your people. The new date ranges feature allows you to analyse data over any time period very easily and then you have great drill down opportunity into data per post.

You can also access new standard report on negative comments on your page so you can figure out exactly what annoyed your page viewers while also being able to work out what posting times worked best.

The “People Talking About This” page metric has been expanded upon to provide more information with the results now subdivided into specific measurables outlined by Facebook as “people engaged, the number of unique people who've clicked on, liked, commented on or shared your posts, and other page activity, which includes Page mentions, check-ins and posts by other people on your Page.” You can now get a full break out by age, gender and demographic of those that are interacting with your page and not only by those who liked your page.

The measure “virality” has been removed and replaced with “engagement rate, which is the percentage of people who saw a post that then clicked on, liked, commented on or shared it.”

The term “viral reach” is now included as part of organic reach. The “total reach” is now broken down into paid and organic reach so that a user can determine the success of paid versus unpaid campaigns.

Ok, that is enough about the main differences, what about how this impacts you the page owner looking to increase engagement levels with your audience? Right from the outset of using the new insights, you will probably feel a lot more at ease and in control of exactly what you would like to find out to learn more about my audience.

Rather than feeling that you are being given information by Facebook to try and make some meaningful assessments with, the updated insights is now providing you with exactly the kind of data that you can take away, assess, adapt and come back with a meaningful plan of action to genuinely improve the level of customer engagement with your page. How can you take the information now available to you and create a take away action plan to improve your customer engagement and overall experience?

1. Review your Overview statistics:
Starting with the new “Overview” page which gives a much more holistic view of page performance, it is much easier to dip into exactly the areas that matter to you. Look for any dramatic spikes or dips in performance in areas that stands out so that you can analyse exactly what caused the activity. If none stands out, you can proceed methodically through each of the following steps.

2. Page Likes:

Under the “Page” tab, open the “Page Likes” tab and look at your change in number of likes and where they came from. If you performed paid activity, make note of exactly the results that were achieved per investment made. Now do a benchmark comparison on each of these versus previous performance to test if your activity in the previous week had a positive or negative impact and note what action is required.



Fig 2: Reviewing your likes in the new format.

3. Post reach:
Review how many people saw your posts and the level of engagement in general and the difference in the organic versus paid levels of reach. Checkout the likes, engagements and shares as a total benchmarked against historic activity for success levels of reach of your latest posts.

4. Page visits:

Still in the “Page” tab, you can review in detail where exactly people looked in your page, how many mentions, posts on your page, check-ins and offers purchased if you had any on offer. Finally take a look at what external sites were bringing people to your Facebook page and look to increase focus on the areas which are bringing you the most.

5. All Posts & Best Post Types

Under the “Posts” tab, starting with “all posts” you are presented with a beautifully laid out display of each of your posts and their impact in terms of reach, post clicks, engagement, likes, comments and shares. This is a fantastic opportunity for you to assess exactly what posts generated the biggest response thus providing you with the key information to what your audience likes and what to do to further improve customer engagement. Cross reference these results with the “Best Post Types” tab to reinforce what posts your audience likes best. Take this data and formulate your plan for the types of posts you should now be using. You can also take the posts with the greatest engagement levels and test the paid promotion by using the “Boost” option.



Fig 3: The new “All Posts” layout.

6. When your fans are online

What better way to decide when best to upload your most effective posts than to coincide your posts with when your audience are on line. The new “When Your Fans Are Online” tab under “Posts” not only gives you the best day to post but the exact time to maximise customer engagement. Take note of the best days and times and get your posts scheduled to go out exactly as the data tells you.



Fig 4: Graphical representation of when your audience are online.

7. People

Under the tab people, start out by looking at the first two tabs, namely “Your Fans” and “People Reached” and look at the breakdown of the gender and demographics of your audience so that you can assess what type of posts will suit your audience better.

8. People Engaged

Finally, under “People”, take a close look at the level of engagement of your audience in terms of age, gender and demographic. From this information, you may be able to extract some useful information as to the level of interaction of your people and the post types you have been using, whether status, videos or pictures or the subject matter that brought about the most interaction with your audience.

These are some pointers for you to help improve not only your interaction with the new Facebook insights but to help with audience engagement. If you are slow to move to the update, Facebook also make it possible for you to switch between the old and the new and back again so that you can see and judge for yourself the difference. Once you are making the most of the information that we can now harness from Facebook about our pages, the next step for you is to ensure that you are using Facebook insights on your domain and use it in tandem with Google analytics to expand on your monitoring. The key is to use the information wisely to ultimately give your audience what they are looking for to enable your page and website to thrive by providing excellent, entertaining and engaging content.