How To Analyze Your Facebook Likes

Facebook is one of the most famous social networking websites. As of now, it has more than a billion users, which makes it a huge repository for public information. Many brands and business also use Facebook for marketing purposes. It is a great way to stay connected with your audience and engage with them. However, it is not as easy as it sounds/ As a marketer, you may get excited at the prospect of getting the data of so many people at once. But Facebook is very strict about their privacy norms. They will never release the private data of their user. Unless you are a friend of that particular person, it will be very difficult to get hold of someone’s private information. There are plenty of large scale organizations which pays plenty of money for advertising purposes. But even the data which they get is highly anonymized. Hence, the only way to get access to someone’s personal data is by sending a friend request and hoping that he or she accepts it. Other than that, organizations like NSA or Homeland Security also have the right to access the personal data of someone if they believe that it is needed for the security of the country.

Hence, if you are the owner of a business and you open a Facebook Page to learn in details about your audience, you will face difficulty. You may be able to get hold of large volumes of data. But all the data which you will manage to collect will be for the entire audience and not for any specific person. Because of this, it is also very difficult to spot fake accounts of your audience.

The only way to collect data is by taking help of Facebook’s own Insight program. You won’t be able to use third party apps to collect data. You can try using third party apps like LikeAlyzer, but the data which you collect will be very limited.

Hence, instead of giving the names of 3rd party tools which can help you out, I will tell you how to properly use Facebook’s own Insight program to collect data. You will find the Insight Tab at the top of your page. In this article, you will find several tips and tricks on how to collect as much data as possible. Here are the following things which you need to do:

1. Measure your Reach: This is one of the ways to analyze how your page is performing on Facebook. Reach doesn’t mean the total followers which you have on your Facebook page. It denotes the total number of people who actually see your posts. For example, lets assume that you have 2000 followers in your Facebook page and your reach is around 5 percent. This means that out of your total 2000 followers, only around 5 percent of them i.e 100 have actually gone through your posts while browsing Facebook. Your aim should be to increase the Reach percentage as much as possible. It is very difficult to have a reach of around 50 percent. Very few people or companies have that. However, if you manage to have a reach of around 25 percent, then it is very good.

However, the problem with Reach percentage is that it is not always very accurate. One of the major flaws of Reach percentage is that it takes into consideration all the people who see your posts and not just the audience which you are targeting. In some cases, one of your posts may go viral and will be seen by thousands of people. For example, if your post goes viral, it may be seen by around 4000 persons. In that case, your follower strength is just 2000 and 4000 people see your posts. The reach will be 200 percent. However, one of the best things about Reach percentage is that it calculates on the basis of person and not views. For example, if one person is seeing your post for 5 times, it will still be considered as just 1 view and not 5.

However, there are different kinds of Reach which will help you get a better understanding of how well your Facebook posts are performing.

There are basically three kinds of reach:

1. Organic Reach: Organic reach basically calculates your target audience. These people get to see your posts because it shows up in their News feed.

2. Viral Reach: The people which are included in Organic Reach may like your posts and decide to share them with their friends. Hence, those people who get to see your posts because other people have shared it are included in Viral Reach.

3. Paid Reach: Sometimes you may decide to promote your posts so that it becomes visible to more people. Those people who get to see your posts because of your promotional activities are included in Paid Reach. In case your Paid Reach figure is very low, it indicates that there is some problem with your ads. Generally, you only have to pay for advertisements when the Paid Reach figure crosses a certain limit.
Out of the different kinds of Reach, Viral Reach is definitely the most important. More people have seen them because they have been shared by many people. You should carefully analyze those posts and find out the factors which made them so sharable. Your aim should be to increase the Viral Reach figure as much as possible.

Study Your Demographics in order to increase the visibility of your posts, you need to carefully study your audience. You have to learn what kind of posts they appreciate. Once you are able to do that, your Organic Reach and Paid Reach figures will automatically improve. Improving your Organic Reach is actually much more difficult. Because in case of Paid Reach, you are just splashing the cash and visibility will improve. However, to improve your Organic Reach, you need to connect with the audience. Once you start losing your audience, it will be very difficult to get them back.

You must be wondering how to study your audience and how to create posts which suits them the best. These are some of the parameters which you need to study:

1. Activeness: You first have to find out how frequently your audience uses Facebook. If the majority portion of your audience is inactive, then it may indicate that those were fake accounts or old accounts which are not used anymore. This is the reason why many marketing campaigns have poor stats.

2. Age group: You also need to find out the average age group of your audience and make posts which suits that particular age group. For example, if the majority of your audience is above 40, then you have to make specific type of posts. Similarly, if the majority portion of your audience are below 20 years, then you need to make posts which they will be able to relate to.
3. Educational Level: The educational level of your audience is also very important. If majority of them are still in school, then you have to make sure that your posts are simple and easy to understand.

4. Platforms used: It is also very important to figure out what device your audience is using for browsing Facebook. If the majority of them are using smartphones, then you have to make content which looks better on mobile devices.
Apart from all these, you can also find out what other pages your target audience has liked. This will help you to get an idea about the competition.
Thus, if you manage to carefully study the demographics of your audience, then you can get plenty of valuable information which can be used for improving the reach of your posts.

1. Find out what Percentage of your Audience are Engaged: You need to find out what percentage of your total audience are actually engaged to your posts and page. Just looking at the total number of likes or comments will not give an accurate view of the scenario. For example, your audience strength may be 2000 and the total number of likes is just 100. It you look it this way, then it looks very dismal. However, if your Reach is 6 percent then, it means that out of your 2000 audience strength, only around 120 people actually see your posts. And out of those 120 people, 100 have liked your posts, which means the engagement rate is more than 80 percent. And engagement rate of 80 percent or more is very encouraging.

The engagement rate is a very important metric to judge the success of your posts. You should find out the stats for each of your posts and see which one has the highest engagement rate.

2. Consider the Timing of Your Posts: Timing is a very important thing which you must consider. The quality of your posts is obviously very important, but unless you manage to get the timing of your posts right, your Reach will not increase. For example, if you make posts in midnight or at a time when none of your audience is online, then no one will be able to see it and your engagement rates will fall dramatically. Insights is an excellent tool which has been built for this purpose. It will track the activity level of your audience and will inform you the time at which majority of your audience will be active.

Although timing is more important on platforms like Instagram and Twitter, but in case of Facebook also you must consider it. And there is nothing called ideal time. It will vary from user to user. The peak time varies from business to business and location to location. Hence, while calculate the timing, you have to consider several things like your location and the industry in which you are dealing in. However, you don’t have to figure out the peak time yourself. Insights will do that for you.

3. You Need to Benchmark your Performance: This is very important. Once you set a benchmark, you will be able to figure out where you stand currently in terms of competition and how to improve. It is quite difficult to get the stats of another page. However, there is a tool called Fanpage Karma which will help you compare between your page and another page. Once you compare, you will be able to figure out how your competitors are performing. You will also be able to find out who is the leader in your industry.

4. Compare your Audiences: In order to get better results, you have to make comparison between your audience. For example, you have different kinds of audience- the total number of your Facebook followers, the total number of people who have subscribed to your emails and the total number of your customers. You can compare them and find out the similarities.

For example, you can make a comparison between the total number of people who visited your website and the total number of people who subscribed to your emails. This will help you to find out what percent of the total visitors have signed up. You can also look for similarities between all the people who didn’t subscribe and try to find out a way to make them subscribe as well. Similarly, you can also make a comparison between the total number of people who visited your website and the total number of your Facebook fans. This will help you find out how many of your website visitors follow you on Facebook.

There are several other interesting comparisons which you can make. For example, you can compare your target audience for 2 separate Facebook ads. If there is a lot of difference between the 2 set of audiences, then you also have to make sure that the advertisements are also different. Thus, if you manage to make the comparisons cleverly, then you can extract lots of valuable information.

5. Study Similarities Between Audiences: Another thing which you can do is find out which pages your audience likes. Find out which athletes they like, which sport events they like and which companies they prefer. Once you find out the similarities, you can create your advertisements on that basis.

The team at buyrealsocialmarketing.com has put this together as a reference guide  and hope you enjoy this wealth of Facebook tips. Cheers to your success!