Week 5 - Part B: Learning about FaceBook Data Collecting

About Insights and Metrics

Insights provide metrics regarding your Page's performance. Facebook insights will report demographics such as your viewers’ age, gender, location.  Insights also give us invaluable information to help guide future posts. This includes the type of posts that have the most engagement, the times of day your audience is on Facebook, and which days perform better.

The data from page Insights is only available after you have 100 likes or followers. In addition, Facebook only keeps the data for 2 years.

Why are Facebook Insights important? The metrics give you detailed analytics, so you can track and measure the performance of your content and advertising. You can precisely determine when it is the best time of day to post, what type of posts perform better, and who to target. When you have such detailed knowledge about your Facebook audience you can create more relevant content and better targeted ads.

Metrics for your Page's posts are available in the Posts section of Insights. Here you will find following information about your Page posts:

• The number of people reached.
• Post clicks.
• Engagement: Reactions, comments and shares.
• Total video views and viewing behavior details.

What is Facebook Reach?

Reach is the estimate of how many people who have seen a piece of content you have published at least one time. If that same person sees it twice the reach is still one for that person. The tricky part is all it has to do is enter their screen. They could be scrolling by it fast and never even look at it but it still shows up in counting toward your reach. Reach can be further divided into paid reach and organic reach.

1. Paid Reach is the number of people who had a paid post from your Page show up on their screen. A paid post could be an ad or a “boost.”

a.   A boosted post is an existing post that you choose from your Page's timeline and pay Facebook to promote it to your chosen audience. It is similar to creating an ad in Ads Manager but it doesn’t have as many customizable features. It can be optimized for Page engagement (likes, comments, and shares), overall brand awareness, website clicks, and local business promotions. When you boost a post, Facebook will ask you the following:

i. Your target market 

ii. Your budget

iii. How long you want to run your ad

b.   A paid ad is a stand-alone ad that allows for many more creative and formatting options than a boost. It can be optimized for app installs, website conversions, video views, shop orders and more. According to Facebook, the full ads system in Ads Manager lets you choose objectives like store traffic, conversions, and lead generation. In addition, Ads Manager let you use their advanced targeted capabilities, thus making better use of your advertising dollars. 

2. Organic Reach is the number of people who had an unpaid post from your Page enter their screen. Organic reach can be broken down into viral and nonviral:

a.   Viral: Viral reach is any time someone sees one of your posts because of the actions of someone else. If one of your post of gets more likes, comments and shares than usual, Facebook will consider it a viral piece of content and push it to more of your followers.   The more the post is seen, then the more likely it be engaged with, thus organic reach will increase.

b.   Nonviral: Nonviral Reach is when someone sees your post because they are either following you directly, browsing your Page, or seeing your posts because of their own actions. This does not include viral content.

When a page is very new with few followers, it is often worth it to initially run some paid boosts or ads in order to increase your audience.  Having higher organic reach is desirable because it's free advertising.

What is Facebook Engagement?

Facebook engagement when someone interacts with your post or Facebook Page. Most commonly the action is to like, react, comment, and/or share your post. Other actions include checking in to your location or tagging you in a post.

Facebook engagement matters it is one of the top 4 criteria in Facebook's algorithms. Make the algorithms happy and then they make your posts organically be seen more. Engagement also indicates that your audience is interested enough in your content to interact and as such you know if your marketing is on track.

A note about Facebook Algorithms

Facebook’s algorithms are ever-changing. While not part of this assignment I found it important to know what Facebook prioritizes in its algorithms. The following is copied from the internet and not original content. I am placing it here for my own reference and future exploration in creating content.

• Relationship: Is the post from a person, business, news source or public figure that the user often engages with? (i.e., messages, tags, engages with, follows, etc.)
• Content type: What type of media is in the post, and which type of media does the user interact with most? (i.e., video, photo, link, etc.)
• Popularity: How are people who have already seen the post reacting to it? (Especially your friends). Are they sharing it, commenting on it, ignoring it, smashing that angry face?
• Recency: How new is the post? Newer posts are placed higher.

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NOTE: I liked and commented on every page in our class.