Facebook Quantified: Analytics Tools Worth Exploring

What is the best way to to analyze your Facebook campaign? Is it enough to observe interactions and follow conversations, or is there a way to crunch the numbers into something meaningful? What is the best way to assess your brand's impact and scope of influence? Who is your audience?

If you work with data, you know that in the Internet industries, numbers are more of an art than science. There are a number of ways to measure the abstract idea of "influence." For instance, influence may relate to dialogue and user engagement. We can also measure  influence through click-through and traffic numbers.

Ultimately, the bigger picture may be more nuanced than what you originally thought.

Social media marketers frequently wonder whether they are "doing it right." Sometimes, we create Facebook pages thinking that they will self-propagate. The stronger the brand, the more likely self-sustaining growth is. For most brands; however, growth takes a little bit of elbow grease.

Before you measure the impact of your social media campaign, it is important to establish concrete, measurable, and big-picture goals. In some ways, a Facebook page is like a newsletter, blog, or website. At the most basic level, you are working with a group of subscribers who are interested in maintaining a connection with your business. Following this idea, it is important to assess your social media campaign from a content-perspective. Why does your Facebook page exist? What benefit will it bring your subscribers? Having a big-picture is probably your most important analytics tool. Before you quantify your Facebook, be ready to explain the construct(s) worth measuring.

Once you're ready to get down & dirty with the data, these tools will quickly become your staples:

1) Facebook Insights: Using this free tool from Facebook, you can quickly assess your community's demographic composition. Keep in mind that the composition of your Facebook community will not necessarily match your website's demographic. Depending on your business, you might need to interpret your Facebook page separately from your product. Remember that your Facebook is only a subset of your overall audience, so don't forget this idea when you're exploring the Insights tool. Use this resource to assess what's important to you. For instance, you may be interested in the impressions to pageview ratio. You might also be interested in whether certain actions triggered your users to unfollow or unsubscribe to your page. Change the numbers into a format that makes sense to you -- from raw numbers to percents, for instance.

2) Socialbakers: This resource features both free and subscriber-based options. It's useful because you can see how different types of pages are performing. For instance, you might be interested in comparing your week-over-week, month-over-month or daily growth with your top competitors. Socialbakers allows you to assess your page's relative performance. When you add your page to the Socialbakers database, the company will actually calculate an index for your page and rank you against other pages. Is this ranking something that should guide your business decisions? Honestly, probably not. Remember to keep in mind that in statistics, indexes are relatively subjective since they assign different weights to different quantifiable qualities. What your business considers important might not be what Socialbakers considers important. As a free tool, the resource can help you. Regardless--when relevant-- take what you're told with a grain of salt.

What analytics tools do you find best for Facebook?

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