How Does Your Facebook Page Measure Up?

Most of us evaluate our success on a ministry Facebook Page based on the number of Likes we have. Some of us include in that evaluation the number of people we Reach with our posts and the Engagement they generate with our followers.  We can see how we are doing in these areas by checking our Facebook Overview under Insights (access the Insights link from top menu bar on your Facebook page).

Here is the top graph on the Facebook Page Insights Overview for a Page managed by a community of women religious (click on the image to see it full size):

This graph tells us that in the past week the Page continued to get new Likes, reached more people than the week before and had healthy engagement.  These are positive statistics.

Most Recent Posts

Below that graph Facebook provides another graph relating the reach and engagement for the 5 most recent posts (click on the image to see it full size):

I blocked out the image and the text from this graph.  In real-time, these are live links to more data about the specific post.  If the post is a video you uploaded directly to your Page (as opposed to a link), you will also get details on how much time people spent watching the video. (Sorry, not everyone views our videos to the end.) The May 11th post on this Page had only been up 30 minutes when I captured this information, so that is why no activity shows.  You can tell from this graph that the organization used only photos in this grouping (no links or videos).  The most engaging photo (which was a picture quote) was the one posted on May 6.  It reached the most people and had the most engagement.

The Boost Post which appears in the last column is Facebook giving you the option to pay to reach more people. Sometimes you may want to do this.

Targeting refers to an audience option you select in Settings. Most of us don’t do anything with this.  The default is the Public. But if you want to target a specific audience for some of your posts, you can activate that option in your Settings and then each time you create a post, you can target it using a variety of demographics.

These two graphs help us to know how we are doing (growing or declining) and which of our Posts reach the most people and get the most interaction.  If we want to be successful on Facebook, we need posts to reach as many people as possible and generate the most activity i.e. clicks, likes, shares, comments.

Pages to Watch

While the above information is important, it gives us no idea how we are doing in comparison to our peers. That is where the third section on the Overview Tab helps us.  The title is Pages to Watch.  Here you add the Pages of your peers.  In this area Facebook shows you in real-time how everyone on your list is doing. The graph tells you how many Likes the Page has, its Reach and Engagement for the past week.  The numbers will fluctuate, but if you notice some of the Pages doing better than yours on a consistent basis, check out what they are doing that is different from what you are doing and consider adding that to your posting repertoire.  If you click on the live link which is in the Page column (here blocked out in blue) you will see the details for the Top Posts from each Page in the last week. Be sure to scroll down to see all of the posts offered.

Here is the graph for Pages to Watch for the religious community we are looking at.  This community is number 4 on the list (which means it has the 4th largest number of Likes of this list). Click on the image to see it full size.

Take a look at the Insights Overview graphs for your Facebook Page.  If you have not used this section before, add the Pages of your peers and see how they compare with yours.  If you learned something helpful about your Page from this exercise, please share it with us in the comments below.  Thank you.