How to Gauge the Success of your Facebook Page

Guest Blogger: Rachelle Morris, DEMA Membership Marketing & Communications Coordinator

 Last week, I shared some of my favorite strategies for creating a successful Facebook business page and I am sure you probably have plenty of good ideas as well. Once you have your ideas and plan in place, how do you go about tracking the success of your social media efforts? Again, there is no universal answer, but I can certainly share with you what DEMA has decided to do to track and gauge the success of our efforts.

DEMA has decided to focus on the engagement rate of our Facebook Fans. That is, calculating the Engaged Fans of DEMA’s Facebook page will tell us how many fans are engaged with the page content and essentially how well we are doing with providing our Facebook fans with content that is relevant and valuable.

We track this number on a weekly basis by taking the number of weekly engaged users (you can find this information under your FB business page insights “Talking About This” tab), less any new “Likes,” and then dividing it by the number of total fans as of that week. Ta-da! Weekly engagement rate!

What is a good engagement rate you ask? Prepare to be surprised. Well, at least I certainly was…

According to a study done in 2011 by Ehrenberg-BassInstitute, only 1.3% of Facebook users engage with brand pages. Only 1.3%!?! Wait…there is more… If page “Likes” are removed as a contributing factor of engagement, the actual average of engaged CURRENT fans is only 0.45%. Also noted is that even a sample of “Passion Brands” which were expected to see a higher level of engagement only saw an average of 0.64% of their page fans engaging with content.  I don’t know about you, but I was both shocked by this number (I was expecting something a little bit higher) but also relieved as it meant that DEMA is doing pretty well! One interesting tidbit to note is that engagement rates tend to drop as fan size increases (probably because of an increased number of lurkers rather than truly engaged fans). And according to another resource, Social Examiner, healthy pages have an average of 1-5%.

“Rachelle, why can’t you give me a straight answer?” It’s frustrating, I know. I was searching for a concrete answer like, “Your engagement rate should always be X%.” However, like most things related to social media and marketing for that matter, there doesn’t seem to be a finite answer. I would suggest that anyone trying to set an engagement rate goal consider these factors:

•  Do you have 20 followers or thousands? If you are on the higher end, you may find that your pages have quite a number of lurkers (it’s ok!) which may bring your engagement rate down a tad.
• Keep in mind the availability of the staff. If you don’t have the manpower to dedicate countless hours, just do the best you can do without sacrificing other areas of your business.
• Calculate your current engagement rate. Is it on the lower end of the scale which leaves room for improvement? Maybe some of my suggestions from my previous post can help get your rate where you would like it to be.

·         Ultimately, what are the goals of your Facebook page? To entertain? To makes sales? To share information? You might have a great engagement rate, but if your underlining goals aren’t being met, perhaps incorporating a different strategy will help you reach your goals.

While we really focus on our weekly engagement rate, DEMA also tracks things like our audience demographics, page visits, number of likes, reach, tab views, referrers and so on. There is a wealth of information available to you under your Facebook page’s insights. If you haven’t already, take a peak and see what you can learn about your followers. 

• What do you track?
• Have your insights revealed any surprising information about your followers?
• Does your engagement rate blow the 0.45%-5% scale out of the water? If so, please tell us what you are doing!

Have a great week!

Rachelle