5 Vital Facebook Reports Every Community Manager Should Know

A wise marketer once told me, "You can be a likeable community manager and still suck at managing a community." The best community managers are likeable, yes, but they also use data to learn about their existing and potential community as well as how best to interact with them.

Let's examine Facebook Insights reports and public data sources that will help you understand, at a granular level, how your community consumes the stories you create, your fans demographic information, and how users are engaging with your competitors. Most all of these reports and metrics can be found in the Facebook Insights UI or in downloadable page and post level Excel reports.

Negative Feedback by Total Clicks

It’s a bummer to think that any of your hard earned fans won’t always pick up what you throw down, but it happens. Some users decide to hide your story, some click the X button and some will hide all of your posts all together. Hmm, wouldn’t it be easier to simply unlike the page?

In any event this data is viewable in both the page level report and the post level report, but not in the Insights UI.

BTW: The post level report offers additional data not found in the page level report. In addition to Hide clicks and Hide all clicks, the post level report will tell you how many times users hit the X button.

People Who Like Your Page (Demographics and Location)

Have a peek in the “Likes” tab in Insights to understand where geographically your fans are and what languages they speak.

If you notice growth in a certain demographic segment or manage a multilingual and/or international community, take advantage of the option to target your page posts by geo or language. The community will thank you, most likely in their native tongue.

Daily Organic Impressions

Those “Talking About This” and “Viral Reach” metrics are helpful when trying to understand how deep into the second degree of separation (friends of fans) your content has spread, but be sure to mine the “Organic Impressions” metric in the page level report to understand how many times your posts have been shown in users’ News Feeds, tickers or on a Page. These metrics lend an understanding of content’s propagation at its most basic and fundamental level (Page Level Report – ‘Key Metrics’ tab - Column AA).

Plot the data on a graph to pinpoint spikes in impressions.

Have a look at the post level data to understand what post types were responsible for those spikes. In the example below, note the engagement centered around three photos posted on April 10 and 11.

BTW: Make sure to pull data on a regular basis or track in a third party tool. Facebook only gives the last 89 days.

Lifetime Post Stories by Action (Post Level Report)

This report gives a good look at how you’re doing when it comes to the “Weight” variable of the EdgeRank algorithm. Remember Weight assigns value to the actions users take when engaging with the content. Generally speaking, the longer the action takes to complete the more “Weight” it has.

Visual representations of data make for easy consumption.

Competitive Intelligence

Click the Likes tab button on your competitor’s page to view the number of new likes and people who have created a story about the page in the past 30 days. Facebook also ponies up their most popular week, city, and age group.

Hover over the line graph to view data specific to any certain day in the date range.

There is certainly no shortage of data when it comes to Facebook Insights. The page level Excel report alone has 65 freakin’ tabs! Don’t be shy community managers! Pull those reports and dig right in.

Vital data is right there below the surface, but it's up to you to identify the metrics and reports that speak best to your channel KPIs.

Register for SES San Francisco
September 10-13, 2013: SES San Francisco could be the most valuable online marketing conference you attend this year! Save up to $700 with the pre-agenda rate, but hurry - this offer is only available for a limited time.
Complete your registration today!