Step 1: Benchmark
Facebook marketing platform Agorapulse has a fantastically useful tool called the Barometer. The most interesting thing here is to understand the differences between the size of Facebook pages.If you’re a page under 1,000 fans, you are going to see a much higher percentage of people seeing your posts – somewhere in the range of 22%-. However, for pages with over 100k fans, the percentage will be much smaller: around 6%. Larger pages still reach more people, but percentage-wise do not fare as well.
It’s also important to note the range between similarly-sized pages. In the shot below, the fans reached ranges from .6% to 19.9% – a significant difference that is directly correlated to providing engaging, captivating content that users like, share and comment on.
Step 2: Analyze the different metrics:
The first step is to understand properly the terminology:
– Fans reached: Average percentage of fans reached by each post.
– Engagement: Average percentage of users that have liked, clicked, shared or clicked on a post.
– People Talking About: Average percentage of users that are talking about the page (ie. liked, clicked, shared a post with friends).
– Negative feedback: Average percentage of users that have marked a post as spam or actively hidden it from their feed.
– Viral reach: Average percentage of friends of users reached through a post action (liking, sharing, commenting).
– Organic reach: Average percentage of fans and non-fans reached by each post.
– CTR: Average percentage of users that consumed a post by watching a video, enlarging a photo or clicking on the link.
Here’s an analysis of a page with over 100,000 fans, followed by a page with under 10,000 fans, proposed by Nick Vivion. By focusing on the “Per Post” metric, the analysis will be more effective as it looks at the overall performance of the page – rather than something skewed towards a one-off competition or other temporary promotion.
By going through these items and considering what they mean through the lens of your social strategy, you can start to get a solid understanding of where the page stands and where there’s room for improvement. The differences are very interesting, both between the two pages and when compared to the average of tracked pages in orange. Both pages are doing a great job at providing engaging content, which is getting above-average click-throughs. However, both pages are seeing a lower viral reach than would be expected for such engaging content and this needs to be looked into.
The Barometer also provides an interactive graph, showing performance over time. This graphical information can be combined with an overview of that month’s post to determine what posts offered the best combination of organic and viral reach, in addition to solid engagement.
Step 3: Act
After looking through the statistics, and seeing how you match up with the Barometer’s average, it’s time to act. Here are some concrete ways to move forward proposed by Nick Vivion:
1) Set up the Barometer and make it a part of your weekly performance analysis.
2) Link particular posts to uplift in results via a spreadsheet and replicate.
3) Using this knowledge, set some targets for organic/viral reach, engagement, or any other under-performing area.
4) Start benchmarking your own progress, and revisit goals every week.
5) Finally, determine which metrics are the most important to your brand, ergo, which ones provide the most ROI, either in terms of sales, chatter and/or general reach. Then focus on these and then experiment to see how you can improve them. At this point, consider ads and using them to start bending the results in your favour.
On the other hand, Lee McCabe provides several general advises to improve the performance of a travel brand in Facebook:
1)
Keep It Basic: He defends to do
The things travel brand have done well for the last hundred years,mentioning branding, promotions, sales conversions, and rewards.
Public Relations Has Its Limits:
Social media efforts should get integrated across departments and shouldn’t be the exclusive reserve of the public relations department.
Last but not least, it is always important to analyse what are doing the best players. Ben Harper, manager at Zazzle Media in a clarifying analysis focused on the UK Travel market, concluded that comparing audience size and engagement shows that the current leader is Thomas Cook – whilst it is behind Thomson in terms of audience numbers, engagement is strong enough that each post is likely to be gaining considerable reach.
In terms of the rest, Harper identifies clear opportunities for the likes of Jet2 and Kuoni, both have decent engagement but a small audience. STA Travel on the other hand has a relatively large audience, yet has the lowest engagement of the brands studied – this may be down to an acquisition campaign which has brought in the wrong audience as the content seems quite similar to the big players.
Ben Harper has also categorized the posts into similar content strands to analyse the engagement per post:
This shows that on page competitions have performed particularly well in terms of engagement, closely followed by “audience interaction posts” (eg. “like if…”, “thumbs up if…”, “Snow or sun?”) and “couples recommendations posts” over the last two weeks.
When we look at the volume of posts mapped against the engagement per post the data indicates that a low volume of competition posts worked best, with a higher volume of “audience interaction” posts scheduled to keep the engagement ticking over.
This data would suggest though that Thomas Cook still has room to improve, with things it could try including increasing the number of “couples recommendation” posts as only one was posted despite having the third highest engagement level of the content strands used.
