Evaluating facebook
500 Million people are romping about on facebook. About 600 of those like the betterplace lab. What good is it, actually, if only 0,00012 percent of facebook users can see our status updates?
This is what we hope it provides:
- raised awareness about the work of the betterplace lab
- raised awareness for the potential of digital media in the social sector, and
- the opportunity for interested users to acquire useful information and networking possibilities through our facebook fanpage.
Basically, we want to raise awareness, and that's what the facebook fanpage is for. But what do our fans get out of "liking" the betterplace lab on facebook? That's more difficult to say, and when we once posted the question on our fanpage wall, we received this comment: "To be honest, these kinds of posts are annoying. Just look at the feedback on your posts and see what engages people and what doesn't."
This is where the facebook statistics tools come in handy. As we wrote about in our first facebook blogpost, we are going to show the final results of our facebook strategy month. Which strategies worked (and in this sense, we judge our success based on how many fans we have and especially how active they are)?
The facebook statistics concentrate on these two factors: users and interactions. Attention fanpage administrators: the following is a description of how the facebook statistics work, using the betterplace lab fanpage as an example.
If you (as an administrator) click on the "Statistics" link, you arrive at the following overview:
At the top of the diagram, there is a quite static blue line showing the users and the cumulative "Likes" of the last four weeks. In the same diagram, you can also see a green line that displays the number of our daily active users. What is this?
A user is considered active when he or she clicks on our posts by commenting, liking, or linking/sharing them with others. Note: an active user is a better fan!
If you click to remove the blue curve, the green line becomes more dynamic.
On 11 October, we had a remarkable amount of active users - 33 in all. This must have to do with our deliberate posting strategy that included a mixture of six posts that asked open questions on our topics, a post from one of our fans, as well as posts about external topics that are still engaging and of relevance.
The diagram below shows the specific degrees of interaction of our users:
Likes are the precursor to comments and both often go hand in hand. On the 11th of October, we can see clearly that we received the most likes and comments. To find out which posts received what reactions, we have to look at it by hand and analyze the corresponding posts ourselves. Only fanpages that have over 10,000 fans can receive additional statistical information that analyzes individual posts and reactions (what this looks like can be seen in this (German) blogpost). We are only 9,400 fans away from gaining this possibility...
Without wanting to bore you with details, I can tell you that it is interesting to click on "See Details." Under this view, you can get information such as: 58 percent of betterplace fans are men and half of our fans are between 25-34 years old.
If you click on "View Old Page Insights," you get an even deeper look into the world of statistics.
July 21 is an especially outstanding day for the betterplace lab fanpage, on which we won 78 fans all in one day. Since then, we have a trickle of about 3 new fans a day. Yes, there's still room for improvement, and we're working on it.
But the conclusion of our facebook-month is still positive. We used relatively little resources, posted strategically and still activated our users significantly more than previously.
The number at the top right shows the quality of our posts. Within the time period of the last seven days, this shows the percentage of our fans who interact on our fanpage when we post new updates. I don't have any other numbers to compare it to, but 3,0 seems like it can be improved on! Facebook previously had a 1 to 5 star rating system and a comparison with other fanpages that had a similar number of fans and posts.
As the administrator, you can get a feel for what engages the fans and what doesn't, even without looking at the statistics. But the numbers and charts make it very clear and also allow the possibility of tracking the history and dynamic of your site development. At the very least, it's nice to see when your numbers are all going up!
(This weekly update from facebook statistics is not the most current and is just used to show an example).
(translated by Becky Crook)
