10 Insightful Content Marketing Metrics you must be Measuring on Facebook

In today’s world of changing consumer interests and needs, marketers feel it really is a challenge to chart out a successful, engaging content strategy for Facebook and other social channels. But then, there is no fun when we know the perfect formula for engagement with our audience as the meaning of social only would be lost, Agree?

After having used many tools like Sprout social, Hoot suite, Quintly (formerly AllFacebookstats), Simplymeasured and a whole array of tools available online, i figured that there are so many more useful metrics which we can actually get through manual analysis of Facebook pages which would be time consuming I agree but I promise you it would be worth the effort.

Below are a few metrics using which you can to determine the success of your content marketing activities on Facebook by using human analysis and tools to chart out wonderful socially engaging strategies for your brands and making the social ride worthwhile for your customers.

1. Content engagement ratio

Weekly/ monthly Engagement ratio for a brand page is defined by a summation of likes , comments and shares divided by the total number of followers gained for a certain time period *100 as it is expressed as a percentage. This value gives you the engagement of the followers on the content being posted by brands.

What does this metric help you with?

You can tweak your content strategy on posts which don’t result in good audience engagement – In short you can post content that your audience actually likes to read.

2. Content themes driving engagement & Most engaged posts and most /least engaging themes

This is an interesting metric which I would reckon is the heart of your brands content strategy. When we post content we identify themes right – like let’s say sports or business updates for a certain week. You gauge if these themes have worked for you or no, so at the end of a month you understand what themes drive engagement.

What does this metric help you with?

You can arrive at a list of themes your audience likes and you can generate content based on them which helps you become more engaging and social.

3. Messaging tones - Authoritative, Neutral, Questions, Informal, and Informative

We post content on Facebook on an everyday basis – but have we tried using different tones of messaging in the content we post? We may have the most amazing piece of content but if the tone we use in the messaging isn’t right then we may not get optimal results right?

An authoritative messaging tone would be on the lines of We are the leaders get this from us (Eg),A neutral tone would be on the lines on providing a view point, Informal can be fun oriented or Witty or anything on these lines and Informative would be to say something beneficial.

What does this metric help you with?

This metric helps you to identify the type of tones in the messages you post which your audience would love and creates highest engagement.

4. Content Net value – Purpose of the content being posted(brand building, CTA driven, event related, contests, campaigns, offers, engagement driven, Drive website traffic)

This is a very important metric while you would want to measure content strategy effectiveness for your brand on Facebook. Anything you do has to have a reason right?

Similarly any content you post on Facebook should have a purpose like a few posts are for driving traffic to an interesting blog post or a new PR article you just released and another few would be either to drive your audience to a landing page for campaign / contest you are running.

What does this metric help you with?

Monitoring this metric helps you gauge if the content you are drafting and posting on Facebook is actually driving the value you need or is it conveying something else. You can use custom URL’s like bit.ly to see the clicks on a certain URL and measure using Google analytics if your purpose is being served (Referral traffic).

5.Type of content driving engagement – What works the best for my brand? Photos, Polls, Questions, Links, Videos, Status messages, Infographics, Images or graphics, Comics

Facebook is a visual medium and it is seen that brand which use images and videos for engagement with their audience have increased their engagement rate by 600%.source. That is awesome right?

Using a mix of all these would tell you most optimum type of content your audience would love to see on their brands pages.

What does this metric help you with?

Assessing and understanding the type of content your audience would want to associate and engage with is the essence of your content strategy. Your content strategy gets more focused when you know what your audience wants and how.

6. Best performing keywords on content being posted

This is a slightly tricky and very useful Facebook marketing metric that marketers need to track as it helps in optimizing the chosen words for your business on social channels.

Generating a tag cloud of keywords which you would want to focus on for a campaign or for your brand could be the differentiator for your success on social media.

What does this metric help you with?

Using this list of best performing keywords we can add these wit the posts we make on Facebook delivers highest engagement along with optimized search results.

7. Bench mark engagement against competitors and industry average

Today almost every brand is on Facebook right? It’s always wise to see what your competitors are doing and benchmark your performance against theirs.

Ideally 2 -3 leaders of your industry can be used for bench marking your Facebook marketing efforts and this could also be checked against the industry you operate on(FMCG, IT , Telecommunications etc)

What does this metric help you with?

Benchmarking always helps you strive to do better and better and become the leader in your industry. It also helps you see a lot of things which could trigger your thought process to get more creative.

8. Length of the content posted creating highest engagement v/s low engagement

Have you ever determined the length (number of characters) of your most engaging brand posts?

Ideally some best practices I read across the web suggests that post which have close to 150 characters have engagement compared to long ones. Like they say – Keep it short and precise.

What does this metric help you with?

You don’t have to write a BIG sentence for a post you want to put up on Facebook, identify the most optimum length and maintain it across posts so that your audience know that you are a brand who can tell them what they need in a little less than 160 characters.

9. Classify influencers based on category

Influencer marketing today is an industry buzzword and every brand wants to identify people who are its influencers so that they can talk good about the brand and bring in more followers and advocates. What if we can identify our influencers based on the themes of content we post? Does it sound intriguing?

Let’s now assume we post about 15 posts on healthy life and we have a set of people who constantly engage with you on these and you now post 15 posts on how you can travel or suggesting places to travel and these are a new set of people who engage with you.

Identifying these two separate sets of people to talk about your brand and running an influencer program with them would bring in new followers right?

What does this metric help you with?

This metric would help you when you are running targeted campaigns for your brand and each of them can be engaged differently.

10. Highest engagement on content – Day of week , time of day , time of the month (either first week, first 15 days, last week etc)

Facebook gives you a few of these metrics and a few of them you would understand by manually running through your Facebook insights page or using a plethora of tools.

What does this metric help you with?

This metric would help in posting content on appropriate days and time intervals and if we would want to run any campaigns using this data we could determine if the first half of the month is better or the second half.

For instance, brands run most sales during the first week of a month or mid of second week as they know people’s spending is highest during first 15 days of a month. Using these manual metrics along with the many metrics which social media tools provide us we would be able to chart out a world class social engaging strategy.

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