Forming a Social Media Success Plan – Step 7

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There are 7 steps to building a successful social media platform. During the next few weeks, we will be going over these steps one at a time.

The steps are:

  1. Create a Vision
  2. Set Strategic Goals
  3. Find Your Social Media Voice (Persona)
  4. Build Your Social Media Platform
  5. Create a Publishing Plan
  6. Build Your Tribe (Community)
  7. Evaluate Your Results
  8. (Yes, I said there are 7 steps, but I’m going to be doing 8 posts and #8 will be a summary of tools of the trade – stay tuned to find out about useful things like Buffer, Hootsuite, and others).

This week we’ll talk about evaluating your results. We’ll have a short tour of Facebook Insights. As I promised last week, we’ll be going over simple ways to look at results for the average user. If you want to go deeper I’d be glad to work with you one-on-one, but the purpose of this blog is to help the average user with social media, productivity, and administrative tasks.

CURRENTLY (until Facebook chooses to change the format) there are two ways to reach your Insights page. If you’re on the page that says “Admin Panel,” just to the right of that are some menus. Click on “See Insights.” If you’re on your News Feed page, in the menus on the right are some options and you can click on “Insights.”

When you get to the Insights page, at the very top are boxes that say “Ads Manager” “Export Data” and a box with three dots (more). Click on the box with the dots, and then say “take tour” (or “take tour again if you’ve already taken the tour).

Along the top of the Insights page you have different tabs for “Overview,” “Likes,” “Reach,” “Visits,” “Posts,” and “People.” When you take the tour, it will give you an explanation of each tab.

Here are a few things I found interesting when reviewing my Insights. Two people from Bacoor, Cavite, Philippines like my page.  Who knew?  Of everything I’ve ever posted on my Facebook page, the item that received the furthest reach and engagement was a quote by Dr. Seuss.

For simplicity sake, the most important of these pages is the “Posts” page. From this you can see which days you have the most visits, which times you have the most visits (nobody is looking at my Facebook page at 4am), and which posts have the furthest reach and the most engagement. Understanding which of your past posts have the most reach will help you in determining what to post in the future. If all else fails, quote Dr. Seuss.

If you’re inclined, there are ways to examine the Insights more thoroughly. You can download data ranges into an Excel spreadsheet, which can get really fun if you’re a statistics nerd. If you’re interested, the articles below go much deeper into looking at the performance metrics.

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