How to measure brand awareness on Facebook

“How do I measure social media?” is one of the most frequent questions I get asked whenever I give social media seminars.

However, it is difficult to give someone a one-size-fits-all answer as it largely depends on what you want to measure, and what you want to measure largely depends on your wider objectives in the first place.

With this in mind, I thought I’d put together a series of articles where each week I take a particular objective and offer some guidance on how to measure it.

I’m going to kick off with brand awareness – this week focusing solely on Facebook so as not to make the articles too long.

Facebook Insights

One of the best things about Facebook is the analytics tool, Facebook Insights, which you automatically get access to when you create a page.

Within it, you can track the number of likes, engaged users, people talking about your content, reach, viral reach and so on, all beautifully graphed for you.

Reach

Reach (represented by the blue line on the graph below) is the number of unique people who see your content on Facebook and is one of the most important metrics to track.

It is a key revenue driver for online brand marketers, in fact a study by Datalogix found that campaigns that maximised reach had a 70% higher return on investment. 

People talking about this

Represented by the green line in the graph above, this is the number of people who have taken action on your post/page. These actions include: liking, sharing, commenting on, tagging, checking-in and so on.

In doing so, they have created a story which will appear in the news streams of their friends. 

Engaged users

This is the number of people who have clicked anywhere on your post eg. clicked through to read an article. By sorting this column high to low, you can see which posts are getting the most interest and then steer your content more along those lines to help you increase awareness of your brand going forward.

Likes

The number of likes you have is generally a great indicator of how well your content is resonating with your audience; these people have a much stronger awareness of your brand and are buying-into what you are saying.

Insights also tells you the sources of those likes ie. on page, photo, mobile etc.

Viral reach

Your viral reach is the number of people who saw your content as a result of action taken by their friends. For example, they might like, comment on or share a post on your page which then feeds through to the news streams on their friends pages.

The figure (%) is the number of people who have taken one of those actions as a percentage of the total number of people who saw the post. 

Next week: How to measure brand awareness on Twitter.