How to Evaluate Your Facebook Marketing Strategy

Most of you have been using a personal profile on Facebook for years at this point, and it's possible that some of you have even had your business page for years too. But let me ask you this how often do you review your page's performance? More specifically, how often do you review the content you post to your page? When it comes to knowing what content performs best and what engages your audience, a great place to start is to assess the content you're currently posting by conducting a content audit. Conducting a content audit can help you identify areas for improvement not only in your content, but in your company's overall strategy on Facebook too. Let's take a look at how to get started with your content audit. Begin by looking at all the content you've posted in the last 90 days and create a repository of all your high performing posts. You can create depository in a spreadsheet or any notes app that lists out each post, the number of likes, shares and comments, and the link to the post on Facebook. To help you get started with your content audit, we've created a simple content repository that you can find in the Resources section below. Use this repository to learn what content is likely to perform well in the future by analyzing what's performed well in the past. Ask yourself questions like Are videos performing well? If they are, what's unique about them? Are they short 30 second videos or lengthy three minute videos? When you're trying to understand if your videos are performing, it's important to have benchmarks. Establish benchmarks based on historical performance and then Compare the last 90 days of performance to those benchmarks. Take a look at the Resources section for a guide on benchmarking. If you don't have any videos, consider creating some and test to see if they suit your audience. Are you posting Facebook content with images? How are they performing? Do high performing image posts have anything in common? Maybe they have text over the image or maybe they don't. When it comes to images, a high number of likes, shares and comments are a key indicator of performance. Does your Facebook text content resonate with your audience? Align your copy and writing style with your brand and your audience. Do humorous posts resonate with your audience or do serious posts drive more engagement? While conducting a content audit is a very important step in evaluating your current Facebook strategy, there is another Conducting a competitive analysis. It's very likely that there are other companies with similar pages and content to yours. You'll want to know who your biggest competitors on Facebook are. Who are you up against? What are they posting and is there anything you can Learn from them. Not only will conducting a competitive analysis help you see what your competitors fans are like and what's working in your space, but it will also give you an indication of where and how you can differentiate your business. You can do this analysis manually by searching for competitors pages, using the search functionality and asking the same questions you asked when auditing your content and Page. Or you can use Facebook's Pages to Watch feature in Facebook Insights. This allows you to watch other Facebook Pages so you can compare their activity, engagement and audience growth to your own. Pages to Watch is a really great feature because it lets you see what content your competitors are posting, how often they're posting, when they're posting, and the engagements those posts are receiving. It's a great place to keep track of your competitors or brands you admire. To set up Pages to Watch, go to your business page and click on the tab called Insights. Then click Overview. Scroll down until you see Pages to Watch and click Add Pages. Type the name of the page you're looking for and then click Watch to add it to your list. Looking at other pages and watching to see how the engagement levels increase or decrease can be a valuable tool. Ask yourself how often are your competitors posting? What's unique about their content and what can you do to distinguish yourself from them? Comparing what's working for others can help you adjust your strategy and adapt your tactics accordingly. Don't forget to make sure you track and measure your performance. Facebook delivers some robust statistics that you can use to do a variety of things, including understanding the demographics of your audience, determining the best mix of content, and the best times for that content audience engagement, such as clicks, likes and reshares, and how many followers you've gained or lost that month. If you're advertising with Facebook, there's another set of analytics that you can tap into as well. Having all these analytics is one thing, but you should determine early on what you want to measure and which KPIs you plan to track. See the Resources section for a link to a lesson about building KPIs. There's a lot to consider when you're evaluating your Facebook strategy, and you won't be able to tackle it all at once. Mapping these components out will help you do a full evaluation of your current Facebook strategy so you can go on to create better content, get more engagement from your target audience, and create Facebook ads that'll actually convert.