INTRODUCTION

Facebook fan pages are an essential part of one’s marketing mix.  But understanding your fan base can be a difficult and time consuming task (collecting and processing data in a way that makes sense in context to your objectives).  Unilyzer’s Facebook Metrics Dashboard is a tool available for social media strategists to automatically monitor the ongoing health and opportunity related to their fan pages.

Unilyzer’s Facebook Metrics Dashboard tracks and trends page reach and response metrics including:

1. People Talking About This
2. Reach
3. Depth
4. Engagement
5. Sentiment

The following information is provided:

• Demographics: gender profiles including trends and averages across time frames.
• Geographical: top 5 Countries and top cities with absolute values and trends over time frames.
• Fan Add Source: where fans originated, e.g. Fan Box, Stream View, Request, etc.
• Unilyzer Marketing Metrics: Reach, People Talking About This, Virality, Sentiment, Engagement, Fan Growth Rate and more..
• Unilyzer’s Fanpage Score: evaluates changes in fans, active fans, engagement, sentiment, and reach to measure growth and interactivity.

UNILYZER FACEBOOK DASHBOARD METRICS

Unilyzer’s Facebook Fanpage Dashboard currently has a series of some 30+ metrics available on its dashboard.  An abridged list of Unilyzer’s Facebook Metrics Dashboard is listed below:

Table 1.  Unilyzer Facebook Fanpage Dashboard Metrics

Other information available on the Unilyzer’s Facebook Metrics Dashboard include the following:

1. Line Chart:  Fans, Users, Unique Pageviews & Pageviews
2. Number of fans added vs. number of fans lost
3. Female Demographic Profile
4. Male Demographic Profile
5. Top Referral Source: external web properties sending traffic to your fanpage
6. Top Geographic Regions: top 5 countries your fans are located in
7. Top Cities: ranking of cities with most active fans
8. Fans Added Source:  where fans Liked your page from e.g. Fan Page, Fan Box, Streamview, etc.

To read more about the ‘People Talking About This’ metric, see our previously posted article named “People Talking About This” | Unilyzer

And, if you want to in-depth information about Facebook Page Insights metrics, check out the Product Guide for Facebook Page Owners

Get the manual here:

http://ads.ak.facebook.com/ads/creative/insights/page-insights-guide.pdf

“People Talking About This” is a metric introduced by Facebook Insights.  This metric attempts to capture how many people are talking about your business on Facebook.

The benefit of “People Talking About This” is that it helps marketers optimize how they publish content so that people will tell their friends about your brand.

When people talk about your content, they spread your brand name virally.

The concept of “People Talking About This”

Certain interactions on Facebook automatically create entries on your friends’ news feeds. Facebook Insights refers to these entries as stories. When people create stories about your business, Facebook Insights considers these people to be ‘talking’ about your business.  The total number of people who were talking (created stories) about your business within the last 7 days is equal to the value of “People Talking About This.”

What are the Benefits of “People Talking About This”?

According to Facebook Insight’s, the new metric “People Talking About This” helps you maximize the number of people that see content associated with your Page. The number of people that see content associated with your page is called reach.

“People Talking About This” helps you extend your reach in two ways:

First, “People Talking About This” shows you exactly which pieces of content are getting the most people to talk about your Page. This information gives you clues about how to better construct and select content that will get your fans more engaged and ‘talking’ about your content. For example, you might find that by asking a question, you will consistently get more “People Talking About This” than if you posted a video. Knowing this could influence you to ask more questions and post less videos in order to get more people to talk about your content.

Secondly, “People Talking About This” shows you what’s hot and when, meaning that you can see what content is rising into popularity and what content is fading away in terms of the number of “people talking about it.” Watching these trends can help with timing of new content in order to maintain the highest levels of “People Talking About This.”

Ultimately, “People Talking About This” can help you maximize your reach (the number of people who see your content). Your maximum potential reach is the total number of friends that all your fans have. Facebook Insights calculates your potential reach and calls it friends of fans.   If all your Fans were talking about your business, then all your friends of fans could potentially see content associated with your Page.

Reach extends further and further as more people create stories about your content. To measure the extent that you are extending your reach virally via “People Talking About This”, Facebook Insights makes a calculation called virality.

Virality is the number of unique people who have created a story from your Page Post as a percentage of the number of unique people who’ve seen it. For example, if 100 unique people saw your post and 2 of those people created a story about it. In that scenario, the virality would be 2% which is calculated as follows:  “People Talking About This” / Reach = Virality.

The overall benefit of the “People Talking About This” metric is that it can help you understand what people care about and what they will share with their friends.

Which Interactions Are Included in the “People Talking About This” Metric?

Facebook Insights groups certain interactions into the “People Talking About This” metric.

Here are important facts about “People Talking About This” and a list of the interactions that are included in the metric:

• “People Talking About This” is updated daily
• “People Talking About This” is based on the latest 7 days of activity (rolling 7-day timeframe)
• “People Talking About This” includes the following interactions:

• Liking A Page
• Posting to a Page’s Wall
• Liking, Commenting On, or Sharing content on a page (photos, videos, albums, etc.)
• Answering a Question posted
• RSVP-ing to an Event
• Mentioning a Page in a post
• Photo-tagging a page
• Liking or sharing a check-in deal
• Checking in at a Place
• Recommends your Place

CONCLUSION

“People Talking About This” is a metric introduced by Facebook Insights. It attempts to capture how many people are talking about your business on Facebook.

The benefit of “People Talking About This” is that it helps marketers optimize how they publish content so that people will tell their friends about your brand.

When people talk about your content, they spread your brand name virally.

For more information about Facebook Page Insights, “People Talking About This”, “Reach” and “Virality” refer to Facebook Page Insight’s Product Guide for Facebook Page Owners.

RELEVANT GLOSSARY OF TERMS

Engaged Users: the number of unique people who have clicked anywhere on your post. Types of engagement include all different ways people can consume your post: clicking on a link, viewing a picture, watching a video and other clicks.

Friends of Fans: the number of unique people who are friends with your fans, including your current fans.

People Talking About This: the number of unique people who have created a story about your Page in the last 7 days.

Stories generated: the number of stories that were created from your posts. Stories include Liking, commenting on or sharing your post, answering a question or RSVP-ing to an event.

Total Likes: the number of unique people who Like your Page.

Total Reach: the number of unique people who have seen any content associated with your Page (including any Ads or Sponsored Stories pointing to your Page) in the last seven days.

Virality: the number of unique people who have created a story from your Page Post as a percentage of the number of unique people who’ve seen it.

Source: Facebook Page Insights, Product Guide for Facebook Page Owners

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Emilio Basaldua is business intelligence and marketing analytics professional located in the Dallas, Texas area.  His experience includes applied business intelligence used to drive financial performance, building & leading business intelligence competency centers (BICCs) and performing all aspects of end-to-end dashboard development. Emilio is the founder and developer of  Unilyzer® .

Related Unilyzer Articles:

• Facebook Analytics Dashboard

• Facebook Dashboard Metrics

• Facebook Dashboard Score

• Fan Page Metrics Report

• Fan Page Metrics by Month

What does Social Media Analytics mean?

The process of collecting data and transforming into meaningful information that can evaluate the success of marketing tactics is referred to as Social Media Analytics.

Social media analytics enables data-driven, fact-based, decision support for social media marketers who could ordinarily only rely on past experience or rules of thumb.  Social media analytics includes the use of evaluating the direction and speed of trend lines, comparing results to goals and benchmarks, and interpreting meaningful metrics in context to marketing goals.  It’s important to emphasize that metrics need to be evaluated in context to goals.

What are Social Media Marketing Goals?

Common social marketing goals include the following:

1. Increase Brand Awareness – results in inbound leads, brand equity, and future customers.
2. Gain Quality Traffic  - results in sales transactions, loyal customers, and new leads.
3. Increase Effective Reach – results in a broader addressable audience.

Increase Brand Awareness

Also known as “creating buzz” or “getting the word out.”  Creating awareness makes your brand known to people who may ultimately become a customer. A main objective of using social media networks is increase brand awareness.  Once people know about your brand, they can contact you (inbound lead) or visit any of your web properties that include: fan page, blog, website, twitter page, youtube channel and other web properties that you might have setup.  Awareness can also build brand equity which basically means that as people recognize a brand more and more, and if they think highly of the brand, the brand builds favor in someone’s mind. Then when the time comes, a person making a purchase decision will have your brand in mind.  Increasing brand awareness means keeping your brand ‘top of mind.’

Gain Quality Traffic

Driving traffic to your web properties is a top-line goal because traffic drives conversions.  That’s right, without traffic, there are no online conversions.  Conversions are important in order to make social media marketing pay for itself, so the traffic that you generate will, hopefully, be traffic that is interested in your brand’s products and services. Simple metrics like bounce rate, time on site, page views per visit and give high-level clues about the quality of traffic generated; for example, if you bounce rate is 95% it means people see your message, go to the site, and immediately see it is not what they expected to see or they see something they don’t like.  You can drive poor quality traffic to your site all day long, but with a bounce rate of 95%, there will likely not be any conversions.  You can use social media analytics to evaluate the performance of your messages and your landing pages, and to see if you are reaching the right target audience.

Sources of traffic can be from the “Big 3” (Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter), but LinkedIn and social bookmarking sites like Delicious, Digg, and StumbleUpon have become important sources of website traffic.   As you use these social networks to build your audience, your effective reach will grow.

Increasing Effective Reach

Social media analytics can help you grow your effective reach.  Effective reach is, in simple terms, how many people have received your branding message enough times to stick with them. For example, if they hear the message once and never again, that may not ‘stick’, on the contrary, if they see your branding message daily or weekly for an extended period of time, then this will likely be effective in terms of keeping your brand ‘top of mind.’

So to recap, effective reach has two components, 1) the number of times a message is seen (x impressions), and 2) the number of unique people that see the message x times.  Now, x (the number of times a message is required to be seen before it’s deemed effective, is determined by the marketing strategist in your organization and it varies from company to company.

As it relates to social media marketing, and social media analytics, effective reach is increased by growing the size of your network because the size of your network determines your potential net reach on social media. So, you guessed it, growing your net reach on social media depends on growing the quantity and quality of your Facebook Fans, Twitter Followers, Youtube Subscribers, Website visitors, Social Bookmarking Site users and the like. As this network grows, so do the probabilities of increasing your effective reach.

What are the most useful Social Media Metrics?

Here is a list of the most widely used, and commonly used metrics in context to websites, blogs, social media networks and social bookmarking usage.  With the three aforementioned goals in mind:

1. Pageviews – the number of times a web page is served which provides a top-level measure of the websites popularity.
2. Pages-per-Visit - the average number of web site pages served to unique visitors of a web site.  This measure will can vary from 1 – 20+ pages per visit depending on the purpose of the website.  Thus, to determine whether performance is poor, good or great, several factors need to be considered including; 1) type of site and the benchmark for such sites, 2)desired sequence of page visits needed to meet a goal.
3. Visitors – the number of unique web site viewers.
4. Visits – the number of website visits (as opposed to visitors). This metric helps determine the level of repeat viewing by visitors and can thus help determine customer loyalty.  For example, 1 visitor (unique person) can visit a website 20 times during a given period, thus the visitors = 1 while visits = 20.
5. Twitter Clicks – the number of people that click on a link distributed via twitter.
6. Twitter Followers – the number of twitter profiles that have agreed to communicate with your twitter account.  A measure of how many people would receive a message sent via twitter, but not necessarily the number of people that will see the message.
7. Twitter Mentions - the number of times twitter users talk about your brand using the @ tag.  A measure of how many people are talking about your brand.
8. Twitter Retweets – the number of times a twitter user rebroadcasts your twitter message to their own twitter followers.  Retweets are a prized event because they extend can extend a message’s reach dramatically.  For example, if you send a tweet to your hypothetical 250 followers, and one of those followers retweets that message to their 4.2 million followers then you have extended your reach dramatically.  This implies that reach is not purely based on 1st degree followers, but on followers of followers (2nd, 3rd, and 4th degree followers).
9. Facebook Comments – the number of times people comment about your brand on Facebook.  This metric helps determine the whether people are talking about your brand.
10. Facebook Engaged Users –  the number of unique people who have clicked anywhere on your post. Engagement includes: video plays, photo views, link clicks, other clicks and “stories generated” (see stories generated definition below).
11. Facebook Fans – the number of people who have “liked” a fan page and thus have opted-in to receiving a brand’s advertising messages.  It’s easy to see how the number of fans is a component of overall reach.  Remember that fans have friends, and friends can see when a another friend ‘fans’ a brand, thus creating further visibility for the brand that was “liked” – all this means that each fan brings a 2nd, 3rd and 4th order of potential reach with them.
12. Facebook Friends of Fans –  the number of unique people who are friends with your fans, including your current fans.
13. Facebook Likes – the number of people that “like” a comment, video, or other piece of content on a fan page.
14. Facebook “Peope Talking About This” – a metric provided by Facebook Insight’s and is the number of unique people who have “created a story” about your fan page in the time period.
15. Facebook Total Reach – the number of unique people who have seen any content associated with your fan page (including any Ads or “Sponsored Stories” pointing to your fan page) in the time period.
16. Facebook Stories Generated – stories include: liking, commenting on or sharing a post, answering a question or RSVP’ing to an event.
17. Facebook Virality – the number of unique people who have created a story from your fan page post as a percentage of the number of unique people who’ve seen it.
18. Facebook Wall Posts – this metric counts the number of posts placed on a fan page wall and thus measures the frequency of content activity on a fan page wall.
19. Social Media Amplification Rate – a metric that considers how often people re-share messages.  When people retweet your Twitter messages and share your content on Facebook, this activity increases the amplification rate.  Amplification rate quantifies how often a message will reach beyond 1st order reach.
20. Social Media Conversation Rate – the rate at which people reply to your posts on Social Media Channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Youtube.  This metric helps measure how engaging are an authors comments.

Conclusion

Social media analytics helps marketers achieve their goals by giving them perspective on the performance of their marketing tactics in quantitative terms.  Trends and metrics paint a clear picture of effectiveness relative to common social media marketing goals.

About the Author:

Emilio Basaldua is business intelligence and marketing analytics professional located in the Dallas, Texas area.  His experience includes applied business intelligence used to drive financial performance, building & leading business intelligence competency centers (BICCs) and performing all aspects of end-to-end dashboard development. Emilio is the founder and developer of  Unilyzer® .

EXPLANATION

Well, it turns out that Google Analytics has changed how it records and reports the keywords that generate traffic to your website. The reason? Well, for privacy reasons (Google’s privacy reasons), when a user initiates a keyword search while logged into their Google Account, the keywords they use to find your website will not be shown in Google Analytics. Instead, those keywords will be shown under the word “(Not Provided).”  To say that another way, the keyword (Not Provided) represents any, and all, keywords used by people who found your website through a Google search query while logged into their Google Account.  This means that some of the keywords used to find your site will be invisible to you in Google Analytics, Omniture, and other analytics systems. But, there are two things you can do to get a more complete picture of all the keywords used to find your site:

1. Use Google Webmaster Tools.   Within Google’s suite of tools, this tool allows you to find the top 1,000 search queries used to drive traffic to your website (30 days view).
2. Do the math.  It’s highly probable, and reasonable to believe, that the keywords which are displayed are the same set of keywords that are withheld and embedded in the “Not Provided” group. Remember, the key difference between a keyword that is hidden under the moniker of “(Not Provided)”,  and keywords not hidden, is whether the searching party was logged-in to Google at the time of the search.  It is reasonable to believe that within the Universe of people querying Google that those people who are logged-in are using the same keywords as those people who are not logged-in to Google. So, under that assumption, we can use the proportion of keywords shown (not hidden), and apply those proportions to the quantity of hidden “(Not Provided)” keywords to determine the overall quantity of each keyword.  To illustrate my point, here is a simple example:  if I had keywords as follows: 6 Social Media Dashboard, 4 Unilyzer and 10 (Not Provided) – then,  a total of 20 keywords (6 +4 +10) drove traffic to my site which is Unilyzer.com.  Now, I see that 60% of the keywords provided were “Social Media Dashboard” and 40% were “Unilyzer” – so, I can reasonably assume that 60% of the keywords in the “(Not Provided)” bucket, were probably the keyword “Social Media Dashboard.” Following this logic, the 20 keywords are probably as follows: 12 Social Media Dashboard + 8 Unilyzer.  This kind of deduction is commonly used in analytics to make estimates.  Can you be sure the conclusion is 100% correct?  No, but it will be close. To support this logic further, it is reasonable to believe that within the Universe of people querying Google that those people who are logged-in are using the same keywords as those people who are not logged-in to Google.

With all this said, the bottom line is that this change puts a little fog on the window of visibility into which keyword searches are driving traffic to your website.

I understand the reason and respect Google’s efforts to reinforce user privacy on the web, however next time they consider a change, I really hope they will consider how this looks on my Unilyzer Social Media Dashboard……

Final note, here is an excerpt from Google’s official blog, in their own words, and as it relates to the new keyword (Not Provided):

“As search becomes an increasingly customized experience, we recognize the growing importance of protecting the personalized search results we deliver. As a result, we’re enhancing our default search experience for signed-in users. Over the next few weeks, many of you will find yourselves redirected to https://www.google.com (note the extra “s”) when you’re signed in to your Google Account. This change encrypts your search queries and Google’s results page. This is especially important when you’re using an unsecured Internet connection, such as a WiFi hotspot in an Internet cafe. You can also navigate tohttps://www.google.com directly if you’re signed out or if you don’t have a Google Account.”

Source: The Official Google Blog

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Emilio Basaldua is business intelligence and marketing analytics professional located in the Dallas, Texas area.  His experience includes applied business intelligence used to drive financial performance, building & leading business intelligence competency centers (BICCs) and performing all aspects of end-to-end dashboard development. Emilio is the founder and developer of  Unilyzer® .

Terms covered in this glossary include categories such as:  Business Intelligence, Data Integration, Dashboard Visualization, Social Media Metrics, Social Media Dashboards, Web Metrics, Dashboard Software, Dashboard Software Vendors, Building Dashboards and more……

Business Intelligence – an umbrella business term that refers to the devices and concepts used to process data into intelligence in a business context.  Devices include software, hardware, and people while concepts include data visualization, scorecards, key performance indicators and the like which help business management teams measure, monitor, and manage business operations towards successful achievement of business objectives.

Dashboard – a visual display of key information usually used in a business operational setting.  Article: What Is A Dashboard?

Dashboard Software – software used to display data in visual format. Dashboard software typically includes the ability to do any of the following:  connect to data sources, transform data into KPI’s, make graphical objects (pie charts, meters, maps, bar graphs, etc.), combine and organize graphical objects to form a dashboard, and share the dashboard.

Dashboard Methodology – an approach to building dashboards that typically includes the following components:

• Analyze the purpose and goals of the dashboard(s)
• Explore existing information system to determine technical requirements

Create metric and key performance indicators, design reports and dashboards

• Implement Dashboards and Train Users on how to navigate the platform

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Emilio Basaldua is business intelligence and marketing analytics professional located in the Dallas, Texas area.  His experience includes applied business intelligence used to drive financial performance, building & leading business intelligence competency centers (BICCs) and performing all aspects of end-to-end dashboard development. Emilio is the founder and developer of  Unilyzer® .

Related Unilyzer Articles:

• Facebook Analytics Dashboard
• Facebook Dashboard Metrics
• Facebook Dashboard Score
• Fan Page Metrics Report
• Fan Page Metrics by Month

It is important for Brand Managers to quickly see which social networks are driving traffic to their site(s) and to see the trends in those traffic sources.  This social report entitled “Social Media Visits” is one of many reports provided by Unilyzer.  The social report breaks out the number of visits from social networks and bookmarking sites in the following time frames: yesterday, day before yesterday, last 7 days (week) and the last 30-days.

This social report tracks visits from the following networks: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube, Reddit, Newsvine, Kaboodle, Digg, Propeller, Squidoo,
Technorati, StumbleUpon and Delicious.  More networks will be added in the coming weeks and when requested by Unilyzer customers. Google Analytics is the source for this social report.

The user of this social report can filter the report by one or more networks and web properties.  The report can be printed or exported into 6 different formats including: PDF, CSV, & Excel.

Unilyzer is the leading brand for integrated internet & social media reporting and analytics.  Its suite of dashboards, charts, and social reports provide a brand manager with tools needed to extract insight from data.  Unilyzer is the tool of choice for professional social media marketing managers who need high-level perspective, transactional detail, reporting and distribution capability.