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3 Metrics that Can Help Enhance Your College’s Facebook Presence
Friday, January 20th, 2012
With over 800 million active users, Facebook is the largest social networking site. The site collects massive amounts of information about all of its users, which is great for page owners. Through Facebook’s newly revamped Facebook Insights, page owners can gain access to substantial amounts of information regarding the activity of everyone that “likes” their page. This information is an insight into how page owners can give their fans a better experience, which in the end will achieve better marketing results.
Here are three metrics your college should be tracking through Facebook Insights:
1. People Talking About This
This is one of Facebook’s new metrics for Facebook pages. The number, which is visible to the public, is pulled from a variety of interactions that occur on Facebook in the past seven days and is refreshed daily. It’s a good indicator of how much conversation your college’s Facebook page is generating on Facebook. It’s also a good way to measure the content your page is posting and how to generate more conversations around your page on Facebook.
The interactions that make up the “People Talking About This” metric are any stories (previously referred to as posts) that users share in their timeline (formerly referred to as their wall):
• “Liking” a page
• Posting to a page’s wall
• “Liking,” commenting on, or sharing a page post, photo, photo album, or video
• Answering a Question posted by your page
• Mentioning your Facebook page in a status update
• RSVPing to an event created by your page
• Tagging your page in a photo
• Checking into your college on Facebook
In your Insights dashboard you’ll see a percentage increase or decrease next to the current number, allowing you to compare this week’s engagement against last week’s statistics. Engagement is the most critical metric you can track, since the goal is the have a thriving Facebook community to give prospects a positive experience with your college.
2. Engaged Users
On your Insights dashboard you will find Engaged Users under the Page Post information. The Engaged Users metric shows you how your audience interacts with your posts by tracking actual clicks. Facebook only tracks this information for 28 days, so remember that when you’re looking over this data.
This information can be used to create more engaging posts. An important thing to keep in mind is your target audience. What do they want to see from you? What benefit do they get by “liking” your college’s page on Facebook? If your fans aren’t interacting with your posts then you more than likely aren’t solving their problems and posting content that is specific to them.
3. External References
External Referrers tracks how many times people visited your Facebook page from an external site during a select date range. It’s important for your school to know where people are finding them online. The reason this is so important is because Facebook allows for conversations and relationship building, stuff that you can’t do on a regular website.
Are you finding these metrics helpful for your college’s Facebook page? If so, have you made any changes recently based on statistics you’ve seen?
About Effective Student Marketing
Effective Student Marketing, Inc. is a strategic marketing organization that specializes in generating student leads and enrollments for career, technical, and vocational schools across the country through the use of Internet marketing tools and techniques.
The team at Effective Student Marketing combines experience working on the school-side with skills in the latest technology to create programs that can meet any school's needs. Marketing and recruitment programs can include online reputation management, social media marketing, cost per lead vendor management, search engine advertising, search engine optimization, and e-newsletter production and distribution.
