Everybody wonders it sometimes.
You peek at the organic reach for every Facebook update you post, and the numbers aren’t what you’d hoped. They aren’t even what you expected. You’ve seen people with higher bowling scores. And you can’t help but wonder:
Does my Facebook page suck?
It’s frustrating when it feels like nobody is seeing your posts. Sometimes it seems like you’re the only person who doesn’t have the whole thing figured out – like there must be one simple, glaring thing you’re doing wrong and just need to fix, like plugging the hole in a sinking rowboat.
That’s when it’s time to get a little perspective – and here’s a step-by-step guide on how you can do it.
How does your Facebook reach compare to other pages?
Want to know how your Facebook page is really doing? You can’t just look at your own stats – you need to have something to compare them to.
Today, we’ll use these findings from April 2015. The social media analytics experts at Locowise compiled the statistics for 5000 Facebook pages, and came up with results you can use to contextualize your own. (Hint: If you need a refresher on how to access Facebook data beyond what you get on your Insights tab, this shows you what to do.)
Here’s an example.
According to their study, the average reach for a Facebook post in April was about 4.11% of total page likes. Let’s see how Edgar’s Facebook page stacked up.
Image may be NSFW.
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First, we used the Post Data spreadsheet we downloaded directly from Facebook (again, here’s how) to add the reach for every update we posted to our page in April. (Remember, when you’re looking at your own spreadsheet, look at organic reach, not total!) Our total organic reach for the month? About 45,182 users. Divide that by the number of updates we posted (91), and we get an organic reach of about 497 users per post.
Because your page’s number of likes is probably different at the end of the month than it is at the beginning (ours grew by more than 2000 in April), again, make sure you average your page’s likes over 30 days. Add the numbers in your “Lifetime Total Likes” column (in the Page Data spreadsheet) and divide by 30: we got 10,862.
Divide the average number of users reached per post by the average number of total page likes, and you’ll have your result. Our average reach? About 4.6% – a number that might initially sound disappointing on its own, but is actually higher than average.
This is why context matters so much. We could look at that 4.6% and feel disheartened, but when we compare it to the average of 4.11%, we see it’s actually not a bad figure at all!
There’s more to life than Facebook reach
So now you know how your reach compares to the average – but reach isn’t the only thing that matters, either. Not by a long shot.
You need to pay attention to your engagement rates, too. Engagement means clicks – comments, shares, likes, and clickthroughs. It means people seeing what you post and actually taking action, instead of scrolling on past without a second thought. And it’s easy to measure your own.
On your spreadsheet, look at the Lifetime engaged users column. This gives you the engagement for each individual post. Add them up (hint: use the sum function instead of doing it manually) to get your total engagement for the month, then divide that number by your total number of people reached to get your engagement rate.
Clik here to view.
Enter a sum formula into a blank cell to calculate a total. For example, if you want to add every number in a column between cells B3 and B50, you would enter =SUM(B3:B50) into an empty cell.
According to the study, the average engagement rate in April was 15.58% of a page’s reach – so again, you can compare your own engagement rate to the average.
And what if yours is really low? How can you get a better engagement rate?
Well, that’s the other nice thing about spreadsheets like this – they make it easy to identify what’s working and what isn’t. For example, you can sort all of the updates in your sheet in order of engagement rate, so you can easily pick out patterns in what people liked the best, the least, and so on. Pay attention to factors like:
- Type of update
- Time of post
- Day of the week
- Message phrasing (A question? A statement? Funny? Serious?)
Don’t be discouraged if you don’t recognize any immediate patterns – especially if you’re looking at a relatively small period of time, like a single month. Try going back to your Insights page and exporting data for a broader range, like several months, and you may notice things that weren’t apparent in a smaller data set.
Now see how you’re performing
That’s all there is to it – now you know how to figure out your own average organic reach, as well as your average engagement. So download your data from your Facebook Insights tab, compare it to the average, and see exactly how you’re doing compared to the other pages out there!
The post How to Find Out If You Have Good Facebook Reach appeared first on Edgar.