When you're using the world's biggest social media platform, how do you keep tabs on everything in your Facebook marketing? From gaining the right insights from your Facebook page and Facebook analytics to making continuously smarter decisions and adjusting to social media platform changes, this post takes a closer look into what you need to know about Facebook monitoring.
Social media monitoring tools are on the rise, as social platforms themselves continue to see a growth in user-ship. It is becoming increasingly important for brands to stay up to date with the changes that platforms make.
Read on to learn the best way of tracking, monitoring and analyzing your Facebook marketing efforts going forward.
Table of Contents
What is Facebook Monitoring?
The Discontinuation of Facebook's Analytics Tool
What is Facebook Insights?
How to Get Facebook Insights
Which Facebook Metrics Should You Track and Analyze?
What's the Difference Between a Facebook Page & a Facebook Group?
3 Reasons to Monitor Facebook Page Analytics and Facebook Group Analytics
What is Facebook Monitoring?
Facebook monitoring is the process by which marketers can track for mentions of their brand, industry, and competitors on Facebook.
Monitoring on Facebook covers posts, pages, and Facebook Group posts.
Your team can uncover common keywords associated with certain topics, be alerted when a spike in negative or positive sentiment occurs, find new marketing opportunities, and more.
The Discontinuation of Facebook's Analytics Tool
Facebook announced in 2021 that the free Facebook Analytics tool would no longer be available after June 30, 2021.
According to CMS Wire, there was a declining interest in the panel data - data with a filtered view - that Facebook Analytics displays. With the growing concern surrounding data privacy regulations and well as the aggregate view of what content trends, there was been less interest in the panel data that Facebook Analytics provides. Moreover, Facebook Analytics was simply found to be less useful than other analytical tools that provide much more in-depth insights. So it's bye-bye Facebook Analytics and hello to new alternatives.
While Facebook Analytics is no longer available, the social media platform does have alternative tools that can be used for Facebook monitoring, and to track content engagement, budget spend on ads, and page traffic:
If you haven't explored these tools before, take a look at this Facebook Management Guide to get a feel of how you can start utilizing them:
Facebook Business Suite
Facebook Business Suite is a social media management tool that allows you to manage your Facebook, Facebook Messenger and Instagram in a central place. From engaging with your audience to responding to messages and managing your advertising activity, Facebook Business Suite is ideal for managing your brand's Facebook and Instagram profiles to create content, promote ads, publish posts and provide customer service.
Ads Manager
Ads Manager is a tool that allows you to create ad campaigns, manage your Facebook ads and view or demonstrate the performance of your ads with reporting. This tool is free to use and makes it quite easy to adjust small ad details like the copy, ad placement, and tracking the conversion.
Creator Studio
Creator Studio is Facebook's social media content management tool that is designed to manage content shared on a Facebook page and analyze the performance of the content. While the tool is free to use and allows anyone who manages a Facebook page to use Creator Studio, your page role will determine the information you see.
What is Facebook Insights?
Insights gives you data about your Facebook Business Page performance and audience activity. You can't get Facebook group analytics but can provide this extra layer of analysis. This data is visible to all the page admins, but they will only have the ability to access it as far back as 2 years.
You can use Facebook Insights to:
- Better understand how your audience is interacting with your Business page.
- View and analyze metrics about the performance of your page.
- See which posts have high engagement and when your audience is most active on Facebook.
What is important to remember with this version of Facebook monitoring is that it's always updated to reflect your Business page’s developments; soon enough, you will start to see certain patterns and trends form that can be incorporated into your Facebook marketing efforts and you have the ability to monitor your page in real-time as a result.
How to Get Facebook Insights
Follow these steps to access Facebook insights:
- Go to your Facebook Page.
- Select the "Insights" tab on the navigation panel on the left-hand side of your screen.
- You'll see a Page Summary, a link to access your Ad Center, and insights into your 5 most recent Facebook posts.
In essence, Facebook Insights is able to give you an overview of your content performance, tracking traffic and allowing you to learn more about who your Facebook audience is and how they engage with your content.
One thing to note, though, is that due to privacy rules in certain regions, Facebook will no longer provide messaging and order-related data. This impacts performance reporting metrics, specifically on ads delivered to and from Europe and Japan.
Tip: With Facebook Monitoring Tools like Meltwater you can get access even more in-depth Facebook Analytics.
Which Facebook Metrics Should You Track and Analyze?
Social media metrics are a helpful way of determining just how successful a campaign turned out to be. However, Facebook has its own metrics that you should be paying attention to in order to better understand the performance of your campaign.
So what metrics should you be tracking for your Facebook Page?
- Post Reach: This will tell you how many users saw your post and who engaged with them.
- Page views: This will track who is viewing your Page and how many views your Page is receiving.
- Post types: This will tell you what type of content best resonates with your audience.
- Location: This is to see where your audience is coming from.
- Demographics: this will give you a breakdown of age groups and percentage of women and men that make up your audience.
- Facebook Group analysis: With Facebook group monitoring you can analyze conversations in your Facebook Groups.
What's the Difference Between a Facebook Page & a Facebook Group?
Facebook pages are a businesses official profile on Facebook. Facebook users who follow the profile can get more information on the business like hours, location, mission statement, and in some cases businesses allow for customer service inquiries through the Facebook chat function. Businesses can share images and videos to their page, create events, and access analytics for Facebook posts, like described above.
A Facebook group is a membership based community around a specific topic, product, or theme. Sometimes they are publicly accessible, other times groups are private and require an admin to accept your request to join. Businesses can create their own groups if desired.
What can you track with Facebook Group analytics?
Facebook Group monitoring can give you additional insights into how your audience perceives your brand, and communicates about your products and industry. The big benefit of Facebook groups analysis is the ability to gauge general sentiment.
Using Meltwater Facebook Group monitoring, you can track several different metrics via a central dashboard:
- Activity: track volumes of engagement
- Mood: analyze sentiment of comments and reactions
- Interest: identify top topics or entities driving engagement
- Themes: monitor keywords around key topics
- Contributors: discover the most active
Interested in using Meltwater for Facebook group analysis? to learn more!
3 Reasons to Monitor Facebook Page Analytics & Facebook Group Analytics
Monitoring the analytics of your Facebook page and Facebook groups provides insights to help you improve your Facebook marketing strategy. here are some key ways Facebook analytics can give you a deeper understanding of your Facebook content performance:
1. Know your audience
Facebook provides enough data for you to get a better idea of who engages with your content, where your followers are located and more demographical data such as their age and sex. As the biggest social media platform - with more than 2.50 Billion active users - you could cast your net quite wide when assessing who your target audience is for a specific marketing campaign.
Not everyone on Facebook is interested in your brand and the content you have to share so having a clear idea of who your target audience is helps you craft a more effective content marketing strategy.
The insights you gain from analyzing who engages with your content - from when your audience is active on Facebook to seeing which posts receive more likes than others - can help you decide how to adjust your content.
A great way to understand wider audience potential for your brand on Facebook is through Facebook group monitoring. Meltwater allows you to filter & compare between groups to uncover opportunities. to find out more!
2. Know when to post on Facebook
Speaking of knowing when your audience is active on the platform, monitoring your Facebook page analytics will give you the data you need to see when your audience is most active on Facebook. While there are suggestions on when the best time is to post on social media, most times, the best time to post highly depends on your specific target audience.
Having insights on when your audience is active on Facebook helps you plan and schedule your content accordingly. Planning your content like this is important because you're able to ensure that you send the right information to the right audience at the right time. With a social media content calendar, and Meltwater's Engage tool for social media publishing you can align your long-term content marketing strategy and maintain consistency across your social media accounts.
3. Know how to improve your Facebook Page
One of the benefits of monitoring your Facebook Page analytics is having access to the in-app reporting tools that can quickly show you an overview of how your page is performing. You can export the data collected to report on the analytical insights you find with stakeholders or use the data to improve your Facebook page and the content you share.
Summary: Internal vs. external Facebook Monitoring
While Facebook Analytics is no longer available, you still have the ability to monitor and analyze insights from the platform. Today's digital landscape requires you to keep your finger on the data pulse to monitor the health of your Facebook presence and ensure that you meet the needs of your audience.
The alternative analytical tools that Facebook has will still help you track your Business Page but if you want a far more powerful, all-in-one solution, reach out to the Meltwater Team to hear more about our Meltwater social media management suite and our social media listening capabilities by filling out the form below.
