A Digital Agency Approach to Facebook Engagement

Who knew, when Facebook first started, that the social media platform would become such a boon for marketers? Indeed, for those who work at a digital agency, Facebook is a first stop for any new marketing campaign. And yet, unless one approaches it from a thoughtful perspective, a lot of marketing dollars may as well be simply set on fire. In order to see positive ROI with Facebook marketing, you have to make the most out of your page’s Insights.

Why engagement matters

Regardless of whether your goal is to promote a specific product or to increase overall brand awareness, paying attention to engagement, at both the page and post levels, is critical. The engagement metric is comprised of the likes, comments and shares that you get. To analyze your brand’s engagement, take the total engagement figure and divide it by the number of people who saw a particular post. Posts that receive greater engagement get served to more newsfeeds. Estimates are that insufficient engagement, absent paid promotion, will lead to a post’s appearing in the newsfeeds of just 6 percent of your page’s fans.

How to leverage engagement metrics

Analyzing engagement metrics reveals the ability of your content to garner attention and prompt action from users. In Facebook Insights, the number of people engaged appears on both the “Overview” and “People” tabs, and it includes all people who have engaged with a post, not just the fans of your page. So if a fan shares your post with their friends, and those friends engage, they will be included in the total.

It’s a good idea to look at which individual posts get the most engagement. Try to discern how a high-engagement post is different from one that got low engagement. And it’s useful to look at engagement patterns over time, say, from one month or quarter to the next, as it will help you understand whether the community you are trying to grow is active or not.

Facebook Insights contains a wealth of information about the demographics and sources of users who interact with them. At our digital agency, we analyze your dashboard with an eye toward understanding what makes a post “pop” with users, and then use those posts as templates.