Week 15 Part B: What We Can Learn from FaceBook and Other Analytics

For this assignment, we were asked to review the Facebook analytics on the top of our business page and take a look at the insights. The challenge that I had with this assignment is that I simply did not have enough traffic on my business page to review analytics.  My business page was created just for the purposes of this class and for my fictitious business, My Fitness Revival, which has been visited only by a handful of my fellow classmates over the past several months. 

So to dive into Facebook analytics a bit more and understand how it works, I used my personal Facebook page this week, found at https://www.facebook.com/jared.spurlock.39/  I changed the settings to a public profile so that my posts could be seen by all.  I have about 300 personal connections, still not a lot when trying to do any type of data analysis as I probably couldn’t get 100 people to view and engage with a post organically. So, in an attempt to reach new audiences, I tried the “boost my post” feature which promised greater exposure in exchange for fees.  To try this out, I paid $30 for five days, and in return I was expected to receive and estimated 810 – 2,300 new accounts reached per day. At the time of writing this blog, I am just wrapping up my first day of “boosting”, but I can now share some of those initial results (screenshot also at the bottom of this blog).

For my “boosted” post, I shared pictures and a map from a hiking excursion I completed this past weekend: https://www.facebook.com/jared.spurlock.39/posts/9827511824033616 . In reality, if I did turn My Fitness Revival into a legitimate business, this is probably a post I might want to share on my professional Facebook page and website as it highlights some of my physical abilities and adventures; and the material could also spark new conversations on “how to train & prepare for challenging hikes” as part of a holistic lifestyle change.  After the first day, the data insights revealed that I have gained 1,424 views with a reach of 1,103 (reach is the number of unique viewers). The data analytics also revealed that only 10% of the views were from my organic connections, while 90% of the views were from a new audience.  So far after the first day, I have been able to gain 68 reactions, of which 15 were from organic connections, which means I now have 53 unique opportunities to further connect with new audience members.  From my perspective, it was not a bad first day as it only cost $6 to identify those 53 potential new connections.  From the business perspective of My Fitness Revival, those 53 new interactions would now be considered “leads” and potential future clients!  Additionally, as Facebook identifies each of those interactions as individual accounts, I can now review those accounts to see if there are any in particular that I might want to additionally target.  Finally, I can see that all of the sentiment has been positive, no negative sentiment or comments thus far…which is great feedback to see on a post.

Getting back to my fictional business, I can see how Facebook analytics could be very helpful in identifying the viewership and sentiment of posts, whether that be organic or boosted.  As a future online business owner, I would want to be posting new content regularly, and over time I could see how well the posts were doing comparitively by reviewing the analytics.  I could further start to look at best received content as well as best times for posting. Overall, assuming if/when My Fitness Revival does come to fruition, I will definitely be using Facebook analytics to monitor the progress of my social media outreach efforts.

 

Analytics from day 1 of my Facebook hiking post: