Time To Check Your Facebook Vitals: You’re Flatlining!

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Social media is essentially a living platform made up of billions of thoughts and actions. While you can't measure the blood pressure of Facebook , you can check a few things to get an idea of how ‘healthy' your page is doing. You can also identify quickly whether or not you're on the right track with your social media efforts or if you're going to need some help.

Our team performs a more in-depth weekly vitals check for all of our clients across all channels we're active on, but for today we'll focus on Facebook. I'll also provide a simplified scoring system so you can determine whether you're “Rocking it” “Treading Water” or “In Need of Help”. Let's get started, shall we?

Facebook recently rolled out their new insights to all pages and there's a lot of really helpful and actionable date in there that many people still aren't utilizing.

Checking Your Facebook Vitals

Step 1: Engagement Rate At A Glance

Take a look under your cover photo and you'll see the total number of page likes as well as the number of people ‘Talking About This'. You can get a rough estimate by dividing the number of ‘People Talking About This' by the total number of page likes.

Here's How To Score It:

Engagement Rate < 10% – 0 points
10% < Engagement Rate < 20% – 1 point
20% < Engagement Rate – 2 points

Step 2: Page Likes, Post Reach, Engagement

Scroll up to your admin panel and click on ‘View Insights'. It should take you to the overview of the page that gives you a breakdown on the three things we want to see at a glance. These numbers might have a different value to your business pending on your goals and your strategy, so we'll give room for extra points here.

Here's How To Score Page Likes:

Page Likes From Last Week < 5% – 0 points
5% < Page Likes From Last Week <10% – 1 point
10% < Page Likes From Last Week < 15% – 2 points
15% < Page Likes From Last Week – 3 points

Note: This scoring system is assuming that you aren't currently running a paid like campaign. If you are, you're numbers should be much higher.

Here's How To Score Reach:

Total Reach From Last Week < 5% = 0 points
5% < Total Reach From Last Week < 20% = 1 point
20% < Total Reach From Last Week < 50% = 2 points
50% < Total Reach From Last Week = 3 points

Here's How To Score Engagement:

Page Engaged From Last Week < 5% = 0 points
5% < Page Engaged From Last Week< 20% = 1 point
20% < Page Engaged From Last Week < 50% = 2 points
50% < Page Engaged From Last Week = 3 points

Note: Yes, we already checked on engagement, but this is a more transparent metric inside the analytics platform and pending on your goals you can track increases in specific engagement actions.

Step 3: Optimize Your Posts

Hop back over to your insights dashboard and click on the ‘Posts' tab. Here you'll see three options: ‘All Posts', ‘When Your Fans Are Online', and ‘Best Post Types'. We'll go through all three, so hang on tight.

Step 3.1: Top Posts

The ‘All Posts' section literally shows you a snapshot of all the posts that have ever gone up on your page. More importantly, it allows you to organize those posts based on a few different filters. The one we're most interested in is ‘Reach'. Find the column and click on it once to see a top-to-bottom list of your farthest reaching posts.

Should look something like this:

For the sake of simplicity, you can just look at your top 10 posts. If you really want to dig in later you can go up to 25.

Here's How To Score Top Posts:

Top 10 Posts In The Last Month = 0 – 0 Points
0 < Top 10 Posts In The Last Month < 2 – 1 Point
2 < Top 10 Posts In The Last Month < 5 – 2 Points
5 < Top 10 Posts In The Last Month – 3 Points

Step 2.3: When Your Fans Are Online

This is pretty straight forward but REALLY important. In your insights dashboard, under ‘Posts', click on ‘When Your Fans Are Online'. You should see a graph that looks something like this:

Here's How To Score This:

If you're posting when the majority of your fans are online, give yourself 5 points. If you're not, you get 0 points. There shouldn't be any grey area on this one unless you're a high-volume content publisher (100 articles a day or more).

Step 3.3: Best Post Types

Hop back over to your insights dashboard and under ‘Posts' you'll see ‘Best Post Types'. Click on it and you should see something like this.

Here's How To Score This:

If at least 50% of your 10-20 most recent posts are in the top performing post type, give yourself 5 points, if that's not the case give yourself a 0.

So Where Do You Sit?

The total score should be out of 20, keeping in mind that I added a couple bonus points in there.

Your Score < 10 – You're In Need Help – Since you took the time to add this up, you're obviously putting enough time into social media to see that it is an essential part of any media mix, but you don't have the time or experience to get the ball rolling on you're own.

10 < Your Score < 15 – You're Treading Water – You're not going under any time soon but you're not making progress either. Figure out a way to carve out more time or start looking to see what some of the top social brands are doing that you're not. It could be anything from your copywriting to the personality behind your Facebook page.

15 < Your Score < 20 – You're Rocking It – Start implementing a weekly vitals check similar to this across all your channels and work your way up to that perfect score.

20 < Your Score – We might just have a job for you.