Facebook has implemented new Insights that makes it easier for small businesses to measure their success. The problem with most people small businesses trying to use social media to grow their business is that they don’t measure their social media efforts. Metrics or Key Performance Indicators are important to determine whether your actions are working or not. Measuring to see how your fans are engaging with your content can only improve your social media marketing efforts because you can quickly stop doing what doesn’t work and continue to do the more of the things that work.
We have over 15,000 social media fans engaged with our content on Facebook. It is because of the metrics from Facebook Insights that I know that most of our reach is organic, which means that I don’t pay for people to see our posts. Also, our fans engage more with photos and videos than they do with regular text posts. The changes in FB Insights include two new insights, people engaged, which means the number of people who have liked, commented or shared your posts. You also can get other page activity like Mentions, and Posts by other people on your page. In addition to this, your Reach is now broken down into viral reach vs paid reach. Small business owners on a limited budget can use these Insights to maximize their budgets.
In addition to these new options you can also export your data for further analysis. This is all great news for small business owners who use Facebook to build and grow their businesses. Never forget that building a strong social media presence is good, but those fans don’t belong to you. At the end of the day, they still belong to Facebook. Therefore, a big part of every company’s social media strategy should be a way to get social media fans and followers out of social media and onto your own list. This is the only way to get them to eventually become buying customers.
Finally, small business owners should know that social media marketing works, but it’s also a process that doesn’t happen overnight. If you get started down the road to building a strong social media following, don’t expect them to become buying customers in an instant. Can it happen this way? Yes. Will it happen this way? Probably Not. So be patient and whatever you do. Try your best to be consistent. The worse thing you can ever do once you start down the road of building your business using social media is to develop a following or fan base and then leave them hanging or abandon them for long periods of time. So, keep the fire burning by fueling the fire with content that your fan base loves.
