While all social media analytics offer helpful insights into the behaviour of customers and the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, they need to be approached with caution.
There are several reasons for this.
Firstly, all platforms are also businesses and therefore want to encourage businesses to use their paid-for promotional products. This is particularly true of Facebook.
Secondly, they are constantly seeking ways to improve the experience of users. Recent examples in Facebook have been offering people ways to refine and personalise what they see in their news feeds and changing the “like” button at the bottom of posts to a series of six images that allow people to more accurately reflect their feelings about the content.
Facebook uses all the activity on the platform to monitor and refine the performance of posts. Anyone who frequently checks in to monitor post performance will see that the weekly statistics for post reach and people engaged shown at the top right of pages regularly go up and down throughout the course of a day or a week.
It can also happen that a business page that has been doing well for several weeks will show an unexpected dip in performance. This may be the result of external circumstances, such as an imminent holiday, when people perhaps are doing other things but it can be difficult to precisely pin down the cause.
While it is important for business owners to look regularly at their business page performance it can be difficult to draw conclusions when the information is so fluid. Nevertheless business owners or managers do at least need to be aware of what the analytics are showing in order to have meaningful discussion with marketers.
Consult your marketers
Monitoring the data and what is driving it constantly changes. This requires the marketers’ expertise to keep an eye on trends and interpret the performance of a particular marketing campaign.
They will be able to advise on whether a campaign is subject to momentary fluctuations that require no intervention or whether the analytics are revealing that a campaign is not performing to produce the goal it was set up to achieve.
They will also be able to suggest ways of adjusting a campaign’s social media activity to better achieve those goals.