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1 in 6 consumer social messages get a response. A pitiful 17%! Social media is fast paced, and I get that you're under pressure. But... do your followers? Don't be a victim of social media overload. Download my free, interactive social media checklist now!
What is Facebook analytics?
You could post random stuff on your brand’s Facebook page. Eventually you’ll hit on something that’ll resonate with your target audience. Could take you some time, but hey, no worries. It’s just your business, your livelihood.
Alternatively, you could use Facebook analytics tools and learn about your followers. Measure your performance, track likes, page views, reach. If you’re going to do social media marketing, build brand awareness, increase your follower numbers, get those followers to perform an action - Facebook analytics will help you understand who’s following you and what works for them.
Why use Facebook analytics?
There are over 1.6 billion daily active users. 2.4 billion monthly active users. How do you think you’re going to be able to analyze that amount of data?
Understanding your Facebook data will furnish you with the information you need to realize what kind of content is going to work with your audience. You can’t simply cross your fingers and wish on a star.
Facebook analytics tools
I’ve put together a list of Facebook analytics tools that’ll help. Use them all. Choose your favorite. Whatever. Just don’t leave without taking a test drive.
Quick Search | Social media search engine
Quick Search gives you an instant overview of your brand online. It’s a social media search engine that offers extensive coverage of social networks - including Facebook - news sites, blogs, and forums.
Features include:
- Quick brand overview - the KPIs that matter - engagement, volume, sentiment, demographics, and geographies
- Find real-time trends - identify emerging trends to boost your content
- Content ideation - create viral content that resonates with your audience
- Competitive intelligence - compare multiple brands to benchmark against competitors
"Quick Search provides such an easy and user-friendly opportunity to deep dive into your competitors' social sphere; letting you harness their strengths and weaknesses to improve and cultivate a winning marketing strategy. For a specific breakdown of the importance of this, you should definitely check out Talkwalker's latest article on the necessity and implications of competitor analysis for your business and brand."
Christina Garnett | @ThatChristinaG
Facebook Insights | Paid & organic breakdown
The best place to start.
Facebook Insights is available to the admin(s) of your company page, once you have more than 30 fans. Find total likes, total number of people who were shown your page and posts, total number of people engaged, and a heap of other insights.
Understand your audience with demographics and a breakdown of location. An overview of post engagement, or for specific posts, reveals which kind of content works best for your target audience.
Paid and organic are broken down so you can identify the value of promoted posts, with more metrics on video views, post reach, and actions taken on your page.
“Facebook Insights gives you a plethora of useful information about your Facebook page. However, the key is to take the data and create something meaningful with it. Using the data to track the performance of your page and find emerging patterns is crucial.”
Elizabeth Joss (@themuseumtimes) | Lecturer & writer @ The Museum Times
TrackMaven | Track & compare
TrackMaven collects data from a number of sources, including Facebook and Twitter, content marketing, traffic, and SEO results. It also takes data from sites such as SEOmoz and Alexa. Brands can use this actionable data to identify what their competitors are doing and what’s working.
This tool tracks a wide range of Facebook metrics at the post and campaign level. For organic posts, boosted, and ads.
- Track and compare the performance of organic content and ads - reach, engagement, impressions, clicks, conversions, referral traffic, etc.
- Paid content detection alerts - optimize your Facebook ad spend and compare with competitors
- Optimize content based on increase in traffic, conversions, donations, etc.
Sociograph.io | Facebook Groups & Pages
Log in with your Facebook account and analyze for free. You’ll be able to see all your Facebook metrics, understand your audience and community better, and evaluate the performance of your content.
Features include:
- Activity graph - look at your community’s overall activity over the course of a year, month, or set time range
- Post reports - view your posts in chronological order and find data about the types of post, authors, share stats, comments, and likes
- Community members’ report - find who’s active in your community, rated by the number of comments, likes, shares, and number of posts, then compare with your competitors
Okay, I said it was free, and there’s certainly a free plan where you can monitor user activity, filter activity by type, and find out about your visitors. If you’d like to reveal more data, there’s a premium plan. It’s cheap, so don’t be put off.
AgoraPulse | Build an online presence
AgoraPulse provides specialized Facebook analytics tools. One allows you to benchmark your page, identifying content performance. Content that’s performing well, plus which metrics need improvement. While another lets you run quizzes, competitions, and sweepstakes on your page’s timeline.
The tool reports on audience, engagement, management, and awareness. Most influential users are highlights, along with users who talk about you the most. It will also breakdown paid, organic, and viral reach. Once you’ve established which content works best for your brand, you can calculate the ROI of your Facebook marketing.
“AgoraPulse is a competitively priced tool with some great functionality. One of the nicest parts of AgoraPulse is that it’s very simple to use.”
Ian Cleary (@IanCleary) | Founder of RazorSocial, social media tools blogger
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Quintly | Customizable dashboard
This facebook analytics tool works with Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube.
It has a free tool specifically for Facebook Analytics, with a dashboard that can be customized to suit all your needs. You can track three Facebook pages simultaneously, identifying the main engagement metrics - likes, shares, comments, and follower growth. On top of this, you can measure performance against that of your competitors, to optimize your Facebook marketing strategy.
You’ll find data that covers influencers, sponsored posts, content, and more. The Facebook analytics will recognize more than 250 metrics and reports can be generated and customized. Stump up some cash, and you can monitor multiple Facebook pages.
“While it’s the same information you can find in Facebook Insights, having them in Quintly lets you sort various metrics and see what content is getting clicks, which is winning your fans, which is losing your fans, and which is generating conversation.”
Bob Carver (@BobCarverTC) | Principal Consultant at Carver Technology Consultancy, and contributing author for Social Media Today
Buffer | Manage, schedule, analyze, collaborate
Manage and monitor all your social media accounts with this awesome app. It’s simple to use, and you can quickly schedule and share posts from all your social media accounts - Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. LinkedIn, and Google+.
As far as Facebook analytics tools go, Buffer’s free plan is great. It allows you to add three social accounts and 10 scheduled posts per account.
If you’re happy to pay, and I recommend you seriously consider it, you’ll get additional features such as being able to add 15 RSS feeds of content per profile. The analytics dig deeper, including the number of posts sent out and how many active users there were over a certain period of time. You can schedule up to 100 posts and manage 10 social media profiles.
Features include:
- Streamlined analytics to identify which types of content perform best with your audience
- Track key engagement metrics - clicks, likes, reach, shares, comments, retweets, mentions, etc.
- See your best posts at a glance - instantly see which posts are performing well so you can do more of what works and continually increase engagement
- Easy reporting - get the data you need to see how your content is performing, to find what’s working and what isn’t
“Do I recommend Buffer? Yes, yes, and yes! I love it and it frees up so much of my time. If you’re struggling right now to get a foothold on social media and would like to minimize the effort while amplifying your results, then Buffer is definitely for you. I suggest you start out on a free trial and if you like it, feel free to go on to premium.”
Chris Lee (@chrisleevella) | Founder of A Blog on Blogging
Scoreboard Social | Social media reporting
This app gives you a competitive snapshot - Facebook Page, Instagram, or Twitter profile - of how you’re performing on social media compared with others. So you can see how you’re doing compared to your competitors, big name brands, and industry leaders.
You can create watchlists and Scoreboard Social will send you a daily/weekly/monthly/quarterly email report. The actionable report includes ranking, growth and engagement metrics, trends, and unique authors who are engaging with your content.
There’s a strong emphasis on competitor analysis, meaning you can understand which content’s working for you and the competition. Then, repeat, improve, or delete. With a 30-day free trial, it’s definitely worth checking out.
Grytics | Facebook groups analytics
If your loudest followers are members of multiple Facebook Groups, Grytics can bring them together. It’s a SaaS solution for community managers that helps with tracking and analyzing performance of groups. It also reveals members’ stats so you can understand your target audience.
Features include:
- Content analytics - measure, predict, and improve performance with comparative insights
- Receive automated reports - key metrics, KPIs, top-performing posts
- Check-out publications and stats based on keywords
- Community management - all your groups in one place for comparison and best practices
- Curate content - top posts, top images, top videos to feed your content
SocialPilot | Measure your marketing strategy
The Facebook analytics feature provides key metrics from your Facebook pages. Track likes and unlikes to understand the growth of your followers. Identify whether your audience is coming from organic or paid campaigns. These insights will highlight what’s working and can be replicated, and what needs improving or deleting. Compare your current status with previous periods, so you can check your progress over time. SocialPilot also covers Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
Features include:
- Connect 50+ social profiles and schedule posts from one place
- Complete overview of likes, reach, engagement, clicks, fans, published posts
- Shared access with your team, with appropriate levels of authority
- Discover curated content to share across your social networks
- Organize your social media strategy with the content calendar
- Upload and schedule upto 500 posts
“SocialPilot rivals Hootsuite and Buffer as one of the top social media automation tools around.... The app team is great about fixing bugs and engaging with the community across social media and the app stores. Great support makes for a better user experience.”
Neil Patel (@neilpatel) | Co-founder of Crazy Egg, KISSmetrics
Qwaya | Manage & track Facebook ads
It’s a Facebook and Instagram tool for managing and tracking your ad campaigns. The science behind is to do with embedding tracking pixels in your ads. This allows you to monitor impressions, performance, and conversions.
The integration with Google Analytics means reporting is a cinch. Qwaya’s blog contains useful advice. Unfortunately, the last post was in 2016. Hey guys… get writing!
Features include:
- Schedule your ad campaigns to run at a set time of day/week
- Override Facebook and choose your own ad rotation
- Shared access for you and your team
- Google Analytics integration shows conversions attributed to your ad campaigns
- Audience and ad A/B testing
- Automatically add tracking URLs to your ads
- Export results to Excel for analysis
You can give the tool a go with a 14-day free trial, then you need to outlay some cash.
"Running Facebook ads? You need to use Qwaya. Hands down best tool/customer support."
Carl Sednaoui (@CarlSednaoui) | Director of Marketing @mailcharts. Co-Founder of @CoderDojoNYC
Socialmonials | Track what counts
Campaign and social media management platform with pretty impressive reporting and analytics. The website states, “Socialmonials helps you measurably increase revenue from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube.”
Like your very own social CRM, you’ll be able to identify your best influencers, find how much revenue you’ve earned, and how many leads and website visits came from your campaign.
Features include:
- User-generated content - collect and display videos, images, and text from your community
- Social publishing - preview posts before scheduling
- Social media campaigns - No tech required to launch campaigns to social, mobile, and your website
It’s a tool with a price, but offers a 14-day free trial. Worth considering.
“I am absolutely thrilled with Sociamonials. Not only does it do everything I need it to, it does a lot of things I didn't even think of, but am loving (Click to tweet and Facebook Tabs). The product is fantastic... perhaps only surpassed by the great customer service."
Viveka von Rosen (@LinkedIntoBiz) | Chief Visibility Officer & Co-founder Vengreso
PeakFeed | One simple dashboard
K.I.S.S. That’s all I really need to say about PeakFeed. It’s an analytics tool that delivers simple, easy-to-use reports on your brand’s social media performance, on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
Create a dashboard and monitor key stats from your profiles - follower growth, new content, engagement. To save you time - hey, we’re all rushed off our feet - you’ll receive an automated email report once a week. You, your team, your boss can track key growth metrics across all your social media platforms.
Unfortunately, there’s no free trial. But, the three payment plans won’t break the bank.
“I was looking for a simple report to show me how we grew, week over week. Nothing fancy. Fortunately, I found PeakFeed. Now I get easy, no-nonsense reports to my inbox every week."
Ian Smith (@SkyCapture) | Marketing @ Drone Deploy
The best Facebook analytics tool!
These are some of the best Facebook analytics tools I've found. If you're looking for a single Facebook analytics tool that'll give you all of the above, and more - hashtag tracking, brand listening, sentiment analysis, competitive analysis, image recognition, crisis management - Talkwalker's Quick Search is what you need.
Free social media checklist
So. Are you a victim of social media overload. Creating, curating, scheduling, posting, listening, responding, measuring, analyzing, engaging, planning, testing. Every day. Every week. Every month. Every quarter. Download my free, interactive social media checklist. It'll help you increase engagement, awareness, credibility, and conversion. Reduce your stress levels. Maximize your brand's success.
