How are my efforts on facebook contributing to my organization's overall goals?

Photo from flickr user clappstar

Introduction

The amount of pressure on organizations to "get on Facebook" is tremendous.  It's driven partly by consultants who use social media expertise as a "guilt marketing tool".  You know what I mean, "You don't understand Facebook, I do, please pay attention to me long enough for me to convince you to hire me!"  I'm guilty of this.

But it's also partly due to the fact that facebook has over 300 million registered users, over 100 million of which use the site monthly.

Those are great numbers, but they aren't "pour money down a hole" numbers.  You need to answer a few simple questions:

1. How effective is the work I do on facebook in producing bottom line results?
2. How should I change my budgeting and resources for facebook to make my results better?
3. Should I take resources away from facebook and devote them to something else?

You can measure the impact your efforts on facebook are having on your bottom line today, and get a good sense of exactly how much time you should be investing in maintaining your outpost there. 

Assumptions About Your Facebook Fan Page

Let's start with what we assume your facebook presence looks like.  I'm guessing it's some sort of fan page on which you post items on your wall, like this one from the Trust for Public Land.  These items lead back to your organization's website through a link.  Maybe, also, they lead to other places as well.  After all, you're not so self-centered as to only share items with your fans that you write.

 

The whole point of your strategy here is to insert your message in front of your fans, mixed in amongst the messages from their friends, so they'll pay attention to it.  In fact, what you really want is for people to click this link I've highlighted in green.

 

If you were to click on this link to the Trust for Public Land website, you'd be taken to this landing page with a little donate link and a description of the project you'd be supporting by clicking the donate link I've highlighted in green.  (For all you optimization folks, yes, that link is too small and doesn't stand out.  TPL is not a client of mine, they just do good conservation work and make for a good example.)

Measuring the impact of your Facebook fan page

While PR measurement experts like KD Paine (one of my heroes) can measure things like "message retention" of your social networking efforts, the easy way to measure the effectiveness of this work on facebook is to track how it hits your bottom line.  When your efforts results in an organization-wide goal (money, volunteers, sponsors) that is easy to understand even by people who don't understand the Internet, there's no debate about the benefit or budgeting of Facebook.

You can create a few metrics from a couple of basic data points:

1. the number of fans you have on a given day you make a fan page status post (gathered from your Fan Page Insights);
2. the number of fans that click on the link to your landing page; and
3. the number of conversions these visits from Facebook generate.

From these data points, you can then build and track the following actionable metrics:

1. clickthru rate of your facebook posts;
2. conversion rate of facebook traffic; and
3. conversion rate of all other "organic" traffic.

Once you have these metrics, you should be able to examine them and look to connect improvements or degradations in the results to specific actions. Do all my status updates without a photo perform worse than those with a photo of the land being conserved? Then we should always use a photo!

Objections to this measurement strategy

Your first reaction to seeing this might be "Hey, wait, I've got lots of people clicking 'Like' on my status updates, and 'Share' and playing my videos.  Doesn't that count for something?"

Well, to be concise about it, not really.

Yes, facebook is different. Yes you have to hold conversations with your fans, you can't just broadcast to them. I'm not advocating that you put a donate link up every day with no context. Your facebook presence needs to be more interactive than that, with you contributing to a larger conversation by highlighting other areas that are important to your audience, and bringing other things besides calls-to-action into the relationship.

And most importantly, listening to what people are saying (on your Facebook fan page and off) and then incorporating that into your work.

But in the absence of results, it doesn't matter how many people click 'Like' on your status update.  It doesn't matter how many people share your video.  It doesn't even matter how many fans you have. 

You don't have results.  Of course, once you have results, you have the luxury of measuring other things more subtle, like non-transactional interactions.  But since you don't know if you have results yet because you're reading this ebook to learn how to measure them, you don't have that luxury.

Start with measuring well-understood results like money and volunteers, and optimizing your status updates and landing pages to increase those results.  I'll talk about measuring non-transactional interactions in future writing.

Pulling it all together

For this example we're assuming the top goal of your website is fundraising, but you could apply this equally well to advocacy efforts where you want your visitors to write letters to Congress, e-commerce efforts where you want to sell products, etc. 

I'll explain more about how to collect this data in a future post, but suffice to say, you'll need to pull it from two sources: your analytics product on your website and Facebook's Fan Page Insights.

Here's an example spreadsheet of the data you should create around your status messages:

Once you've done that, you can aggregate it up for weekly summaries and compare the results to the rest of your site traffic.  I suggest that you focus on weekly batches of data.  I find that weekly meetings with my clients creates a good rhythm that allows us enough data to see the results of our experiments, and gives us enough time to put in changes for new experiments. Here's a spreadsheet where I've done that with more imaginary data I made up just as an example.

Where to go from here?

Once you've got a trove of data from at least 50 updates and 4 weeks, you'll need to start optimizing your facebook updates.  Some common areas for optimization are:

1. COPY: Are there common elements in the title or copy that cause more people to click?  
2. URGENCY: How much higher is my clickrate when I incorporate a sense of urgency into the call to action?
3. DAYPARTING: Does the day of the week or time of day matter?  (You can look at Facebook Fan Insights to get a sense of the timezone your fans are in, and even use their targeting tools to show status updates only to certain timezone's of people.)

You should always be either setting up an experiment or collecting data from one to figure out whether your hypotheses are working.  Good luck, and may the results set you free.