Benchmarking Your Facebook Account

One of the best ways to prove to your team or your funders that your investment in social media is worth the time and effort is to benchmark it. Benchmarking, simply put, is a system to measure the success of your social media plan. By collecting performance data, you can track your ongoing campaigns, fundraising efforts, and overall success of your social media plan. Facebook is one of the easiest platforms to do this with. I recommend looking at your data about once a week. 

First, choose a platform that best suits your needs for keeping track of your data, either Google Sheets or Excel is typically the easiest way to do this. Up at the top, the most important metrics you want to be following for your business’s Facebook page will typically include the date, the total likes that your page has on that date, the new likes from this time period (this is the difference between this week’s overall likes and last weeks overall likes, simply subtract those numbers), and the percent change. 

I also recommend keeping a ‘notes’ column to keep track of any dramatic changes, new campaign launches, or other events that might affect your data. 

How To Calculate Percent Change

The percent change can be found by dividing the new likes from this week by the overall likes and then multiplying that number by 100. This will easily show you how much overall growth your page has seen over the last week. 

What Else Should I Be Tracking?

There are other important metrics that can show off the success of your page as well, which can be found by looking at the ‘Insights’ tab under your Facebook’s business page. Other important metrics to measure in other tabs of your spreadsheet might be: 

• Post reach: how many Facebook users saw your posts for this week. 
• Actions on Page: how many times folks have clicked on your page’s contact information or clicked any other calls to action you have set up. 
• Post Engagement: this measures the number of times people engaged with your posts by doing things like commenting, sharing, liking and reacting, etc. Learn more: What is Facebook engagement & why does it matter?

How Can Benchmarking Help My Strategy?

Tracking these metrics can help you better understand the strategy that does and doesn’t work for your page and either replicate them or adjust them as you need! By keeping all of this data in one centralized place, you can easily access the most important metrics to show the overall health and success of your business page. Happy tracking!