Options abound for getting free information to help you gauge the effectiveness of your social media efforts — among them TwitterCounter, Google Analytics, Crowdbooster, Facebook Insights, and Simply Measured. All have great graphs and charts, but giving meaning to the numbers and knowing what to do with them is the tricky part.
Enter LikeAlyzer (disclaimer: it’s a lead generator for a social media marketing company with the same name), which measures engagement and offers suggestions for improvement — and which may be the only site solely focused on Facebook.
We ran REMODELING’s Facebook page through LikeAlyzer in late February to see where we were succeeding or falling short in areas such as posts by type (text, video, photo) or length, and when posts were likely to get the most responses. Our grade: 83.
Says April Wilson, president of digital marketing company Digital Analytics 101, LikeAlyzer is good because it focuses on what’s working well for you and how to improve it. But, she cautions, take the information with a grain of salt. For example, one LikeAlyzer metric told us to use emoticons because “posts that contain emoticons receive up to 50% higher interaction rates.” But for a business page? Not really appropriate.
Another metric showed an engagement rate of 5.2% (i.e., of 1,980 “likes” from the previous 30 days, only 102 people interacted with a post by clicking through on a link, commenting, sharing, or otherwise engaging. (Note: Facebook’s new business model lets you pay a fee so that each time you post, Facebook makes sure all “likers” see it.)
To improve engagement, LikeAlyzer recommends that you:
Publish more photos: “The goofier the photo, the more engagement you’ll get,” Wilson says. But there’s “no quantifiable evidence that the more you disclose about your business in a personal fashion the more people will feel engaged with your brand.”
Respond quickly: Always respond as if you’re speaking to a respondent in person.
Post regularly: Although REMODELING gets a green check mark for its number of posts per day — 1.1 — Wilson says that number should be whatever makes sense for your brand.
Keep posts short: Remodeling got dinged for long posts. “Shorter posts are better, as people get easily distracted,” Wilson points out.
Watch the time: Post text statuses — something not attached to a link — at around 6 p.m.,when fans engage most.
Wilson says it’s worth using LikeAlyzer to investigate your Facebook page and that its analysis makes it “more digestible than if you’re an admin on the back end.”
—Stacey Freed is a senior editor at REMODELING. Find her on Twitter at @SFreed or @RemodelingMag.
