Forget Likes, These Are the 3 Facebook Metrics to Watch

Marketers nowadays are data driven numbers people. I get it. I consider myself a numbers guy, too. That said, when it comes to Facebook, I think a lot of marketers have it all wrong. The Facebook metric marketers tend to focus on — a page’s Like count — does not matter as much as marketers and business owners think it does.

There are three other Facebook metrics that provide businesses with far more valuable insight:

1. Talking About This

The “talking about this” number, which you can find to the right of your page’s Like count , is broken down into two metrics: "people engaged" and "other page activity." People engaged is the number of unique visitors who liked, commented, shared or clicked on your posts. Other page activity is the number of page mentions, check-ins and posts by other people on your page.

Why “Talking About This” is Important

A whopping 93 percent of B2B marketers use content marketing, according to theContent Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs’ fourth annual content marketing report. With so many businesses investing in content marketing, a business’s Facebook page often becomes a main hub for sharing content.

If your business’ "talking about this" is low, it might be a sign the content being shared is not resonating well with your fanbase or that the language used in your posts isn’t effective at driving post engagement. Either way, you need to make changes.

Start testing fresh calls to action, alternating long and short posts, posts with and without an image, etc. The more testing you do, the better you will understand your fanbase and the type of content/posts they react to best.

How to Improve This Metric

First, find out what your page’s user engagement percentage is. To do this, divide your “talking about this” number by your page’s Like count. A good engagement percentage is 2 percent, but most bigger brands with more than 100,000 fans have closer to 1 percent.

Second, if your page’s engagement percentage is low, it might be time to tweak your content and posting strategies. Again, the best advice is to learn as much as you can from testing.