What Makes a Facebook Page Successful? (Hint: It Isn’t Fan Count)

Jun 25

TGIF: What Makes a Page Successful? (Hint: It Isn’t Fan Count)

by Nicole Landguth
Category: Facebook, Measurement

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I see posts on lots of social media blogs with weekly updates on the most successful Facebook Pages or types of Facebook Pages (example below) and they always include the same metric: number of fans (now called “Connections”). Likely this is because that number is the most public metric to compare but a little digging into the engagement on a Page came tell you a lot about its success.

You would never measure the success of a retailer by how many people entered the store or the success of a services company by how many people visit the website so why do people get to lazy with Facebook? Here are the metrics that really matter in a successful strategy and while fan count is one of them it may not be your most important.

Reach metrics

Number of fans/connections
Number of Facebook mentions
Photo and video views
Page views

most-fanned-pages

Preference

Number of “likes” of wall post and content
Number of positive/neutral wall post and comments
Number and engagement of fans on brand wall posts and content
Number of positive/neutral fan photos and videos shared
New fans versus removed fans
Unsubscribed fans versus resubscribed fans

Action

Application interactions
Application shares with friends
Petitions signed/pledges taken/badges downloaded
Clicks through to another site
Purchases made (through Facebook or through tracked clicks)

These are just some examples of the metrics and is not meant to exhaustive. The main point is that you should look at the entire journey- awareness to action- and establish goals and objectives for your presence instead of simply number of fans, especially because some Pages (cities, TV shows, etc.) have an obvious advantage of being on a user’s profile.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 25th, 2010 at 3:16 pm and is filed under Facebook, Measurement. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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TAGS: Tags: best examples, best facebook pages, brand page, brand pages, facebook analytics, facebook fancount, facebook insights, facebook measurement, facebook page, facebook pages, ideas, Measurement, measuring, measuring facebook, scoring

2 Responses to “TGIF: What Makes a Page Successful? (Hint: It Isn’t Fan Count)”

Johnny Wyatt Says:
June 26th, 2010 at 6:50 am
Nicole, my agreement meter pegs 100% with your post title. To reflect your retailer analogy, I read some years back that Walgreens’ key metric is total sale per customer visit. Obviously, that is bright, and, as you said, far more significant than the sheer number of customer visits.

The HubSpot chart interested me and I thank you for including it. Since The J3 Effect provides business fan page management, it tells me, “WOW” we’ve got our work cut out for us.

More importantly, since the effective negotiation of today’s Social Media rapids is moving to the top of the Local business “to do list,” we must flip that chart. Local business must not remain the next to the shortest mark on the graph.

A Fundamental metric we are running with right now:
The Fans:interaction ratio. True, each of our clients has different end goals and different success definitions, but this seems fundamental to them all.
Nick S. Says:
June 28th, 2010 at 11:46 am
I’m a big fan of this series of posts, and once again, you’ve done a nice job, Nicole. Well done. Most articles on successful Facebook fan pages only discuss the pages with the most fans - and cite their number of fans as a sign of their success. That’s like citing dollars spent on an ad campaign as a sign of the campaign’s success. Of course, if that were the case, nobody would be watching the NFL anymore - we’d all be watching the XFL!