Facebook has myriad points of engagement so when tracking the content marketing goals of your business—specifically, brand awareness/visibility and engagement or inbound leads– there are a lot of KPIs that should be tracked and measured so you can determine if your time and resources are being maximized.

An investment in social media can be beneficial by providing your target audience with content, whether through a video, image or blog post that is frequently consumed and sought after. To empower your marketing team and company brand, Facebook provides a number of analytical features that can help track your effectiveness. This enables you to plan the usage of your social media channels so you optimize your online presence through content marketing. Utilizing these measurements can help discover where your time, content and placement are most valuable, directing where your marketing efforts should be concentrated.

Facebook has created different options and features so that either an individual user can create a “profile,” or a company can make a business page that best represents their activities. Facebook offers 6 types of pages to choose from when starting your page:

• Local Business or Place
• Company Organization or Institution
• Brand or Product
• Artist, Band or Public Figure
• Entertainment
• Cause or Community

Unlike Facebook pages, profile pages do not have analytics that show charts of recent likes, comments, the reach of a post or shares of your content. Most of the information available from profile pages only tracks what you like or what you comment on.

Facebook pages, however, are capable of providing analytics. A Facebook page requires 30 “likes” before the tracking elements provide insight and measurements for the main Key Performance Indicators (KPI) that can help measure corporate goals.

Here is a list of activities that are tracked for a Facebook page that can help with determining the effectiveness of your content marketing and social media activities in relation to meeting your business goals:

• Growth – How much things have increased over specific time periods
• Reach – The actual number of people who have seen a page post broken down by organic and viral reach. This number is often smaller than impressions, since one person can see multiple impressions
• Impressions – The number of times a Page post is displayed on a news feed–often higher since friends may share the same post
• Virality – Percent of people who actually created a story from your page post out of the total number of unique people who viewed it
• Demographics/Geodemographics – Gender/age/country/city/language
• Number of people who see a post and how many people clicked on the post
• Total Likes – The total number of individuals who “like” your page
• Friends of Fans – The number of unique people who were friends with people who “like” your Page
• Page views
• Talking about this
• User-generated content
  • Engagement comments
  • Recommendations and reviews

The newest metric, “people are talking about this,” offers lots of options as it shows the sum total of all unique people who have created a story from your page by:

• Liking a Page
• Posting to a Page’s Wall
• Liking, commenting on or sharing a Page post (or other content on a page, like photos, videos or albums)
• Answering a question posted
• RSVPing to an event
• Mentioning a Page in a post
• Phototagging a Page
• Liking or sharing a check-in deal
• Checking in at a Place

From a Facebook spokesperson on this newest metric: “This metric refreshes daily but goes back a week. So it’s the current barometer of how much conversation is being generated by someone’s Page on Facebook. It’s a good gauge of the content Pages are putting up and how to generate more conversations around a Page.”

Take all your collected data and aggregate it into a combined view of actions and outcomes. You should be able to see what activities were most effective, or what analytical data (virality/growth in likes/talking about) demonstrated success from the content produced.

Did your content drive engagement, leads or brand awareness? If so, focus on posting the same type of content that gives you the most return.

This is the second piece of the Measurable KPIs for Social Media series.

*Originally published on June 6, 2013 in the Content Marketing Examiner, sponsored by Cadence9®.