Facebook can be a great way for a company to more directly reach its audiences – through effective posting techniques and advertising.
In addition to posting consumer-targeted content about your business, also post media-created content such as articles and videos that relate to the products or services you provide. For every product- or service-related post you make, you should post at least a few fun or helpful photos and articles.
Then use Facebook Insights to determine which content is resonating with your target audiences. You can use Facebook’s own graphs for simple analytics measurements or the Export Data function to download customizable Excel spreadsheets tracking your information in detail.
To make a simple comparison of your Facebook page’s performance relative to competitors, look at your competitor’s pages, their number of fans, and the number of people “Talking About This” for the past week. Using these two numbers you can make a ratio of “engaged fans.”
To obtain this percentage, divide the number of people “Talking About This” by the total number of fans and multiply that number by 100. If your score is less than 3%, then your Facebook page is under-performing (this is the Facebook engagement benchmark for pages with more than 2,500 fans).
If you’re doing Facebook advertising (an effective tool that many tire dealers have not caught onto yet), you should analyze your CTR (click-through-rate) and CPM (cost per thousand).
The CTR is basically the percentage of people who clicked through to your link from your ad. According to Facebook, a CTR of .04%-.05% is considered average. If your CTR is less than desired, try out different images and copy to grab people’s attention. Or maybe your promotional offering is not that compelling.
Concerning CPM, Facebook really delivers! A typical Facebook ad should generate a cost per thousand of $1 or so. This compares to an average $5.92 for radio and $11.66 for a newspaper quarter page ad.
There’s no reason to speculate about whether your Facebook tactics are performing; it’s all there in Facebook Analytics.
Christine Taylor is vice president of social media marketing for JTMarCom,a Nashville-based marketing agency that helps companies with online reputation management and integration of social media into their traditional marketing programs. With a combined 35 years of experience in the tire industry, the agency places a special emphasis on working with tire and automotive aftermarket companies. Follow Christine on Facebook and Twitter (@chrisgtaylor). She can also be reached at 615-714-5469.
