How to measure your Facebook and LinkedIn engagement
Measuring social media engagement lets you discover which aspects of your digital outreach work well, and which may need a little more love. In this post, you’ll learn how to measure social media engagement and how to improve it.
Just like you measure your website performance (using Google analytics for example), measuring and reviewing your efforts prevents you from wasting your marketing dollars and ensures that you’re delivering content that your audience wants.
What is social media engagement?
You can think of social media engagement as the degree to which users of platforms, like Facebook and LinkedIn, are followers of your brand. It’s a measure of how well you’re connecting with your audience, as measured by statistics such as likes, shares, comments and views.
How do I measure and monitor Facebook engagement?
Measuring Facebook engagement is relatively easy because the platform collects and presents all the data you need. That said, there is a lot of data so don’t get stuck down the rabbit hole exploring every single measurement you possibly can.
First up, choose the metrics you would like to track. Options include:
- Reach: The number of users who see your posts in their timelines.
- Clicks: The number of times users click on links or images in your posts.
- Shares: The number of times users share your posts or ads with their connections.
- Comments: The number of people who comment on your posts.
- Likes: The number of people who like your pages.
Typically, you’ll want to combine a range of metrics to get a more comprehensive picture of how you’re engaging users.
For instance, “reach” could be high because you’re spending a lot of money on advertising. But “shares” and/or “comments” could be low, suggesting the content isn’t as impacting as you may want. A small word of warning here for law firms though; generally, organic engagement (non-paid that is) is lower for law firms because there’s not as much of an emotional pull as there is, for example, with animal-related posts or fashion or food.
How to access your Facebook insights
Next, you’ll want to use Facebook’s own tools to track your engagement. To do this:
- Login to your Facebook business account page
- Select the “Insights” option in the menu at the top
- Use the options list on the left-hand side to view individual statistics, such as likes, reach, page views, actions on page, people, messages and so on.
- Apply a date range and either read the results directly on screen or download to an excel report.
If you need to, you can sort information by demographics, such as gender and location etc. You can also track changes in engagement before and after specific advertising campaigns.
How do I measure and monitor LinkedIn engagement?
Measuring LinkedIn engagement is similar to what we’ve outlined above and again, relatively simple.
You first pick metrics you’d like to track and then log into the platform’s analytics dashboards to see how they’re performing. You can access the analytics dashboard from the menu above your cover image on your company page.
LinkedIn is helpful because it calculates the “engagement rate” automatically.
It does this by adding up all audience interactions (reactions, likes, shares, comments) together with clicks and new followers and divides them by the total number of impressions the post receives. The result is a ratio between passive and active actions users can take.
To view LinkedIn metrics, open your company page and select the ‘analytics’ tab in the top menu. There are then three sub-menus you can choose to obtain metrics on:
- Visitors
- Updates (your posts)
- Followers
LinkedIn visitors’ dashboard
This dashboard gives you metrics on how many visitors you have on your company page. You can also break down these visitor metrics into which part(s) of your company page they visit; for example, home, about, people etc.
As with most metrics, you can also add a date range.
LinkedIn updates dashboard
This dashboard provides metrics on your posts. You can break it down into impressions, clicks, reactions, comments, shares etc. You can also look directly at your ‘engagement rate’ (worked out by LinkedIn) for each post.
Again, you can add a date range to your selection.
LinkedIn followers’ dashboard
This is a very basic dashboard designed simply to provide you with the aggregate of followers along with when new followers came on board.
Again, you can add a date range to your selection.
What are good engagement rates for Facebook and LinkedIn?
A study of nearly 3,000 Facebook pages calculated the average ‘post engagement rate’ to be 3.22%. Marketing expert Michael Leander cites even lower figures, suggesting that businesses that achieve a one per cent engagement rate are doing well. Both these references are across a range of industries (not just legal).
In light of this, any post that achieves an engagement rate over 5% could be considered a star performer.
The story is similar on LinkedIn. Experts consider any engagement rate above 2% is good and anything over 10% to be mind-bogglingly brilliant.
How do I improve my social media engagement rates?
Law firms face significant challenges in engaging on social media. This is due to a number of factors. It could be partly to do with the specific training professionals undergo and the language they use or it could be that ‘legal information’ is not necessarily considered ‘sexy’ and firms are competing with more emotional pull or fun content.
Law is a linguistic art, ordinarily requiring precise use of language. Legal professionals and/or their marketing agencies need to approach social media in a manner that removes legalese and speaks plain English. They should also not shy away from having a little fun here and there with their posts.
Making your law firm’s social media posts more ‘human’, less legalese
- Share personalised posts: Your audience isn’t interested in the logic of statute. They want to know who you are and what you stand for. Shining on social media, therefore, often just requires writing a few posts about the everyday goings-on at your law firm - the stuff your team enjoys or loves to do, or your personal mission.
- Be authentic: Don’t allow your training to get in the way of connecting with your audience emotionally. Prove your authenticity by backing up your words with actions.
- Use plain English: Avoid legalese and complex sentence structures that confuse regular people. Speak to them as you might a friend.
- Use images and videos: Visually-rich social media outreach performs better than blocks of static text.
- Time your posts: Evidence suggests that there are better and worse times to post on Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media sites. Posting in the early afternoon, for instance, could be better than the early morning for Facebook and vice versa for LinkedIn. Use your analytics/insights to determine the best times for your specific audience.
- Give your posts entertainment value: Social media users dislike direct sales. They’re on the platform to connect with friends, learn, gain knowledge etc. Law firms need to be sensitive to that by creating the type of content users are in the “mood” to consume. Entertaining snippets, for instance, are a great way to promote your brand and win over potential clients at the same time.
In summary
Measuring social media engagement is relatively easy. Both Facebook and LinkedIn - as well as most other major platforms - provide intuitive and simple dashboards that show you how your posts and campaigns are performing. Plus, they provide tools that allow you to track the impact of changes you make over time, telling you whether new ideas are working or not. If you’re not already monitoring your analytics, you could be a missing a trick.
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