Week 5 Part B: Learning about Facebook Data Collecting

1. 

    Reach measures the amount of people that have seen your posts and is especially important for smaller businesses that are trying to grow their fan base and have their posts seen more. Reach can be boosted by paying for this support to Facebook (and other platforms). Having a large reach does not mean that there is high user engagement which can result in followers not being impacted by posts from a page and result in a more passive viewing with little intent to purchase the services or products.

    Engagement helps business build relationships with their customers by building brand loyalty and it can help measure purchase intent from customers. Engagement involves not only likes, shares, and comments on posts and pages but also the amount of clicks overall on a page; clicking on the page, which images have been expanded, and clicks to different parts of the page are examples of clicks. Engagement is sometimes a better measure of success of posts because it shows followers that are willing to put more attention onto the business and commit to the brand and purchasing. This can be done by asking questions/having answers through comments, creating content that is important to customers, and rewarding customers for participation with posts (commenting back, giveaways, etc.)

2.

    Overall, reach shows a business how far their content goes; whether the content reaches a small audience or a wider audience and some analytics will also show where your audience is from. This can indicate to a business if they should boost their posts to spread awareness of their brand and help understand their demographic further to provide content that they may be interested in overall. 

    For a business, engagement shows them if their customers are interested in their brand enough to commit to them and purchase from them. Low engagement with a high reach shows that a business may need to reevaluate what posts are being put out and how to more efficiently post so customers lean into their business more. High engagement with low reach shows them that they have a strong customer connection but may want to broaden their reach to gain more customers; in my opinion, this is much better because reach is easier to achieve than engagement but engagement may also suffer if a business broadens their reach without adjusting their engagement techniques for a larger audience. 

3. 

    Businesses can use Facebook Insights to measure how far their posts will go and how committed their customers are to the brand and their purchase intent. If metrics are low overall, a business should see this and work towards improving their reach and engagement; this can be done by boosting posts, posting about more relevant topics, refraining from posting about more personal topics, posting more often, and other similar methods. Reach can also be improved by seeing what time and which day of the week that posts are being seen most often so that posts can be put out around these same times so their customers will most likely see them.

    The type of content can also be evaluated and a business will be able to see which posts had more reach, engagement, and who it targeted best. This can redirect what posts should be made more often; if a video does better than a photo or plain text post this is good sign that the business should make more video content to reach more customers and have them engage which can ultimately drive more traffic to them.

    Page likes are the best way that a business can check the demographics of their customer base. Facebook profiles for customers contain plenty of public information such as gender, age, location, interests, education levels that the customers have provided themselves. This all can be used to improve the content of the posts to better target the audience they have; rather than have a broad idea of the content that should be posted a business can focus in on a specific group to increase their engagement. Likes can also be broken down and viewed to see what dates most of the likes came in and a business can check their post history to see what kind of content most stuck out to new and current customers. The business can use this to draw in more potential customers and keep their current customers aware of their brand.

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