Reach on Facebook is an emotional and controversial topic!

So let’s start by diving into some juicy definitions…

Facebook reach is basically the number of unique people who have viewed your content and there are many different kinds of reach including page, posts, organic, viral and paid. Understanding your audience and learning when you are reaching them most will give your business a huge advantage over your competitors.

Reach Is The Lifeblood Of Your Fan Page

 
Without a good understanding of your reach, not only will you not be able to get the most engagement out of your fans but you will also be losing out on a chance to grow your audience and create content made specifically for them.

Now of course there are many variables involved with reach. For one, not all of your Fans will login to Facebook the day you post your content. And of the Fans that do, they will be on at different times.

So as a business owner who wants to use Facebook to grow their business, it’s crucial that you take advantage of the stats that Facebook provides you and today I want to discuss some of the ways that you can measure your reach so that you can market to your Fans more effectively.

Are You Ready To Dig For Gold?

 
There’s gold hiding inside them thar Facebook Fan page hills… you just need to know where to look. Let me explain…

You want to reach more of your Facebook Fans right? Of course you do! If you are a business owner using Facebook – you would love to reach ALL of your Fans ALL of the time. That would be perfect but obviously that is not going to happen. But what you can do is study your Fans to figure out the BEST way to reach them.

And just like gold, you will have to sift through an enormous amount of rock to find the gold. Yes heavy, sweaty, back breaking work is needed to find those lovely little nuggets. That is unless you know exactly where to look for the gold 🙂

And lucky for us, Facebook wants us to find the gold. They provide beautiful shiny nuggets in the form of data on your Fan Page’s performance. Study this data and you will begin to understand the reaction to your posts and how to make changes to improve them, if needed, to reach as many Fans as you possibly can.

Step 1: Where To Find The Gold

 
Ok, get your shovels ready because I’m about to show you exactly where to start digging to uncover the gold 🙂

First you will need to go to your Fan Page Admin panel and click on “Insights”.

Next click on the “Export” tab as shown below…

Now select the date range that you want to download data for and select “New” export. Then download both the “Page level data” and the “Post level data” (download each level data separately).

Now that you have downloaded the data, let’s take a look at the most important “nuggets” from them.

Step 2: Uncovering The Gold Nuggets

Fans You Reached With Your Posts

First we’ll start off with finding out how many Fans you reached with your post. Open up the “Post level data” spreadsheet and take a look at column T (Lifetime Post reach by people who Like your Page). That is where you will find the total number of Fans reached.

To find out your organic reach, just subtract the total number in column V (Lifetime Paid reach of a post by people who Like your page) from column T.

Fans Who Liked Your Page and Were Online

To find out when your Fans were online, you will need to open up your “Page level data” spreadsheet this time. Then go to the last column in your spreadsheet (BT). Here you will see your daily count of people who Liked your page and who were online on the specified day.

Bonus: If you divide column B in your spreadsheet by column BT, you will find out the percentage of your Fans that were online each day.

Fans Who Were Engaged With Your Posts

Another interesting metric to check out is how many of your Fans actually engaged with your posts. Reaching them is one thing but what’s more important is how many are actually interacting with your content. The Engaged users data shows you all clicks and all stories that were generated about your Page.

You can find that information in columns E, F & G.

Fans Who Are Actually “Consuming” Your Posts

This is almost the same as the Engaged information. The difference being that the Consumers information includes all clicks, whether they result in a story or not. Columns AV, AW & AX show the number of people who clicked on any of your content.

Fans Who Are Taking Negative Actions

Negative actions, or Negative Feedback, is an action taken by a Fan such as hiding one of your posts, hiding all future posts of yours, un-Liking your page or reporting your post as spam. You can find that info in columns BB, BC, BD, BE, BF & BG.

You need to keep your negative feedback as low as possible. Facebook gives posts with a high negative feedback less exposure and Fan Pages with a high average negative feedback will end up receiving less Fan reach over time.

Step 3: Cashing In The Gold

 
I have now shown you the exact spot to dig for gold, I have given you the tools to dig up the gold – now it’s up to you to take those beautiful shiny gold nuggets and cash them in and invest them back into your business.

So take the data that you have found and study it. By doing this you will figure out your Fans habits and interactions with your posts. Also experiment with different strategies with your Fans to see how they react and stick with the ones that work well. By regularly keeping an eye on your stats and testing new strategies – you will be able to grow your business at a much faster pace.

The most important thing to remember now that you have gone through all the effort to find the gold in these reports… now you have to do something with it. Take ACTION on what you have learned! And this should not be a one time thing – you should be checking your Fan Page stats on a regular basis. You have access to this gold mine right in your own backyard… and if you had a gold mine in your backyard, would you only go down there once or would you go down there every day? 🙂