How to Analyse a Facebook page

Understanding the impact that the content put out on your brand's Facebook page has on your audience is a critical component in objectively analyzing the performance of your Facebook efforts. Conducting the analysis, however, is often easier said than done.

Facebook Insights provides a nice interface which allows you to see a number of metrics related to each post, but there are quite a few other post level metrics that are beneficial to the analysis yet are not visible in the interface. Gaining access to the additional metrics can be done by either using the

Facebook Graph API or exporting the data from Facebook Insights.

Once you have the data, it's time to get organized.

There are many ways organize the data for analysis, but the focus here will be on three top level segments and four metric categories, each of which can also be segmented.

After the analysis, you will have insights into questions such as "what type of post or mix of posts should I utilize in order to achieve a specific objective?" and "when is the ideal time to post?"

Segments

The top level segments are the type of post, such as link, photo, video or status, the time of day that the content was posted, and the day of week that it was posted.

Each of these will provide insights on its own or can be combined with other segments to provide even more in-depth insights. This information is provided by Facebook for every post.

You can also refrain from segmenting at all and instead compare all posts against each other. This can often be a good starting point to get a high level view of your individual posts.

Metric Categories

The next level down from the segments gets into the metrics that can be used to analyze the performance of each segment. The metrics can be organized into four categories, each of which can be seen in the figure below.

1. Exposure: This one is pretty self-explanatory. It shows the number of impressions that were generated by your posts. This can be viewed as either total impressions, unique impressions (reach), or impressions by users who have liked your page. These metrics are useful on their own, but become even more useful when used as part of derived calculations, which will be touched on at the end.
2. Consumption: This one moves beyond exposure to having some sort of meaningful interaction with your post. This category is called consumption since it is an indication that the user went from being exposed to your post to consuming the content of the post. The sub-metrics of consumption include video plays, photo views, link clicks, and other clicks on the post. Similar to exposure, consumption can also be looked at in aggregate or segmented by the number of unique users who consumed the content and the number of consumptions that came from users who have liked the page.
3. Engagement: This is the step you hope users take after being exposed to the post and consuming the posts content. The sub-metrics here include likes of the content, comments about the content, and shares of the content. Engagement can also be viewed in aggregate or segmented by unique users who engaged and engagements that came from users who have liked the page.
4. Negative Feedback: This is one that you hope to minimize since it is an indication that the content you're releasing isn't relevant or viewed as spam. Examples of sub-metrics for this category include reporting the post as spam and clicking the X button, which hides the post from the users view.

All the metrics described above are easily accessible using the Facebook Insights export feature or for more advanced users via the Graph API.

You're probably familiar with some of these metrics just from using the Facebook Insights interface, but you need to bring the data out of Facebook Insights in order to perform the real analysis.

Once you have your data together in a spreadsheet, you can supplement it with your own derived calculations that will add value by providing greater insights into the performance of your content.

Just like the metric categories and sub-metrics described above, the derived metrics should also be segmented to give greater insights.

Some insightful metrics that can be used in aggregate or segmented include:

• Percent of page fans reached by each post
• Page fan engagement rate vs. non-page fan engagement rate
• Consumption rate of videos vs. consumption rate of photos
• Negative feedback rate for each post type

These are just a few basic examples of derived metrics. There are many others that can also be computed depending on the objectives of your Facebook page.

Is SOX Gonna Hang You out to Dry?

The US Securities and Exchange Commission announced Friday that starting in nine months, it will require the smallest public companies to provide the auditor assessments of internal controls over financial reporting that are required by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.

Under Section 404 of Sarbox, public companies and their independent auditors are each required to report to the public on the effectiveness of the companies' internal controls. Companies with a public float below $75 million have been given extra time to design, implement, and document their controls before their auditors must attest to the controls' effectiveness.

That extension will cease starting with the 10-K reports of companies with fiscal years ending on or after June 15, 2010. Formerly, that deadline was for fiscal years ending on or after December 15, 2009. The extension was granted so that the SEC's Office of Economic Analysis could complete a study of whether additional guidance provided to company managers and auditors in 2007 was effective in reducing the costs of compliance.

Because the study was published in September, less than three months before the December 15 deadline, the SEC decided that adding more time was "appropriate and reasonable so that small public companies and their auditors can better plan for the required auditor attestation," according to the SEC.

While the largest U.S. publicly traded companies are in their fifth year of complying with Section 404, smaller companies have yet to fully comply. It was only last year that nonaccelerated filers — defined by the SEC as those with a market capitalization of below $75 million — began filing management's assessments of internal controls with their 10-Ks. Now, such companies that have fiscal years ending June 15 of next year will have to get their auditors' signoff on their internal controls, also known as 404(b) reports, for the first time.

"Since there will be no further Commission extensions, it is important for all public companies and their auditors to act with deliberate speed to move toward full Section 404 compliance," SEC chairman Mary Schapiro said in a release.

The controversial Sarbox provision has long drawn the ire of companies — particularly small public issuers — because of its allegedly high cost of compliance. The act, passed following the wave of corporate accounting scandals that included Enron and WorldCom, requires the SEC to mandate that corporate internal-controls reports state management's responsibility for setting up and maintaining an adequate internal-controls structure and procedures for financial reporting. It also must contain an assessment of the effectiveness of the company's controls structure and procedures for financial reporting, as of the end of the company's most-recent fiscal year.

The part of Section 404 related to the SEC's current action requires a company's auditors to attest to and report on the internal-controls assessments made by the management of the companies the accountants audit.

While the reporting and auditor attestation grew out of the 2002 law passed by Congress, all U.S. public companies have been required to maintain internal-accounting controls since 1977.

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