When you launch a new product you often need to build awareness. Many types of marketing channels, both organic and paid, can serve a purpose in generating awareness, but social platforms (generally) and Facebook (specifically) are tailor made to spread content from person to person.
It can, however, be hard to measure how well you are building your brand and generating awareness on Facebook. Especially if you’re used to tracking specific conversions (i.e, sales) where you have strict performance indicators and goals to adhere to (cost per conversion vs. return on ad spend).
In comparison, measuring branding can seem less exact and less rigorous, resulting in many questions that one has to work through.
- How do you decide what awareness measures to focus on?
- How do you define what awareness means to you and your needs?
- Do you simply try to reach as many people as you can?
- Do see how people respond to your post by looking at post likes, shares, and clicks?
- Are page likes important?
- Do you want people to visit your Facebook page or end up on your website?
All of these questions are important to ask in order to figure out what your awareness building strategy is. If you simply want to build your social media presence on Facebook, driving page likes and posts that get shared and liked will be helpful, but if you’re trying to also drive people to a site to see what you have to offer, you’ll likely want to focus on clicks and how many people are being directed from Facebook to an external site.
We’ll discuss two ways to measure your branding efforts on Facebook based on whether you’re trying to build your presence or if you’re trying to drive traffic to an external site. In the end, you’ll leave with some food for thought on how you might measure your own branding strategies and how you define their success.
Building A Facebook Presence
So you have a new product you want to introduce to the world, but your site is under construction and your product is in an invite-only beta. You know the timeline is soon when you’ll need to have people access, install, or use your product for the first time and you need a jumpstart on building that audience.
What can you do to get started? You need to get your social media program up and running. In Facebook, it means you need to get your business page set up and start introducing it to the rest of the platform.
You’ll likely be posting updates and content to your page as a way to engage with your page fans and those posts are going to be extremely useful in building a base of Facebook fans for your future product endeavors.
The easiest way to grow your list of Facebook fans and get page likes is to boost posts that are already on your page. This way content you write for your existing fans can also be used to grab new ones. When boosting a post, you choose your audience like any other paid ad on Facebook. Pick the demographics, interests, location, etc. that fits your potential ideal customer and target your post to them.
As for metrics, you’ll want to ultimately look at how many page likes you get as that’s the primary aim of boosting your posts. Beyond understanding how much traffic you’re driving to your Facebook page, you’ll want to look at other types of engagement like post likes, shares, and comments.
These metrics will help you understand which posts are resonating the most with users by how much they interact with them. You can then compare different types of posts by how well they perform. The goal being to find the posts that get engagement (post likes, share, and comments) and lead to page likes.
Driving Traffic To An External Site
You’ve got your Facebook page set up and running, but now you need to introduce your newly launched site. Here, you’ll likely shy away from boosting posts that lead to your Facebook page and rely on other ad formats that allow users to click through to a site.
You’ll still want to pay attention to shares, likes, and comments as they often are an early indicator of how well the ad is being received, but you’ll also want to layer on clicks and click through rate. Since your ultimate aim here is to drive traffic to an external site, clicks and click through rate become the ultimate metrics to focus on.
When creating and testing different ads, you can use click volume and click through rate to determine which ads generate the most traffic and which don’t. Then you’ll be able to optimize your ad creation toward the ads that drive the most traffic to your site.
Conclusion
Understanding what defines “awareness” and how to measure whether you are succeeding or not can be difficult, especially if you’re used to tracking specific conversion actions. It’s also an essential part of getting new products into the market and being part of the conversation. We’ve discussed basic ways to view awareness within the Facebook platform, but the overall key is to define your grand goal and what you can use to measure it. Then use that metric to guide your strategy.
