We all know understanding Facebook insights are crucial to effectively reaching people online, but anyone who has worked with Facebook analytics lately will tell you they can be SO darn confusing! 

Thankfully, you don’t have to navigate them alone because this week we’re taking a deeper, dare I say, geekier dive into the metrics behind your posts. 

We attempt to unveil that dark, mysterious and moving target black hole that is Facebook Insights. 

Click here for the video version of this blog.

You know the old saying, “the only thing constant is change” and Facebook is a master of the change up. The Facebook business page layout got a “facelift” in September 2020 and it continues to evolve, as even more changes were introduced in early January. 

First things first: If you don’t even have a Church Facebook page yet, stop reading this article and read this one: How to Set Up a Church Facebook Page with NEW FACEBOOK then come back in a few weeks after you have collected some data.

By the way, all of the following navigation is for a desktop device, not mobile – because, of course that’s different too!

Finding Facebook Insights in 2020 Layout

From your home business page, the Insights selection is on the left menu, a little more than half way down for most users, under Manage Page.

Once you click into the Insights tab, you’re presented with a nice graphical representation of key metrics about your page. You have the option to view the metrics for these time periods:

• Today
• Yesterday
• Last 7 days
• Last 28 days

We believe that 28 days is a good time frame in which to monitor your metrics and respond accordingly. By the way, Facebook Business Suite dives deeper and allows custom date ranges to be selected for monitoring post engagement. 

For details on each area, you can single click the title of each area from this graphic OR select the area from the left side menu under Manage Page.

Organic vs Paid

What’s the difference, exactly?

One thing to notice in the graphics display is the color coded legend that distinguishes “organic” and “paid”.

Organic essentially means “free”. Your posts have “reached” Facebook users as part of the natural algorithm of Facebook and not because of any action you took to intentionally target them.

Paid is when you boost posts or buy ads to target a specific audience. 

Most of your metrics are broken down by organic versus paid. If you don’t regularly boost posts or buy ads, you have no doubt seen your organic reach decline over recent months. 

This is a result of the Facebook algorithm changing to favor paid ads over organic reach.

Fear not, we’ve got some tips for helping you bridge that gap. 

There are a lot of numbers, on this overview page, what does it all mean and what’s most important?

Likes vs Follows

What’s the difference, exactly?

Someone who likes your page has made a public declaration of that affirmation and is letting the world know; and more importantly, letting you know. 

Someone who follows your page is privately declaring they want to see your content in their feed. No one else will see that they have followed you.  

The number of likes and follows is closely related because they are essentially the same subset of people. But don’t get hung up on this, because, guess what? Facebook is changing it and LIKES are going away! Follows will be the metric to er..follow…keep your eye on. 

This change was just recently announced in early January and will likely be phased in over time to allow for people to learn about it and adjust. 

Reach vs Engagement

What’s the difference, exactly?

Reach is the number of people who saw your post come across their feed at least once. This is broken down by organic vs paid. If you notice spikes in your organic reach, refer to the Posts  you made that day to find out what was successful and resonating with your audience. Was it  something particularly humorous? A silly meme? Photo or video? Bible verse or inspirational quote? Or a personal post celebrating a joy? Take note of that and build similar post content into your digital strategy. 

Engagement is the number of people who have liked, reacted, commented or shared your post. Same as with Reach, review the Posts you made that day to see what resonated. While Reach can be thought of as waving hello as a car drives by your church, Engagement can be thought of as the car driving into your parking lot and waving back, and perhaps calling up a friend while they’re in the car to tell them they found something really interesting at this church.

What’s more important? Well, you can’t have one without the other, so they are both are important. If you are not Reaching anyone, there is no potential for Engagement. That being stated, however, Engagement is what will move the needle in the realm of the Facebook algorithm. If Facebook detects a lot of activity surrounding your posts, the algorithm begins to sense that something pretty cool is going on here, and will organically increase the reach of your page’s content. 

People vs Audience

What’s the difference, exactly?

Under the People tab, you will find the demographic breakdowns  by gender, age and geographic location of:

• People who are your ‘fans’ i.e. who like/follow your page
• People who your content has reached. I.e. your post or About page has displayed in their feed.

It’s important to know who you are reaching with your posts from a marketing standpoint to assess what posts are doing well; you’ll want to keep doing more of that! This demographic data becomes valuable when  you want to boost a post or run an ad, as this gives you a head start to what type of people, i.e what “demographic”  you are already reaching. 

We would argue that as a church community you should also know who you are not reaching. 

Especially if you have content geared towards gender/location/age-oriented ministry, you want to be effective in your reach to these targeted people.

Audience can be considered a group of people who have certain characteristics for which you are targeting an ad or page boost. 

If your demographics show that your followers skew toward one gender or age group, then your organic reach for a post where they are not the target audience would not do well. Here’s where it would be a good idea to create an ad and target a specific audience. Facebook Business Suite and Ad Manager provide a treasure trove of tools and tips on slicing and dicing characteristics to create specialized audiences.

Note that the numbers on your People page are estimates! If they don’t exactly match back to your number of likes, that’s ok. That’s not a bug in Facebook! 

The key data to be mining here is knowing who your target audience is and what content they are engaging with. 

Speaking of data mining, the Posts page under Insights is a gold mine of information. On one summary grid it shows the post graphic, title, the type of post (photo, video, link, status), how many people it reached (organic and paid) and the amount and type of engagement. Quite conveniently, there is a “Boost” button in the last column designed to entice you to continue to promote your well performing posts. 

Every faith community should seriously consider an ad budget for social media outreach. It really is not all that expensive. A little bit goes a long way in increasing your reach!

Be Well Rounded

Though we have been Facebook focused in this post, we would encourage you to have a well rounded social media strategy and explore what works on other platforms like Instagram (including Reels and IGTV) and TikTok.  In other words, don’t put all your eggs in the Facebook basket. Facebook is a publicly traded company whose purpose is to make money for their investors. 

Their main source of revenue is charging you to run ads. We suspect the algorithms will make it increasingly harder for business pages to get reach without purchasing ads; not impossible, but harder. 

That’s why knowing your metrics, your audience, your well performing content is so vital to the success of your social media strategy. 

Facebook likes to see people engaging with people, not businesses/churches. It is, after all, a social network. This is why the engagement metric is so important. 

Encourage your staff and members to comment, react and share your church’s content and tag their friends or relatives. It doesn’t matter if a member tags a non member on a post displaying an inspirational quote or funny meme. Who doesn’t like or need that some days? It’s about relationships; building them, nurturing them and honoring them. 

Now, go and tell the others!