Creating profitable Facebook marketing efforts for your brand can present itself to be an overwhelming process. Numerous pages, distribution methods, monitoring and interaction can be a lot for someone who is also trying to manage their additional business efforts. In this article, we will provide you with simple ways to monitor and measure your social media marketing efforts, allowing you to feel most confident that you are taking in the ROI that you deserve.

There are currently more social media users online than ever before. As told by Statista, "In 2016, 78 percent of U.S. Americans had a social media profile. According to estimates, the number of worldwide social media users reached 1.96 billion and is expected to grow to some 2.5 billion by 2018." 

It's time to get going on Facebook! Already a Facebook Advertising ninja? Check out our other resources below: 

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 Fair enough to say, if your business or brand is not yet on social media, you are certainly missing out on major conversion, cross promotion, and brand connection opportunities. For those who are creating content, posting, and interacting, here are 3 major elements of Facebook analytic data you should be looking at when attempting to monitor your Facebook social media marketing efforts. 

1) Social Media Reach 

Monitoring your Facebook reach enables you to decipher the content you are producing, and decide if an alternative route needs to be taken, in order to get users interested in what you are sharing. Facebook offers three types of "reach" results, each of those is highlighted below using definitions provided by the trustworthy Social Media Examiner. 

"Organic Reach is the reach Facebook gives you for free. It happens in the news feed when your fans see your updates. There are other possibilities, such as random users visiting your page, but these are insignificant compared to news feed views by fans." - SME

"Viral Reach consists of the people who see your content because someone else created a story about it. For example, if a fan likes, comments or shares your post, their friends will see your post even if they aren’t fans of your page. The same is true if you’ve paid to reach larger audiences who may or may not already be your fans. If one of those targeted people creates a story, their friends will see it as well. Both are viral reach."- SME

"Paid Reach is a subset of post reach and is pretty easy to track and report. You paid for it, so you know where it came from. If you pay to promote your posts, your post reach is going to be much bigger than your standard organic reach (because you’ve paid to reach more of your fans)." - SME 

Using things such as the "When My Fans Are Online" tool provided by Facebook, offers you a unique chance to dial in your prime time to post your brands content. 

2) Facebook Engagement: Are People Reacting? 

Now having a more solid understanding of using "reach" to monitor and measure your Facebook marketing efforts, you can begin to look at engagement. While "reach" is the number of people who are visually seeing your content at some point in its life cycle, Facebook engagement is a measure that goes even further in depth, and allows you to decipher who is actually clicking on and interacting with your posts. As told by Sprout Social, "Engagement is the number of individuals who have clicked anywhere on one of your Facebook Page posts. For example, someone could have liked one of your posts, commented on it, or shared it." While social media reach numbers are important, measuring your Facebook marketing efforts with an engagement report can be highly valuable. Gaining a better understanding of when users are most likely to interact with your content allows you to create a highly effective social publishing content calendar. 

3) Successful Social Media Conversion 

You've been working tirelessly on formulating an excellent social media plan, and it's time to see it pay off! The final step to monitor and measure your Facebook marketing efforts is to analyze conversion rates. A successful conversion can be seen in a number of ways: 

• Registrations for content downloads
• Webinar registrations
• Online lead generation form completions
• Phone-in leads
• Online sales

Before the launch of your social media campaigns, it's important to set a benchmark goal. Take the time to discuss with your team, "what is a successful conversion for us on this project?', or "what must be achieved to receive positive ROI from this campaign?" 

ImageWorks, LLC | Inbound Marketing 

Using these simple ways to monitor and measure your Facebook marketing efforts is a powerful step in the process of launching and maintaining successful campaigns. To effectively track conversion, it is also of great importance to have a properly built, optimized, and captivating website to use as a central hub for all of your Inbound Marketing efforts. Our ImageWorks,LLC team is constantly pursuing and educating ourselves,clients, and community on the most up to date, effective forms of digital marketing used to grow your business.