Using Facebook Analytics to Understand Engaging Video Styles
In today’s presentation, we share our experience with using video on Facebook, and how that has impacted engagement and participation during our most recent test of short video clips. There are two parts of our presentation. First, an overview of Facebook Insights data and charts.
And second, we’ll share the engagement metrics from three different kinds of videos that we’ve used. The style of each video is different, and offers perspective on how people engage with different types of videos.
If you have a Facebook Fan page for your organization, you get Insights data on your admin page.
You’ll have choices: Overview, Likes, Reach, and Talking About This.
Overview will reveal the number of Likes, Friends of Fans, which is the number of unique people who are friends with those who like our page. People Talking About This reveals how many people like our page, post comments, share our post, along with a few other action items within the past 7 days. Weekly Total Reach is the number of people who have seen content associated with our page in the past 7 days.
The Likes tab reveals considerable demographic data and geographic location of fans.
The Reach tab reveals who has seen our posts. Notice how the chart has changed. Here you’ll see the reach favors a younger demographic with the highest reach for people age 25-34.
Under Talking About This, we see it’s people age 45-64 who are more likely who like, comment, and share posts.
When you’re ready to get more granular data, click the Export Data tab to download data into an Excel spreadsheet. Depending upon the report you choose, you may have more than two dozen columns of data. It’s a bit overwhelming.
We took a deeper dive into the Excel spreadsheets to identify the engagement of specific posts that included video.
Over the past few months, we’ve posted three distinct types of videos. If you follow our blog, you know that for Christmas Shows we used a series of two to three minute videos we called Behind-the-Curtain.
We’ve also used music videos, delivering more of a content marketing video format, where we take full length recorded songs, three to five minutes long, and match it with images to compliment the music.
And last month, we introduced short video clips as the format in a name that tune contest. Each clip featured a new song that would be introduced on the show for the first time. Each of these video clips was twenty to thirty-five seconds long.
We downloaded numbers from Facebook and sorted through a vast amount of information, and then choose engagement statistics from three of each of these video styles. We used promoted posts for all of these videos, and while there is some skewing of data because the number of fans liking the page has grown tremendously in recent months, meaning earlier videos had fewer fans seeing it and sharing it, we still believe there is learning for us about the video styles we have used.
As you can see on the screen next to me, the short video clips had the highest average lifetime post total reach. A significant contribution to that difference is that several hundred more fans have been attracted to the fan page since after the behind-the-curtain videos were released.
The longer music videos had the highest engagement and featured content the audience wanted to experience. This format generated the highest number of likes, comments and shares, reinforcing the effectiveness of using video in content marketing.
Even though the numbers for lifetime reach and engagement from our behind-the-curtain videos were smaller in absolute numbers, we believe the percentage of engagement is respectable. More importantly, though, is that the campaign where we used behind the curtain videos and music videos produced a sales increase of 20 percent.
Our conclusion from these results tells us that it’s a combination of video styles that should be used to effectively market your organization. Audiences can burn-out quickly if you repeat the same approach over and over. One of our challenges, and a challenge you most surely share, is how do you build on your success and offer up something new and different that continues to engage your audience, and at the same time, generate leads, sell more of your product or increase contributions.