With more than a billion users, Facebook marketing has become an essential component of any inbound marketing campaign, but measuring success on this diverse social network is not easy. 
In the past, most companies measured the success of their ads, website and posts through Likes, and most marketing teams were willing to support this flawed metric because it is relatively easy to purchase Likes with coupons and giveaways.
Once a Facebook Like campaign was over, however, many organizations realized that their Facebook marketing dollars weren’t substantially increasing conversions. It has become increasingly important to accurately measure all of your social media marketing efforts.
If you are eager to leverage your dollars spent on Facebook marketing into greater sales, you should re-align your expectations with user engagement rather than Likes. Different marketing teams may provide different definitions for engagement, but ultimately it should represent the number of users who have interacted with your content.
Facebook provides an Engaged Users metric, which measures any interactions with your page or posts. This includes video plays, page views, likers and people who discussed your content on other pages.
The Engaged Users metric provides some clear advantages over Likes:
More comprehensive—The Engaged Users metric provides a wider view of the interactions with your content. While Likes measure some degree of interaction, there is wide variation in the interest that spurred that click. Many of those Likes may have been a result of an emotional response to the videos or photos, or it may have been caused by a keen interest in the product or brand.
- Measures interest—While many people may view your content, you should be more focused upon the number of visitors who demonstrate some active interest. Whether this is sharing, playing videos or following links, this provides a more accurate understanding of the visitors who made a connection with your organization.
- Provides feedback—The Engaged Users metric (Seen above and found when using the Admin Panel under "Insights") provides more reliable feedback about which posts, videos and photos were most effective in spurring responses. You may find that a more accurate figure requires dividing the number of Engaged Users by the number of Reached Users, which are those who viewed the pages. This percentage allows you to understand the magnitude of impact your new content has on viewers. In response, you can better tailor future content to those interests.
- Negative responses—While knowing the number of people engaged by your Facebook marketing campaign is important, it is also important to recognize the number of people who are providing negative responses to your brand. If you are only looking at Likes, you are ignoring serious issues that may be linked to your ad campaign or products which could prove extremely deleterious to your brand. The Engaged Users statistic should also include this figure; you only need to click on the graphic on the Facebook analytics site to learn how many of these users were put off by your Facebook marketing.
Facebook is an extremely powerful tool for any inbound marketing campaign, but utilizing it effectively requires some study.
In an effort to support Facebook marketing, the company has wisely introduced the Engaged Users tool, and your company should be using the results to fine tune your marketing strategy.
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