More and more businesses are focussing on Facebook Groups as a way to grow their online presence. With the benefits of reach, influence and building a community around your industry or brand, Groups are becoming a favourite way to market organically on Facebook.
But now that your business is using Facebook Groups what can you do to assess it’s success? Recently, Facebook launched Insights for Facebook Groups, and there are plenty of things we can learn from these insights to help you manage your group more effectively and assess if it’s meeting your goals.
Related: How To: Set Up A Facebook Group [CHECKLIST]
How do you get to the insights section?
If you’re an admin of a group, you will see the option for Group Insights on the sidebar when you head to your Group. Just click on it and view your insights.
It will give you an overview, but don’t forget that you can also hit ‘Download Data’ and export your insights into Excel, where you can see even more information.
On Pages, Facebook usually limits exporting more than 90 days of data, but for Groups, I’ve been able to export nearly 6 months of data from a Group. If you are looking for a longer time period to study, I export them in three-month sections then collating them.
When exporting your data, I suggest exporting “All” so you can see all your key info in the one export.
What can you find out from Facebook Groups Insights?
Below is a rundown of some of the key pieces of data I find useful:
Popular dates and times
When are you audience most likely to comment and engage? Once you know the days and times your audience are most likely to be online, you can design your posting strategy to be at times they are online, or save your most important content for the peak days.
Group Growth
If you’re tracking your group size, you can easily see how your group has grown over time. You might be able to spot patterns in the group growing significantly, so you can double down any marketing efforts correlated to that time.
Related: 8 Must-Do Tactics to Grow Your Vibrant Facebook Group
Engaged Members
All strong communities will have members that are more engaged than others. Some people love to lurk, and some love to comment. Actively engage and get to know your best members to reward them for being part of the group and helping it grow into a buzzing community.
If you’ve got a very large group, you might even find those most active members are interested in transitioning over to become a community moderator with admin rights.
Top Posts
When you export your data, you can sort your posts in excel based on highest engagement, whether it’s comments or likes. You can then get an idea of what content people are engaging with most, and create more similar content or conversations.
Reach
Looking at your posts, you can see how many people have “viewed” each post in the export. If reach is something you’re measuring, you can get a rough idea of how many people are seeing your content.
Demographics
I’ve seen some conflicting reports around whether an overview of your group demographics is available. In my group, it isn’t, but it’s possible this does exist for certain regions in the world, or certain group sizes.
However, there is also a really simple way to learn more about your demographics: look at your top contributors, and view their Facebook profile. Even if their profile is set to private, you’ll get an overview of their age and gender, to give you an idea of the demographics your groups attracts. This is useful for considering the content, conversations and needs of your audience members.
Discussion Themes
What are people discussing in your group? Are there key questions or topics? From Excel, pop the posts from members into a Word Cloud generator to find out if there are discussions which are hot topics which you might want to discuss in more depth (or, add it to your blog ideas listing if it’s in high demand!).
Motivators
It can be really useful to understand why people are joining your group, so you can create content which meets those needs to create happy group members. However, this isn’t something you can get from a report, but it’s something you can manually track.
If you have questions people need to answer before joining your group, it can be really useful to keep a record of the responses, because Facebook doesn’t store them (unfortunately!).
In my group, I ask people why they want to join or what they want to learn. If you collect these responses over time, you will see what things people want to learn about, and you can create more content to address those queries.
You could even try the little word cloud technique here, too!
Recap
Running a report monthly or quarterly on your Facebook Group can give you really valuable insights about your audience, what they are engaging with, what they are interested and more. To help you group grow and succeed, regularly paying attention to what is working, and what isn’t is essential to build a community that will last a long time.
If you’re looking for a powerpoint template of a Facebook Groups report, check out my template below, which you can customise to your needs, otherwise, you can create your own, too.
Happy reporting!
Facebook Groups Reporting Template
Need to create a report for your Facebook Group, but you’d like a template to build off? This powerpoint template is an easy-to-customize document, with built-in tables and charts covering off all the essentials to cover off when reporting on a Facebook Group.
