In order to continue our goal of transparency, CREE has decided to post the insights from our own analytics taken from our Facebook page. This post will cover the second quarter of 2019 (April-June).
Overview
CREE posts on Facebook on Mondays and Fridays. Occasionally, Wednesdays are added to our content calendar to highlight special events and blog posts our CREE team has written.
In the second quarter of 2019, April 1st through June 30th, CREE’s Facebook page posted 28 entries. The graph below illustrates our post dates and the total reach each post had. The total reach for the quarter was 10,304 with an average total reach of 368 views per day.
The total reach for viewers who like our page was 4,416 for the quarter with an average of 158 views per day. Not a terrible percentage (3.57% reach per day ((calculated by taking average daily reach DIVIDED BY total reach for quarter ) considering our Facebook page has 635 likes and 668 follows.
During the second quarter, CREE posted a lot of achievements and highlights of our team members, undergraduate students working on research, and highlighting stakeholders. These posts increased our reach to people outside of our page’s audience.
CREE’s Facebook page did see an increase in our audience by adding 27 new followers during this quarter and an overall engagement rate of 8.79% for the quarter. As a reminder, engagement is calculated by taking engaged users (those who have liked the post, shared the post, or commented on the post) *DIVIDED BY total post reach (the total number of people who have been reached with the post) THEN multiple this number by 100 to get a percentage.
Deeper into the Analytics
When breaking down the data further and analyzing it we learned that our audience engages with our posts the most between 5:00 p.m. – 5:59 p.m. A signal that people are checking Facebook at the end of the workday as opposed to the middle.
In sorting the data exported from Facebook, CREE organizes our posts into categories based on material in the message. Of our four categories, posts about Brand Image/ Culture and Third-Party Content had the highest engagement rate compared to our other categories. This shows us that our audience enjoys seeing posts that involve people or businesses they may know. Also, in these posts, we tag the individual or business featured. This increases the viewership of the posts to everyone that the individual or business is in communication with and overall increases the entire reach of the post.
When diving further into our post subcategories, where we drill down to define the post message which illustrates that posts involving CREE team members and stakeholder have a greater average of engagement when comparing it to other subcategories.
When it came to the call to action included on each Facebook post CREE published, we noticed that many posts we published did not have a call to action but still had a high engagement rate. This is because those posts featured a subject that the audience wanted to interact with. Whether that interaction was simply liking the business being highlighted or commenting their congratulations for a CREE team member doing something in their community.
Other call to actions that performed well included asking the audience to comment with their own examples from the information given in the post. For example, “What things do you do to help employees blend their work and family life?” Directing the viewer to a website is another call to action that was received well by our audience when looking at the average engagement rate. This proves that our educational posts on Mondays are helping direct our audience to information and resources that are helpful to their business practices.
Best and Least Performing Posts
Here is a look at our top three best performing posts. We like to pick out both our best and least performing posts to depict what our audience engages with most and what we can better work on with our other posts to increase their reach.
1. Best performing post.
This post had an engagement rate of 33.51%, total reach of 194 people, 176 who liked our page and engaged 65 users. It highlighted one of the businesses that attended a workshop in Beloit hosted by CREE co-founder Dr. Cheryl Boyer. This post not only engaged our followers, but also the Kettle followers as well.
2. Best performing post.
This post had a 29.55% engagement with a total reach of 988 people, 198 who liked our page, and engaged 292 users. This post went into our Brand Image category and spotlighted our CREE intern, Allison Wakefield working in her hometown Extension Office. This post was liked by many because it contains tags for not only Allison, but also the county-based K-State Research and Extension Office where she was working. It was shared by the KSRE office and Allison’s family which engaged many likes and comments from friends, family, and 4-H families that were excited to have Allison helping out. The call to action also asked viewers to comment examples of how they work with employees balancing family life and to stay tuned for the following week to see what Allison did in the office.
3. Best performing post.
This post is similar to the second post. An engagement rate of 20.34% and total reach of 654, 184 who like the page and engaged 133 users. This was a follow-up post for our CREE intern describing her duties and projects while working in the KSRE office. This post had no call to action, a less professional photo taken and is a similar post published a week after the previous. Possibly being the reason it had less engagement than the above post.
1. Least performing post.
This post had the lowest engagement rate of 2.05% with a total reach of 146 people, 135 who like the page, it only engaged 3 users. This Educational post about Twitter may not have performed well because it is information our audience does not have interest in given that they were engaging with CREE on Facebook.
2. Least performing post.
This post had an engagement rate of 2.67%, reaching 412 people, 115 who like the page, but only engaging 11 users. This post was one of multiple similar posts published within a week of one another. Though it was getting the information to our audience multiple times that CREE co-founder Dr. Cheryl Boyer would be going Live, perhaps it was too redundant for our audience and caused a lack of interest.
3.Least performing post.
With an engagement rate of 2.94%, total reach of 136, 130 who like the page, and only 4 engaged users. This education post could have possibly performed better with a more appropriate and eye-catching photo to match the message about the EDEN program. Perhaps the message could have also been written in a way to better illustrate the resources available in the post to help viewers with disaster relief resources. It’s also possible that our CREE audience did not find disaster preparedness content interesting or wasn’t the type of content expected from CREE.
Goals for next quarter
- Share content from third party stakeholders to our Facebook page.
- a. This will be under no specific timeline, just sharing content includes good examples of information and presentations given from real world businesses doing a great job of highlighting their business, engaging with consumers, and building a brand by sharing their story.
- Continue to highlight stakeholders through our Facebook page to illustrate the vast differences among small rural businesses and the unique things they are doing in their communities.
- Curate more pictures that are eye catching and relate to the post as best as possible.
- Continue to provide important information to our audience, but in a more polished message that is useful and quick to read when scrolling through Facebook.
- Find out what social media outlets or specific details about social media marketing that our audience wants to learn more about and creating message and materials to serve that need.
- Target engagement rate for third quarter of 9%.