Over the last few weeks you will probably have noticed that your reach is going down on Facebook. This means your updates may not be delivered to as many people as before.

One solution to this problem is to spend money on advertising.  But while this will solve your problem, it’s an expensive solution.

An alternative is to focus on your analytics to see what is working and not working for you or your competitors.  The key is to learn from your mistakes and capitalize on what is clearly working already.

Facebook does provide analytics on your page’s performance via Facebook Insights, but there are limitations to the information they provide.  In this article, we’ll take you through a range of 3^rd party Facebook Analytics tools that not only provide better analytics on your page’s performance but also provide added value such as competitive analysis against other pages.

RELATED CLASS: 7 Elements of Highly Effective Facebook Marketing

Here are 9 analytics tools that are worth considering.

Agorapulse

Agorapulse provide a full management tool for Facebook which includes a CRM module, a range of Facebook  applications (such as competition apps) and finally an analytics module.  

If you want analytics as part of your overall management application Agorapulse is worth considering.

Feature highlights for Facebook:

• Page and timeline level analytics overview and more detailed reports.  Graphs display breakdown of paid, organic and viral reach.
• AgoraPulse Barometer – Free access to 8 competitive analysis statistics which compares performance of your page against other pages of a similar size to yours that also ran the barometer.   This gives you an idea of reach of other pages so you know what you should be able to achieve.
• Useful analytics related to moderation of posts and content.  As moderation of content happens through AgoraPulse they can report on this, for example, average time to respond to comments. Very useful for community managers and agencies.  If you’re not responding to comments quick enough this could lead to less comments which leads to less reach.

Blitzmetrics

BlitzMetrics is an analytics tool that provides metrics for all your main social channels such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram.

Feature highlights for Facebook:

• Reporting available over 7 day, 30 day, year to date or you can select specific date periods.
• Provide customers (depending on licensing) direct access to the data so they can use business intelligence tools such as Tableau, Microstrategy, Domo, Cognos, etc. to report on the data.  This can give you a different view to what traditional analytics will provide.
• View graph reports in various formats, for example, graph view, list view.  View overview graph for each statistic and then select this to view a larger graph.
• Overview reporting available for groups of pages (e.g. if you have 10 company pages you can see an overview report for all).  This is very useful for larger companies.
• Demographic reporting with split of PTAT  (People talking about this) amongst male/female
• Provides trending of a few dozen metrics, including all metrics available for export from Facebook insights.

Komfo

Komfo provide a full social media marketing suite (including a suite of Facebook apps) with analytics as part of this.  Similar to Agorapulse if you are more interested in a full management solution Komfo provides this.

Feature highlights for Facebook:

• Post analytics on individual posts with categorization provided to allow you to clearly identify posts that were viral, spammy, engaging or penetrating.  This helps you clearly identify the best performing posts.
• Shows performance for the last 30 days for up to 100 posts for the free version of the tool.  This limit does not apply if you have a subscription to Komfo’s social media marketing suite
• ROI calculation and display in graph format split up into paid, organic and viral.
• Fan activity and influencer leaderboard
• Useful and simple competitor comparison chart with proprietary scoring which makes it easy to rate.

Post Acumen

PostAcumen (from the founders of EdgeRank Checker) aims to examine the “why” and the “how” of competitive social analytics.

Feature highlights for Facebook:

• Detailed competitive analysis which gives good actionable insights.  The actionable insights gives you specific actions you could take to improve your reach.
• Monocle real time viewer – If you are really active on your Facebook page you can monitor real-time the activity.
• A great feature is the analysis of photos where photos shared on a page are displayed in a visual with the most popular ones appearing on the top of the page.

Quintly

quintly helps to track, analyze and benchmark Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, LinkedIn and Instagram profiles.

Feature highlights for Facebook:

• Market Benchmarking – Benchmark your page against competitors to compare performance.
• Customizable Dashboards – Set up customizable dashboards to monitor key metrics for you or your competitors.  The dashboards can be converted to PDF’s.
• Automatic Reporting – Based on your dashboards you can set up automatic reports to be sent to relevant people within your organization.
• Facebook Insights Integration – You can import all your Facebook analytics data to the tool.
• Mission control – This is a live dashboard where you can monitor changes live up on the wall.

Scoreboard Social

Scoreboard Social provides simplified competitive and benchmark reporting for Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Feature highlights for Facebook:

• PDF reporting to your inbox – Get a weekly PDF which outlines the performance of your own, and/or your competitor’s pages.
• Create multiple watchlists – A watchlist is a collection of pages.  You can create multiple watchlists based on different categories of pages you are targeting.  You can also have the same page in multiple watchlists.
• View snapshot of performance – Based on the competitors in your watchlist you can view a quick overview of the top 2 posts for your competitor over the last 24 or 72 hours.  If your competitors are getting good reach maybe there are similar posts you could also try.
• Create watchlists to track your page or your competitors

Socialbakers

Socialbakers provide a suite of social media management tools, one of which is an Analytics module for Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, VK.com (Russia’s #1 social network), and more recently Instagram and LinkedIn.

Feature highlights for Facebook:

• Facebook page Country Breakdown – Overview of country level statistics such as number of Facebook fans
• Industry benchmarking – compare your page by industry and region.  If you are under performing in reach it may be related to your content as opposed to Facebook changes.
• Competitive analysis – compare performance of page versus other competitor pages
• View key influencers that are interacting on the page.
• Good reporting options, for example, side by side comparison with multiple competitors.

SumAll

SumAll is a free online software that guides your decision making by connecting all the services you use such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, PayPal, Google Analytics, and many more in one interactive chart.

Feature highlights for Facebook:

• Cross platform analytics – View your Facebook analytics in conjunction with other analytics.  This will help you understand the correlation between channels (e.g. does more Facebook interaction lead to website traffic?).
• View side by side analytics with multiple pages.
• Adjust date view to whatever date you require
• Can track as many Facebook pages as you want. Really useful for agencies with a large number of clients.

Wisemetrics

Wisemetrics Stream is an advanced social analytics and reporting solution, currently focused on Facebook but with Twitter coming in Q1 2014.

Feature highlights for Facebook:

• Save time on reporting with monthly PowerPoint export of all reports – a very visually appealing PowerPoint report provided as a full presentation.
• ROI (Return on Investment) evaluation
• Benchmark performance against competitors
• Country by country metrics for global pages – This means you can break down a page by a particular country and see information related to fans for that country.
• Historical reporting – You can report back to when the page was launched if required, this is not available within Facebook.
• Supports bit.ly integration so if you include bit.ly links, Wisemetrics Stream will track clicks on these links.
• Algorithm is used for monthly reports to provide a fairly good estimate of your unique users reached or engaged for a whole month (instead of 28 days as provided by Facebook).

Summary

Reach is a problem for most of us, but if you invest the time in doing some analysis of your page’s performance this can certainly give you some insights into how you can improve your reach by focusing on what’s working.

How have you improved your reach?  Do you use any of these tools or do you use other tools?  If so, we’d love to hear from you. 

This information is part of a much more detailed Facebook analytics guide sponsored by Online Marketing Institute.