Craft and measure organic insights

In today's digital landscape, understanding how your content performs organically across Meta technologies is essential to building meaningful connections with your community. For government, political and charity organisations, leveraging organic insights can help you reach more people, engage supporters and optimise your messaging effectively.

Here are the essential metrics to measure for each individual platform:

• Facebook's professional dashboard provides data on your audience and content performance. There, you can see:
  • Viewers: The number of Accounts Centre accounts that have viewed your content at least once. Content includes reels, posts, stories, live videos and ads.
  • Views: The number of times that your content was played or displayed. Content includes reels, posts, stories and ads.
  • Interactions: The number of reactions, saves, comments, shares and replies on your content. Content can include formats such as posts, stories and more.
  • Audience demographics: Breakdowns include age, gender, town/city and country.
• Instagram's professional dashboard offers account insights showing:
  • Views: The number of times that your content was played or displayed. Content includes reels, posts, stories, live videos and ads.
  • Interactions: The number of actions that people take when they engage with your content, such as likes, comments, saves and shares.
  • Total followers: View trends across your followers when you have at least 100 followers including, growth, location and age range
  • Specific content performance: See views, accounts reached and engaged and breakdowns on individual posts, stories, reels and live videos.
• WhatsApp channels admin insights (available with minimum 100 followers) include:
  • Total reach: Overall account reach and country breakdowns of viewers and followers.
  • Follower lists: How many people are following your channel.
  • Reactions: Total reaction counts with the option to limit to a selection of emojis.
  • Benchmarking: Compare your channel's performance with similar organisations.
• Threads insights provide:
  • Views: Total views that your Threads content has received. This metric includes followers and non-followers.
  • Interactions: Actions that people take when they engage with your content, such as likes, replies, reposts and quotes.
  • Followers: Total count and trends on your followers. See insights such as: growth, top follower locations and age range.

When you're ready to take your performance evaluation to the next level, you can look at cross-platform insights via Meta Business Suite to see consolidated metrics from Facebook, Instagram and messaging platforms. This analysis can provide a myriad of benefits, particularly if you're employing creative diversification to improve your overall reach and engagement across Meta technologies for your organisation. When you're in Meta Business Suite, look for the Insights tab on the left-hand menu to:

• Understand follower characteristics and demographics, and uncover information about your potential audience to help you adjust your strategies to reach more people.
• See a content overview to compare posts and stories across apps and learn which types of content are reaching your followers and which types are reaching your non-followers.
• Explore benchmarking to:
  • Understand how your performance compares with peer organisations.
  • Evaluate how your individual pieces of content perform compared to your typical performance. For example, see if your Instagram post received more or fewer interactions compared to recent posts.

Here are a few tips and best practices for evaluating your organic performance:

• Prioritise metrics that matter: Focus on KPIs aligned with your organisation's overall goals rather than all available data or proxy metrics.
• Don't fall for the breakdown effect: You may notice, for example, that you're getting more reach on your Facebook post than your Instagram reel and decide that it's not worth producing Instagram reels any more. However, was the reach on the Instagram reel incremental to the reach on the Facebook post? Often, content in different formats will reach different people across different placements. In this case, not having run the Instagram reel would have resulted in lower overall reach.
• Monitor regularly: People's behaviours are dynamic and Meta's platforms are dynamic to ensure that content stays relevant. This means that your strategy that worked last week may need to be adjusted to maintain or improve performance for this week. Check insights often to identify changes in trends and adjust your approach accordingly.
• Identify differences in audience segments: What is interesting to your coworkers and friends could be different from what is interesting to your family and others. Producing different types of content that speaks to different demographics and interests can increase relevance and therefore reach and engagement.
• Adopt a test and learn approach: Building a testing strategy that is grounded in diverse insights will allow you to form hypotheses that translate into test designs and ultimately help you learn about the best strategies to employ. A/B content testing, accessed through Meta Business Suite, enables you to test up to four content variations against each other to see which one your audience responds to most. This can help you optimise your performance and discover trends so that you can make informed decisions about what content you should develop and run moving forwards.

Using organic metrics and insights effectively empowers government, political and charitable organisations to build stronger connections and achieve their mission on Meta technologies. Explore professional dashboard, insights and Meta Business Suite to start crafting your data-driven organic strategy today.

Find out more by exploring the related narrative chapter and one-pager.

Visit the organic content hub to learn more.