Week 5 Part B: Learning About Facebook Data Collecting

Facebook post reach is important because it is the metric that demonstrates how many users actually SEE your post. You need to establish a baseline understanding of how many people your post is actually appearing to in order to make the necessary adjustments that will increase the overall efficiency of your posts. You can also draw conclusions about the size of your audience and how to extract data to target customers that share similar interests with your current audience. If your audience is small your visibility is low!

Post engagement on the other hand tabulates the number of customers that actually interface with your Facebook posts. Many businesses run into issues when they have a high number of followers but these followers do not engage at all with the Facebook page posts. Post engagement captures high level interactions such as sharing and basic interactions such as clicking on a link. This data shows you what is actually working to capture followers vs. something they might just scroll past on their feed. Engagement can capture data about actual potential customers instead of passive viewers.

Facebook insights provide the material for data driven decisions. You can determine patterns of behavior in your users and make decisions on what time and day to publish posts, what media type is most appealing, and how to connect to a larger potential audience based on the data of your existing audience.

I think the changes in Facebook data collection and privacy settings were very necessary. I think we should be following models set forth by the EU etc. of greater transparency in data harvesting methods. I do see how this can be detrimental to small buisnesses as I can see a lot of people opting out of data collection and this hindering a broadening of audiences. But ultimately I think consumer protection is paramount and should be the top priority. Perhaps my views on this may change if I start my own small business but as a user I'm grateful for the increase in oversight and transparency.

I commented on Cozy Cat Cafe, Sav's Vintage Value, Coco Shuffles, Iomi Bake, and Imageon.