Are you a small-business owner who is mystified by the ins and outs of managing your Facebook fan page? If you’re like me, you set up your Facebook fan page in a burst of enthusiasm and energy, but your fan page quickly moved to the back burners as more urgent matters called for your attention.

 

Like me, do you get so caught up in the day-to-day activities of managing your business that you hardly ever even visit your own Facebook fan page, thinking it really doesn’t matter anyway and you’ll get to it when you have more time?

 

But somehow the time to do it never seems to magically arrive.

You get an email now and then from Facebook itself reminding you of your fan page’s existence, but you quickly discard those brief analytics with a pang of guilt, afraid that taking the time to look into the data will take you away from what your business truly needs from you.

If you are an absolutely beginner on Facebook, don’t worry we have a great 7 step guide for you here. If still nobody likes your page, make sure to check out this simple trick to get your first 1,000 likes.

 

It’s time to take matters in hand.

Your Facebook fan page can and will open doors for your business that you never even dreamed possible, and you can do it.

You have what it takes, and the tools are available. So cast your doubts and fears aside. Facebook can help you get ahead in the business world, and your own fan page is the key to the action for you.

You need be intimidated no longer, take for example a look at this great and successful Facebook page from a small London business.

 

 

You can learn how to use your Facebook fan page to your business’s great advantage, leveraging what you learn about your activities there, and the activities of your fans, to promote your business better than you ever have before.

 

What’s more, it’s easier than ever these days to manage your Facebook fan page, quickly extract useful data about your activities there, and use the knowledge you gain to your advantage. This is the first step to learn how to analyse any Facebook page.

 

It won’t take you long to learn how to use these tools, and once you learn them you won’t need to devote a lot of time to using them.

 

Plus, you can learn how to use information you find on your competitors’ pages to give your own business a real boost.

 

Keep reading to find out more.

 

Analyse a Facebook Page with QuickSprout

 

 

Neil Patel’s simple website analyzer, QuickSprout can give you a clear picture of how you’re doing compared with your competitors in about a minute or so.

 

How it works is that you type your URL into the analyzer, type in the URLs of up to three competitors, and the analyzer will tell you within seconds how your website stacks up.

 

What does this have to do with your Facebook fan page?

 

Hold on. I’m getting there.

 

Neil’s analyzer also provides a social media report that shows you in colorful graph format how well your social media posts on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, and Google+ are doing.

 

You’ll be able to easily see at a glance which of your posts were shared on the different networks, as well as on which network you’ve been the most and the least active.

 

 

One of the charts in the report shows the total shares you have on your site, broken down by network. For instance, on Neil’s analysis of his own website, Twitter and Facebook account for more than seventy percent of his shares.

 

Another slightly less colorful page shows the statistics about how many shares your top posts have generated. I guess you could say this page tests your “viral” standing.

 

 

Freebies That Do the Trick to Analyse your Facebook Page

Some other online tools, such as AgoraPlus, LikeAlyzer, FanPage Karma, CScore, and SimplyMeasured are detailed in Ian Cleary’s post at SocialMediaExaminer.

 

Ian even shows you how you can drill down on these tools to probe for more data.

If you’re really a statistics nerd you’ll have a fabulous time endlessly auditing your own and your competitors’ Facebook pages and comparing your page’s performance against your competitors’.

 

That’s not me, though. I was looking for something down and dirty, and I found it.

 

Analyse a Facebook Page with LikeAlyzer

LikeAlyzer is a free tool which scores your Facebook fan page and gives you recommendations about how you can improve. LikeAlyzer looks first to see how complete your page information is.

 

 

For instance, have you provided enough detail about your website and how your fans can find you elsewhere online?

If you haven’t, LikeAlyzer will point out the blank spots and recommend that you insert the relevant data.

When I ran my Facebook fan page through LikeAlyzer, I found I was doing better than I thought, but I also got some great suggestions about what I could do better.

 

 

For instance, LikeAlyzer tells me I should publish posts more often and ask my fans some questions in order to stimulate more interactions. I also need to use more hashtags.

As a result of LikeAlyzer’s recommendations, I’ve added some new items to my to-do list that I’ll take care of over the next couple of days.

This tool analyzes your posts for how often you post and which posts get the most notice, and it also takes a quick look at how often your fans and others comment on your posts or add posts of their own.

In this way, you will be able to see at a glance how much interaction you have with your fans as well as how many people are talking about your page and your posts.

LikeAlyzer is straightforward and easy to use, making it a good match for busy small-business owners who need quick answers to simple questions about Facebook marketing.

Analyse a Facebook Page with AgoraPulse

AgoraPulse is at the top of Ian Cleary’s list (referred to above; click here to see it again).

 

When you go to this website and click on “Free Tools” you land on a page with one colorful block which offers to benchmark your Facebook page, because it’s best to know where you are so you can take aim at where you want to go; another colorful block offering a Timeline Contest Manager for generating traffic, and an online tutoring service called Facebook Marketing University.

All of these free tools are a great boon for beginning marketers.

 

Another free tool is the AgoraPulse Barometer, which performs an analysis of your Facebook fan page and compares it against others’ whose pages are similar to yours and who have also used this tool.

Comparing metrics for fans reached, engagement, people talking about, viral reach (which means how many shares you’ve had outside of your own friends list), organic reach (posts your friends have shared), and click-through rate, it gives you a pretty thorough picture of your Facebook fan page performance.

You’ll also find drill-down pages that provide an even deeper level of scrutiny.

 

Analyse a Facebook Page with SimplyMeasured

As you develop some sophistication with your marketing plans, you’ll want to take advantage of another free tool called SimplyMeasured, which provides a wealth of data.

 

Instead of charging you money for their report, they ask that you post about them on Facebook when you use their tool. No problem. I had the report within minutes.

 

They gave me the choice of downloading the report in either Excel or PowerPoint, and I chose PowerPoint, because I love colorful graphs and I was richly rewarded.

 

My report that contained fourteen different graphs and charts that gave me insights into how my fans were engaging with my fan page and how I was engaging with them, which of my posts people were talking about, my optimal time and day for posting, breakdowns by type and category, top users by posts and comments, comments and brand posts by day and time, top keywords in comments, and top links and top domains in admin posts.

Since I’m just getting started with my own marketing, I’ll use this report as a benchmark to track my progress over time.

Analyse a Facebook Page with MyHelpster

If you want to learn who the top fans are on any Facebook page, MyHelpster has a tool that will export data from any Facebook page to an Excel spreadsheet. (Click here to find it.)

 

With this tool, you’ll learn who your most engaged users are and who mentions your brand most often, and it can help you design targeted promotions for powerful results.

While it’s not free, at only two dollars a pop for extracting data from the last fifty posts for a single page, it’s a pretty good deal. There’s also an option to purchase even more data, too, if you want.

The possibilities are fairly unlimited here, because as I mentioned earlier, you can perform MyHelpster’s analysis on any Facebook page of your choosing—including your competitors’ pages.

So what does this mean to you? Now what?

 

Targeting Your Competitors’ Facebook Fans

A good analysis of your competitors’ pages can open a world of possibilities for your business.

For instance, you can build your own audience by targeting your competitors’ fans who have also willingly opted into your lists and liked your Facebook pages.

 

When you do, you’ll be able to more consistently get in front of those people.

A fairly easy way to target those customers is by offering those people something for free so that they end up on one of your lists, where you can target them more easily and more often.

 

Even better, you could lead them to a new page with a low ticket offer.

By far the biggest reason, though, for analyzing your competitors’ Facebook pages and their fans is that you’ll gain a greater understanding of where your business stands in relation to your industry as a whole and to other businesses in your industry.

 

You’ll end up with greater insights about how best to interact with your own Facebook fans as a result, because when you’re analyzing your competitors’ fans, you’re really analyzing your own brand.

 

Invest the time to do the work and you’ll have a better understanding of what your competitors’ tactics are and will therefore be better able to create and refine your own.

 

Conclusion

We hope you like the MyHelpster extraction tool for Facebook (here), and we’re certain you’ll find creative ways to use it that will help you to understand and grow your business.

 

If you want, MyHelpster’s vetted experts can pitch in to help you find the data that will help you the most so that even if you’re a novice like me, you will soon be using your Facebook fan page to market your business with the best of them. Start with Facebook page optimization, get your ebook copy.

There are also ways to analyse your Twitter and Pinterest followers.

Or you can simply follow these tricks to analyse competitors marketing strategy and make your own.

The post How to Analyse your Facebook Page – And Your Competitors’ appeared first on MyHelpster.