Understanding Facebook Post Stats

This post originally appeared on the Your Marketing Made Easy blog.

In one of our recent live member help sessions on Facebook, I received a question about all of the stats pertaining to Facebook posts. In our session I quickly reviewed the numbers, but I thought I'd get a bit more detailed in a blog post. As an example, I'm using a recent YMME post highlighting one of our founding members.

People Reached: this is how many individual people had our post appear in their timeline (even if someone saw it multiple times they only count as 1). Reach is obviously important because the more people who see the post, the more likely you are to have people take action. However, reach is not as important as engagement, which is what the rest of the numbers refer to.

Reactions, Comments, and Shares: these are the post engagements that you and other people can see right on the post.

• Reactions: include Like, Love, Haha, Wow, Sad, Angry - Facebook will split these up into separate lines. In the example above, you can see that we had 35 likes and 1 love

• On Post/On Share: these numbers give you the breakdown of reactions, comments, and shares that you received on your original post versus on the post that people share (and of course the first number is the total of them all). In the example above, you can see that of our 35 likes, 18 of them occurred on the original post. 5 people shared our post, and those shares had an additional 17 likes. This is important because you could have a small audience with low engagement, but if you have 1 influencer with a big audience who shares your post and it gets a LOT of engagement, you still get credit for that because it was your original post.

Post Clicks: these are the less obvious post engagements.

• Photo Views: when you include photos in a post, sometimes people click to view them full size, or click to view all of the photos if you've included more than 3 photos. In our example, there is a mysterious photo view, which normally wouldn't apply to our post type, which is a link.

• Link Clicks: this is how many clicks on the link you've included. This is very important, because it shows how many people are interested in reading/learning more, even if they don't publicly state that they are interested by reacting, commenting, or sharing.

• Other Clicks: these are everything else that is not a click on a photo or a link. For example, if your post is long and people need to click 'See more' to read the rest, that will be recorded here. If you have tagged another person or page, those will count as other clicks. And if anyone clicks through to your page from here, that is recorded in this spot.

Negative Feedback: this tells us how people are reacting negatively to our posts, so that we can pinpoint if it's a specific post that has caused problems on our page (i.e. if you've suddenly lost a bunch of page likes).

• Hide Post: people can hide an individual post by using the drop-down in the top right corner of the post. The more popular a post is, the more you may see this, as people could get tired of seeing the same post over and over again.

• Hide All Posts: this is also known as 'unfollowing' a page. This means that the person still likes your page, but will never see your posts in their newsfeed. Note: I tried to find out if these people will still see your ads, but so far Facebook support has not been helpful.

• Report as Spam: too many of these could get you a warning from Facebook, or even get your account suspended.

• Unlike Page: these people have hovered over your page name and unliked your page via the pop-up

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