Facebook Groups are great for business development, community building, investigation & research …
To enhance your operations and grow your business, you need to keep watching and assessing your groups performance.
Groups benchmark is an effective and comprehensive assessment method.
By comparing KPIs, identify the most performing groups and understand why. Discover where your groups stand, what is the engagement level, what are the strengths … Identify gaps to achieve your competitive advantage. Find the best practices. Map out your strategy for growth.
Here is a 5-stage Facebook Groups Benchmark approach to build a thriving community and business:
1. Choose groups
The first stage is to choose groups for the benchmark. Benchmark groups you admin. For example, compare your school or university groups to see which classes have a higher engagement level. Compare your business groups in different regions to see which areas are more engaged. Compare your advocacy groups on related topics to see which ones are more active. To start, you can add all the groups you admin in the same place.
When selecting groups, there are other factors you need to considerate, like the group inception date … Sometimes they may have a significant impact on groups engagement and activity. However, you can also pick groups created in different periods or with different sizes to see if groups with a longer history perform better.
To start a benchmark, click on 'Benchmark' at the top of your screen.
2. Select the time range
After choosing groups and starting the benchmark in "Groups dashboard" - "Benchmark groups", you can select the time range with the button in the top right corner.
The time range influences benchmark results. You can choose the last 7, 14, 31 or 90 days to compare the KPIs for the last week, fortnight, month or trimester. You can select a custom period like an academic year, a promotional season, an event … to see which group performed the best. You can rank groups for their entire history from their inception till now.
Select different time ranges. Get comparative insights from both a short term and a long run.
3. Identify the most performing groups and understand why
After choosing groups and starting the benchmark in "Groups dashboard" - "Benchmark groups", you can identify the most performing groups and understand why. You can change and select the time range with the button in the top right corner.
Engagement and Activity
You will see first the most performing groups based on the engagement, activity.
In the group with the highest engagement score, a post has on average a greater resonance. The group with the highest activity score gets on average more daily publications and interactions.
In the chart of key metric comparison, you can compare at the same time all the key indicators. You can click the button in the top right corner of a chart to print or download it.
Detailed Metrics
Groups metrics give you detailed information about engagement and performance: posts, shares, comments, reactions.
From groups metrics, you can see which metrics contribute the most to the engagement and activity.
Click the icon to sort groups by metric. Find which group has the most content (via the metrics "posts" and "comments"), which group has more fun and laugh (via the metric "haha"), which group's publications reach more outside the group (via the metric "shares", applicable for public groups).
Click "Export metrics" in the top right corner to archive the list.
Posts by day, Comments by day
In the charts of posts by day and comments by day, you can compare the posts volume and the comments volume on each day of the week.
Find which group has the most posts or comments on each day, on which day a group has the most posts or comments. See if on a particular day all the groups have more posts or comments. Compare two charts to see the correlation between posts and comments.
Click the button in the top right corner of a chart to print or download it.
4. Find the best practices and map out your strategy for growth
After identifying the most performing groups and understand why, you can find the best practices and map out your strategy for growth.
Here are some examples.
If you find that the most performing groups always have a high posts volume, you can increase the publication frequency in your groups. If in the most performing group there are always more posts and comments on Saturday, you can schedule and publish more posts on Saturday in your groups. You can use the Publishing Tools to schedule, manage and track your publications in the same place.
If you find that the most performing groups have many comments, you can see the most commented posts or the posts list to find which topics initiate and stimulate discussion. You can start conversations about similar topics in your groups.
5. Keep watching and improving
Groups benchmark is part of an iterative process to enhance your community and grow your business.
Through the groups benchmark, you identify the most performing groups and understand why. You find and implement the best practices. Then you benchmark again.
According to your needs and objectives, benchmark groups on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. For example, when building a barometer, benchmark and track your groups performance day by day. When running groups of your business or for your customers, benchmark them each week for an agile management.
Consistently benchmark groups. Keep watching and improving. Build a thriving community and business.
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Compare groups metrics between one period and the previous period, between the same period of two different years, or between any two different periods according to your community management needs.