It is unfortunate but true, Facebook does not provide monthly data. Instead they provide daily, weekly (7 days), and quadweekly (28 days) data. Okay, we made that up, but what else do you call a 28 day period? This presents a challenge for those of us required to produce accurate monthly data to our employers or clients. Let’s use Engaged Users as an example of what we mean.
Engaged Users
Engaged Users is supposed to tell us how many unique Facebook users liked, commented or shared anything for your Facebook Page account. The Insights report available for download from Facebook provides Daily, Weekly and Quadweekly Engaged Users. At first thought it may seem reasonable to surmise that adding the Daily count for a monthly period would yield the correct number, but you would undoubtedly be double-counting users thus yielding an inaccurate number. While it would look good in a report to have inflated numbers, it would be painting a distorted picture of actual engagement (some may think social media marketing has much in common with surrealism and trompe l’oeil, in this case they would be right).
So Now What?
So how can we accurately create monthly reports for our employers and clients being that much of the crucial data we need is not provided by Facebook in a monthly format? Switch to quadweekly reports so that you can compare two periods accurately? This solution would not be ideal given how corporate planning works, but it would yield accurate measurements of how one 28 day period compared to the previous 28 day period.
Another method is to take the average of the last 3 days of a 30-day month or the last 4 days of a 31-day month from the 28 Days column. While this number will not be 100% accurate, it will not deviate too far from the actual number and you will only be counting engagement during that month. Impressions seems to be the sole exception. Taking the sum of Total Daily Impressions for a given month would yield the correct answer.
Why Does This Matter?
As social media takes an ever-larger role in marketing strategies around the world, marketing decisions need to be based on accurate data. Businesses are hiring internal staff, contracting agencies, launching multiple pages and investing in social media ads. If these decisions are being made based on inaccurate data then the true value of social media is not being properly demonstrated. For example, some social media monitoring and reporting tools (I won’t name them yet because I am waiting for their responses on how they deal with this to provide monthly Facebook data to their customers), provide inaccurate information. They simply take the sum of the Daily column for a given month from Facebook Insights and give that to customers for metrics such as Reach. That Reach number will be grossly inflated because it will be counting users multiple times. If on Day 1 10,000 users were reached and on Day 2 15,000 users were reached, the total reach for Day 1 and 2 is not 25,000 unique users. The total number of unique users reached actually remains unknown. If you took the average of the 2 days however, 12,500 users, then you are surely closer to the actual number of unique users during Day 1 and Day 2 (unless you specifically targeted unique audiences on each day).
A Better Solution
The best solution would be for Facebook to provide monthly data or at least provide 30 day data instead of 28. Perhaps Facebook is partial to February.
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