WooRank's Social Stats Explained

Ok, WooRankers. We heard you. The WooRank social stats in our reviews can be confusing, especially if you're looking directly at your Facebook page and seeing what appears to be a major discrepancy in the numbers. Hopefully this blog, once and for all, will explain what we're actually trying to show you in our reviews.

The problem

Let's use the example of BetaGroup.be. In their case the Social stats look like this.

You might see this and think, "That doesn't look right!" So you rush to your social media reporting to see if you've had a sudden drop-off in fans, but instead you see hundreds of engagements.

Now you're probably thinking, "What's the deal, WooRank? These numbers are not anywhere close to the same!" And, well, you'd be right.

The Explanation

In fact, the two numbers that you're seeing are completely different statistics. The Facebook shares that we measure in a review are actually based on your home page URL, not your branded Facebook page. This is also true for comments.

Let me break down each part of our review's Social Media Engagement criteria a little bit more.

• Shares: If somebody wants to tell their friends about your site, they share your URL on their timeline. This includes both use of official Sharing plugins, and also the copy-pasting of a link to Facebook.
• Comments: This number includes any comments that have been made on a shared or liked post about your URL.

More about Facebook Statistics

It turns out that Facebook data is more complicated than we thought when doing initial research for this. Last year The Next Web and MarketingLand confirmed with spokespeople from the social media giant itself that in terms of engagements, the oft-displayed figure next to your like button is actually not the total number of times the button has been clicked. Instead, Facebook uses the aggregate sum of web page likes, shares, comments on likes and shares, and also use of the URL in private messages in order to calculate this figure. To check this out, we set up a blog post which we liked, shared, and commented on in our personal accounts. It's true "“ one person can contribute up to an additional four "Likes" to the total sum that Facebook displays. So, if you notice that this number is different than the number of likes displayed in your WooRank review, this is why. It is a third sort of statistic that is actually better for measuring total engagement with the post than understanding how many times your page itself has been liked.

Data about your Facebook Page

If you're still worried about the likes on your Facebook Page itself, don't fret; you can find this data when you set up a Project. On the "Settings" page, you can sync your business' Facebook Page URL and administrator account, giving you access to your Insights data.

So What Does This Mean?

You might be wondering, "Why do I need to know these numbers?" In fact, this data can be incredibly valuable information for market research. The Social Media Engagement data in reviews gives concrete numbers on how often people evangelize about your brand on various social media networks. Whether you are pitching to a client or working on your content marketing strategy, the review figures represent potential goals of sharability and retention. On the other side, Facebook Insights in your Project can help you to understand how people are engaging with your brand, which will build customer loyalty. One of the holy grails of content marketing is to engage loyal clients who tell their friends about your product, making these statistics a great tool in understanding your own progress and setting periodic goals for your content team for both sharability and loyalty.

We hope that clears things up for you! Still have questions? Let us know in the comments below and we'll do our best to answer.