Workplace from Facebook Analytics: The Ins and Outs
As a Workplace from Facebook system administrator or community manager, you know engagement is a key indicator of employees' awareness, dedication, and ultimately, the platform's success. And, your leadership team is constantly asking you for metrics to prove that it’s working. But how do you use Workplace from Facebook analytics to actually measure engagement? Is counting “likes” and “comments” enough?The short answer is this: measuring group and overall network engagement requires you to go deeper than looking at Workplace’s default analytics. The measurements for Workplace as a whole are important, but so are individual group metrics. Partnership between the overall community owner and individual group admins is essential, given that there’s no single source of data truth accessible to everyone. Here are a few ways to think about Workplace from Facebook analytics without paying for a third-party solution.
Group Insights
Groups in Workplace from Facebook are the heart of where connections are formed and work gets done. So, it's essential to use Group Insights to understand how employees are using them in order to build — and continue — conversations. Group Insights give every group owner a nice, easy snapshot of how employees are engaging through posts, comments and reactions in a particular group. The tool is available to group administrators or moderators, but the caveat is that they're not available to overall system administrators. Three different dashboards are provided through Group Insights pertaining to each group:1. Growth - This helps you to track growth and membership requests from a 5,000-foot level. Check this report if you have an active adoption campaign in which you're soliciting for new memberships. The chart should always move “up and to the right” — if it goes down, people are actively leaving your group.
2. Engagement — View this report to determine overall activity level of the group over time. The "Popular Days" and "Popular Times" tab are self-explanatory (note: they’re shown in the Pacific time zone), showing popular points at which members are commenting and reacting within the group. This dashboard also gives insight into which posts have been the most popular for the selected time period. Use these metrics to determine what type of content is resonating and when to make your next important post.
3. Membership - As a group leader, it's important to know your top contributors in order to leverage their influence. This report gives your "Top Contributors," excluding group administrators and moderators. Remember that quality trumps quantity — so if your group is particularly noisy, you might ask your top contributors to quiet down. If their posts, however, are driving engagement (measured by comments on their posts), let them shine.Group Insights provide rolling metrics displayed in a dashboard for the last 7, 28 or 60 days, or a custom date range of your choice. Metrics are also available for export in a .xls or .csv file for further analysis (we’ll get to that later).
Admin Panel Insights
The Admin Panel Insights are available only to overall Workplace system administrators. It displays five different tabs of dashboards and data visualizations of Workplace across your organization:
- People – See how active people are on Workplace across your organization. Dive into different segmentations, such as location, job title, and language. Determine if people accessing Workplace and Workplace Chat more frequently on mobile or desktop.
- Content – Determine how often new content is created and the volume of activity happening across the organization, and in segments. Identify top contributors, based on number of posts and comments made. This does not tell you where on the platform they were most active and influential. This is where a strong partnership between the community manager and group leaders comes into play.
- Groups – Pinpoint most active groups on a specific day. Use this to help correlate spikes in overall activity from the People and Content dashboards. Get an overview of your group privacy and settings make up.
- Posts - Determine whether your post has reached "critical mass." Find data on the consumption of posts over time and sentiment analysis. This excludes content posted to multi-company groups and posts created on or after Nov. 15, 2019.
- Connections – Identify how different segmentations are collaborating across Workplace, as well as top titles for making connections.
Perhaps the most valuable information to you in seeing trends over time, however, isn't located in the "Insights" tab, but rather the separate "Groups" tab.The "Groups" export in this tab shows you the level of activity that's happening within each group on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. By using the export to build a simple "heat map" in Microsoft Excel (using pivot tables and conditional formatting), you can find high-performing teams, groups with strong content, and pockets of collaborative behavior already in existence. These are calculated with some simple formulas that rank groups based on the replies and reactions that are happening. The best way to boost engagement in Workplace is to find what's working now, support the right behaviors, and offer guidance to those well on their way – but who also need improvement.
Our heat maps help you run simple calculations that quantify characteristics – as they relate to other groups in your community – that we know drive adoption and long term value. From showing you the groups with the most engaging content, to the most interactions between members, these maps will help you reach out to your best use cases and support them 1x1.
This, once again, is where a strong partnership with group leaders is essential, as you will want to work closely with them on digging into their Group Insights.
- Email us for our group export heat map calculations
Benchmarking for your group
It's important to consider your group's primary use case before determining expectations for growth and member engagement. At Talk Social to Me, we know that most groups fall into one of six different categories based on purpose and behavior (such as News, Q&A and special interest groups). Each type requires unique benchmarks and measurements; it's not fair to compare engagement between a group that's used for companywide news dissemination to one that's primarily for team collaboration, for example. The KPIs will be starkly different.
- Contact us for help with analytics benchmarks for your organization
Analytics at the group level are a step in the right direction. There definitely is some room for improvement to make analytics as actionable as they were intended to be, however. Here are a few tweaks we'd like to see to Workplace from Facebook's analytics:
- Give system administrators access Group Insights for all groups, regardless if they are a group administrator or moderator. It's critical that global community managers have as much insight as possible into how employees are behaving on the platform. Because Workplace from Facebook emphasizes activity within groups - and not the News Feed - having access to individual group analytics is essential.
- Show reactions per employee for the day, week and month in the Employee export tab
- A way to see trending topics and most popular hashtags at a group and system level
- A way to see threads that are awaiting a response or acknowledgement at a group level
- A way to determine popular search keywords at a group and system level
- Include group administrators and moderators in the "Top Contributors" area in Group Insights
- Correct inconsistent data exports from Group Insights
Of course, there are several Workplace from Facebook analytics partners, like SWOOP Analytics, which can help make data from the platform's API available and actionable. SWOOP even maps out how teams are collaborating across the globe and who your key connectors are.
Our Point of View on Workplace from Facebook Analytics: Use them for what they’re good for
The financial value of employee social networks and communities has been proven time and time again. We’re fortunate to live in a post-ROI internal communications and collaboration era, where many other companies have already documented the value of internal social platforms. Our advice? Don’t try and fit a square data peg into a round value hole – rather, don’t try and force Workplace from Facebook metrics to tell a story that they can’t, and that has already been told before (go to McKinsey, HBR, Bersin by Deloitte, and other sources if you need the data to make the big-picture case).If you’re looking to build a report for your leadership about the success of your Workplace from Facebook network (which we all know is one of the main reasons we need good analytics), don’t just report on Claims and Monthly Actives. Set your leaders’ expectations early on that qualitative data (stories, examples, and new connections) are the most important indicators of success. Yes, share screenshots of the admin panel and high adoption rates, but avoid using traditional social media metrics in a vacuum. Workplace from Facebook is just one component of your employee communications program and should not be measured alone.For community managers who want to find and amplify your best, most engaging content using Workplace from Facebook analytics, dive into the data in partnership with your group leaders. Play detective in the data exports and alongside group leaders to scour groups for the qualitative data that brings Workplace to life. The best use of Workplace data is as if it were a treasure map — and it’s up to you as the Workplace admin or community manager to follow the clues and find the engagement gold that awaits.
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