More and more churches than ever before are streaming online, especially with the current COVID-19 situation. Social media, just like Facebook, is an excellent tool for churches to grow their community. But to effectively use it, churches must understand how it could work for them and monitor their metrics. Churches must understand how their content contributes to their overall reach and engagement. One of the advantages of streaming online, both live and on-demand, is that it offers powerful tools to track, evaluate, and understand how the audience views your content. So, you can find new ways to reach and attract more people. Here are some best practices on how to measure your Facebook video engagements.
Multipliers for the number of viewers
Sunday services streams are not usually watched by only one person. Most streams consist of families watching. Therefore, the count of views seen in your videos is not typically accurate. With this, it’s best to use a “multiplier” to assume the number of views in your online services
According to Leigh Ann Harold, a method they do in their church is to send out a survey asking their viewers how many people usually view them. After that, they get the average of these numbers and use that as a multiplier for their video views. Kristin VanDuyne raised the notion that this practice does not apply to other videos posted on your pages since it the assumption is that people are generally scrolling through Facebook only by themselves.
Engagements to Calls to Action
Calls to action are something that churches usually do to generate engagement in their content. Usually, churches hand out connection cards to keep in touch with new members and guests. Although these cards generally are in print and handed personally, a connection card can still be given through Facebook or any other way you can get data on the new member or guest. You could monitor the number of people that fill out these to see if people are engaging with your videos and content.
The number of offerings you receive while streaming will also help with measuring the number of people engaging in your streams. Determining how many people extend givings to your church will present you with a ballpark of how many engage and give attention to your videos on Facebook. These prompts, along with other unique calls to action, will help you measure your video engagements.
Video Retention
Keeping the audience’s video attention on your video is essential. This is to ensure that they have watched all the parts and segments of your video. This is where the audience retention graph comes in useful; it shows your video’s retention over time. Hovering and adjusting the graph shows what frame or frames in your video correspond to a specific time and retention percentage.
In this graph, you could see the average view duration, total views of the video for the first 28 days, and the number of people that watched your video starting from 30 seconds or until the end. Sometimes you’ll notice a significant retention drop off in your video. It is better to look at your content and understand which parts of your video might not have been engaging to people. You could also compare your average view duration to videos of other lengths, which will give you an idea of your audience’s appetite for video length and content.
Conclusion:
These are helpful tips on how to measure Facebook video engagements. Other factors to check out and consider are to monitor related channel views, unique viewers, and location statistics. Most of these are found within Facebook analytics and are also available in some features of YouTube. I hope these tips could help you in gathering and reaching more audiences!
