Facebook Page Analysis

When I started this semester I had never even had my own personal Facebook page. Designing and starting my own community page was extremely overwhelming at first. I did not even know how to post something on Facebook let alone design a page. I started out with baby steps and it took me many, many hours to do things that probably took the younger students a number of minutes. I just took it one step at a time and things came together. It has been a very fascinating experience and I have learned a lot.

My page is a community page that I designed to encourage people to educate themselves and their children about the harmful effects of pornography.  I also provided tips on how to talk to your children about pornography, ways to safeguard against unsolicited exposure, and places that you can reach out for help if a problem already exists.

I used the picture of a young child looking at a computer screen while an adult is trying to shield him from what is on the screen. I chose this because the internet does not discriminate and it has no idea who is sitting behind the screen. It is the responsibility of the viewer or in the case of a minor, the parent, to control the content that is being viewed. I showed a picture of many hands locked together in calling for us to unite to fight the cyber drug. This was to illustrate the fact that it will take a lot of people coming together to fight a very powerful and lucrative pornography industry.

Tactics: I tried a mix of multiple different strategies. I posted informational videos, statistics, articles, testimonials and even posted a video of myself talking on the subject.  My most viewed post was the video of myself talking. It reached 213 people and 153 actually watched it. The second most popular post was an article I posted entitled “Having the ‘porn conversation’ with the man you’re dating”. It reached 401 people and 23 engaged with 7 shares.

 

I did all of my analysis using the biggest time period that insights would allow, 2-26-15 thru 4-17-15.

Total Page Likes: My page kind of got a really slow start because I did not even have any friends on my personal page to invite to like my page. Only a handful of students from class liked my page. Sally and Becky took pity on me and invited their friends to like my page and that helped a little but I still didn't have enough likes to see the insights page. I literally went around school asking people to like my page. About a month after I started the page I finally had 32 likes and it stayed at this number until I ran my ad. With my ad for one week starting on March 25th and I got 24 additional likes.

When we did our Facebook Ad’s I ran mine for page likes. I actually decided to pay for the ad to run for one week. I gave it a $10.00 a day budget. I received 24 new page likes from running my ad. I felt like this was pretty good considering that I only had 32 page likes before this. I did notice though that the majority of the people that liked my page did not actually click on any of its content. That was disappointing. The following are the add results.

You will notice that Facebook reports that my ad has a poor performance score and has high negative feedback. I am assuming that this is because the word pornography is in the advertisement and I was only advertising to people in the state of Utah. Many people that have filters on their computers are blocking anything that contains this word. This makes it difficult for those trying to fight against it.

 

  

Post Reach: I obviously had the biggest post reach on the ones that I paid for. When I was running my ad it reached 3,521 people. I also boosted one of my posts and it reached 6,484 people. To be honest I could never really make any rhyme nor reason out of what posts were being successful and which ones were not. Like comments and shares were very sporadic. I can tell you that whenever Sally shared my post on her page I got a lot more views. She is obviously more influential than me. As you can see I also had people hide my posts a number of times. This appears to be during the times that I was paying for either my post or my ad.

Paid to Boost Post: I paid to boost one of my posts. I chose a post that I thought might appeal more to men because I could see that I had very few men that liked my page. I thought it might be of interest to young men to know that there has been a dramatic increase in young men suffering from erectile dysfunction. This increase has been linked to pornography use. Medication will not cure it the only thing that solves the problem is to retrain the brain by no longer looking at pornography. Men did pay more attention to this post and I did get one page like from it. I was glad to see that by boosting a post a few people actually looked at the content of this post. I actually had a few people post comment on this one.

  

Page and Tab Visits:  As you can see my timeline was viewed the most. I had the highest activity during the times that I was paying to boost a post or advertisement.

Posts: The data shows that the peak time that my fans are online is around 10:00 p.m. I personally found that the best day to post was on Wednesday morning. For some reason when I posted on Wednesday my posts reached a lot more people. I routinely posted on Wednesday and Saturday. Each individual post is also shown with reach and engagement. As you can see, I actually had very little success with the majority of my posts. I never could really figure out what would appeal more to people with  the exception of me video taping myself.

People:  These were the original target audience that I presented.

Personas:

Cheryl is a 36 year old mother of four. Recently she was helping her 12 year old daughter, Anna, with a class project. They were creating a character and needed a photo. Her daughter typed in the words, blonde girl. Cheryl was mortified when streams of pornographic photos started skipping across the screen. They seemed to be caught in a loop. Cheryl wonders how she can protect her children from being exposed to such demoralizing images. What if she had not been present? Cheryl knows she needs to talk to Anna about what happened and is a little unsure about how to approach this delicate subject.

Rusty is a 15 year old boy who plays basketball at the local high school. He got his iPhone 2 years ago for Christmas. He was most excited about being able to check the scores on fox sports at any time. Unfortunately, this is also the site that linked him to his first pornographic website. At first he looked just out of curiosity, but now it is something that he can’t get through the day without doing. He doesn’t like the ways he feels or acts most of the time. He knows he has a problem but he doesn’t know how to reach out for help.

Cassandra is a 23 year old newlywed. Cassandra saved herself for marriage and was looking forward to an intimate relationship with her husband Carl.  Cassandra has been surprised by Carl’s lack of interest. Recently she discovered that Carl is spending time each day looking at pornographic website. When she tried to discuss it with him, he brushed her off and said, “That is just what guys do. It doesn’t mean anything.” Cassandra feels betrayed and wonders what is wrong with her that might make Carl choose pornography over her. She begins to try to improve herself thinking that if only she were better, then Carl would choose her.

Real People: I was actually a little surprised about what I found when I looked at who my fans were and who engaged on my page. Very interesting to me that 86% of my fans are women when it is a well-known fact that men struggle much more with pornography use then women do. Men have the problem but women seem to be the ones who want to solve it. My page appealed most to women between the ages of 35-44. As I looked at these results the things that came to my mind are women whose husbands have a pornography problem and mothers who want to protect their children. The majority of my fans are from Utah which makes sense since many of the people that liked my page are friends and my advertisement only went to people in Utah. I purposely chose this demographic because pornography use is such a serious problem in this state.

When I boosted my post I did not set my own demographic. I just went with what Facebook has as their default. This post went to people all over the United States as well as people in other countries. It did not seem to change that fact that women between the age of 35-44 were reached the most.

Summary:  I feel like I learned a lot from this experience. I had a number of things that held me back a little from doing some of the things that I would have liked to. I am currently in the middle of a divorce and Facebook pages are often used in litigation. I had to be very careful what I posted and how it would be viewed. For this reason, I did not make more personal video’s which was obviously the best way to get my message out.  I do think that if I had been able to include some of my own personal experience on the subject that I probably could have gotten more of a following. Because I had such a small following it was hard to determine what would work and what would not. Obviously if I had a lot of money to pore into the page, paid posts were the most successful.

I am not really surprised that I had such a hard time getting anyone to look at the content of this page. Pornography is a huge problem but it is a very sensitive subject and one that most people do not want to talk about openly, especially in the state of Utah where we seem to just be pretending that it is not happening. This is the reason that I wanted to do the page in the first place and unfortunately I did not make much progress in changing that. I do however, feel that even if this page helped one person that it was successful and worth my time and effort.