New Facebook Metric: "People Talking About This"

As part of Facebook's drive to boost their income from advertising revenue, this week they released some new features and functionality aimed at brands or page owners using the site for internet marketing. In an upgraded version of their page insights tool, Facebook are now emphasising the value of sharing across pages, as this works as an interesting proxy for reach, which is of course important to many marketers (obviously, quality of that reach matters too, but that is another story)

The new page insights tool allows marketers to track how posts they put up on their page disseminate beyond their Facebook fans, and measure aspects such as weekly total reach of a page or number of friends of fans of a page - how big is your potential network? Well, according to Facebook, it is on average 34 times larger than your number of Fans, up to around 81 times larger for the top 1000 brands.  

The tool also now measures something called "People Talking about this";  a metric used to indicate how many people are engaging with a story, in different ways.  It measures a combination of items, including the number of people liking your page, posting to your wall, commenting or sharing one of your posts, or mentioning your page in one of their posts, amongst other things.  The stat refreshes daily, but tracks back for a week.  

Reaching Fans and friends of Fans is one of the key goals of many a Facebook campaign and this new metric will make that easier to track.  Do not forget what we said earlier; it is not just about quantity, but quality; stop to think, what is the sentiment of those conversations?, and how is your business really benefiting?