There has been a great deal of grumbling among the users of Facebook at the new changes to its look and feel, most notably the roll-out of the Timeline onto everyone’s personal page. There have also been mixed reviews to the new Facebook Insights provided to Page owners. While I agree some of the new metrics are balderdash there are some that will benefit business owners with a Facebook presence.
“People talking About This” and “weekly total reach” are measurements that allow you to understand the impact and stickiness your messages have to your fans. This can help us gauge which messages are working…and which are not. You can view this as either numbers or graphically, as there is an audience for both visualizations of data. The important thing to remember when viewing these metrics in graphical format is that it’s not the quantity but the value of the information that should be reviewed.
The “Page posts” metric is the meat and potatoes of metrics. Here you can sort on exactly which posts engaged the most people, as well as the likelihood that the content will be shared in the virality column (love this). This is my favorite of the new metrics. Much like Hootsuite‘s metrics for Twitter and your most popular tweets, this metric can tell you whether accompanying media (photos, videos) are more impactful than simple, textual posts (which we already know to be the case according to a white paper from Vitrue)
“People talking about your page” is a vast improvement from basic demographics of people who are exposed to your messaging. This takes it one step further to breakout the statistics of people actually engaged in your brand, not simply that one-time “like” which we now know is only the tip of the iceberg, telling us nothing about who shares our content and what they want from our brand, and therefore, our Facebook page.
Now, on to what’s not so meaningful. The “Friends of Fans” metric – is akin to LinkedIn’s “new people in your network” link, showing you the total number of people to whom you could be connected. But what does this really measure? While a recent Hubspot post suggests it is a representation of the potentiality of the universe of prospects, I believe that is misleading. It’s like saying, “I work with 20 people, and therefore I potentially work with 29,366 people, given each company each person works with and the number of employees within.” It is neither a fair nor accurate number, and merely serves nothing more than to boost the ego of the page owner, or CEO of the business. But there are some metrics that are worth noting.
All of the new “insights” material allows marketers to present more actionable metrics to management. But more importantly, it is data we can use to improve our tactics in the realm of Social Media that closes the gap between actions and leads.
What’s your take on the new Insights for Facebook? How to you see the benefit for your business?
