Facebook ‘Talking About’ Deconstructed. How are the top brands performing? When Facebook recently launched their 'talking about' figure, it signalled a new way for brands to measure their success on Facebook. It meant that it wasn't just about how many fans you had, but how many individual mentions you had on Facebook, also taking into account mentions your Page had through ads. Now that the new figure has been around for a few weeks, it's interesting to look at how it compares to Likes, for indicating the most successful brands on Facebook. An analysis of the top 10 brand Pages by Likes shows us this in action. The figure below shows the top 10 brands on Facebook ordered by Likes, with their 'talking about' figure expressed as a number and a percentage : When you reorder the brands by their 'talking about' figure expressed as a percentage of Likes (to give an accurate representation), then the most popular Facebook Pages look quite different. The movers Surprising?
How to Determine How Frequently to Post to Your Facebook Page How to Determine How Frequently to Post to Your Facebook Page The following is an excerpt of an entry in our Facebook Marketing Bible. The full version contains a detailed walk-through of how to measure the lifespan of your posts through Insights, and how to optimize for gaining new fans or link clicks. Facebook’s new Page Insights and some third-party tools can help you determine the lifespan of your Facebook Page updates. When your updates stop receiving Likes and comments, it may be time to post a new update to make sure you’re consistently engaging your fans. PageLever ran a limited study of 20 posts from five Facebook Pages with over 1 million fans. Third-party tools such as PageLever and EdgeRank Checker can track the activity on a post by the hour so you can easily get an accurate, personalized assessment of the life-span of your Page posts. To do so, visit your Page and click the Insights tab in the left-sidebar navigation menu. Mediabistro Course
Facebook Page Insights 2011 Upgrade: The Complete Reference Guide A major upgrade to Facebook Page Insights is currently being rolled out to administrators. It adds several important new metrics, and removes some others. People Talking About This, Reach, and Consumptions will all help Page admins better measure the total audience of their Facebook marketing campaigns and the traffic they are driving. Facebook has published a .PDF guide to the Insights upgrade, but it doesn’t go into detail about the dozens of new data types admins now have access to. Below we’ll examine every data field available in the Page Insights spreadsheet exports and graphical user interface and discuss what the most significant additions and subtractions are. What’s in the New Page Insights To access the new Page Insights, visit your Page and click the Insights tab in the left Page navigation menu. Several of the metrics measure the volume or reach stories that we’ll call “social mentions”. Page Level Export Post Level Export Page Insights Graphical User Interface
How To Use The New Facebook Insights (Video Tutorial) 0inShare How To Use The New Facebook Insights (Video Tutorial) How many a man has thrown up his hands at a time when a little more effort, a little more patience would have achieved success. -Elbert Hubbard Facebook Comments Are Four Times The Value Of Likes Likes remain the most prevalent form of engagement on Facebook, but comments have more pull — more than four times as much. EdgeRank Checker has found that the average comment on a post attracts more than four times as many clickthroughs as the average like. The average post on Facebook generates: 3.103 clicks per like,14.678 clicks per comment, and.005 clicks per impression (meaning page view). This ties into what we’ve previouslyreported fromEdgeRank Checker about how the changed Facebook news feed benefits brand pages with large numbers of fans, while harming those with fewer fans. EdgeRank now believes that the ability to create content that is more relevant to their fans benefits smaller Facebook brand pages when compared with their larger counterparts. The company says: We think these data suggest that smaller pages are able to create more relevant content for their fans, which ultimately results in higher clicks and shares.
Updates to new Facebook Insights Last month, I covered the upcoming changes to the new Facebook Insights as we were given access on one of our pages. These have still not rolled out in full (something Facebook is making a habit of lately: hello timeline), though they are expected to launch for all Facebook pages over the next couple of weeks. Although Facebook are still cloudy on the details, they have claimed that these will launch 'as early as next week'. Since we covered the changes, Facebook has made further updates to page insights. View the level of Page posts In the summary dashboard, Facebook have introduced a new metric to show the level of activity on your page by the number of posts you've made. But now that pages have to produce more content in order to get noticed, this will enable you to see if there's a direct correlation between the number of posts you make and increases/decreases in the 'talking about this' figure. Likes, Reach & Talking About Reach Demographics Breakdown of Sources Frequency of exposure
Analytics Firms Incorporate New Facebook Page Insights Facebook has an upgraded page insights application programming interface that includes a nifty metric called “people talking about this.” This new API is already in new apps from at least three vendors: Context Optional, Wildfire and Webtrends. Expect to see many more come forward with their own versions soon. Now let’s back up a bit. The people talking about this metric tallies: Liking a page;Posting to a page’s wall;Liking, commenting, or sharing a page’s status update, photo, video, or other content;Answering a question posted by a page;RSVPing to an event hosted by the page;Mentioning the page (users must formally tag the page);Tagging a page in a photo;Liking or sharing a check-in deal, andChecking in at a place. Weekly total reach measures users who have been exposed to owned, earned, and paid media of brands, while Facebook’s friends of fans metric can help marketers estimate the potential viral effects of campaigns and how many new fans they will pick up.
Facebook's New Tools Give Marketers Insights, Help Measure Fans' Word Of Mouth Companies set up Facebook Pages to market themselves. But until now, they’ve only had fairly blunt instruments--like the number of Likes--to measure how well they’re doing. Now Facebook is releasing a new set of tools that the social network says will give marketers better insights into how well their Pages are reaching Facebook users--and ultimately make those Pages more useful to brands. Among the tools Facebook is releasing today in conjunction with New York's annual Advertising Week are a new dashboard to measure the reach of individual Page posts, an API to allow third-party agencies build their own tools on top of this new Facebook data, and a new ad unit that allows companies to create ads out of their Page posts. “With the new Page Insights, Facebook is emphasizing the importance of sharing on Pages, because this increases a brand’s reach,” the company said in a press release.
Facebook Bolsters Page Insights, Unveils New Ad Unit Christopher Heine | October 2, 2011 | 2 Comments inShare143 Social giant's analytics dashboard becomes more robust. With Advertising Week beginning in a matter of hours, Facebook today is unveiling an overhaul of its Page Insights product as well as a new ad unit called "Premium Ad Product." And whether your brand's Facebook posts inspire consumer engagement is about to become transparent for essentially all to see. Among a slew of new Facebook Insights metrics sure to interest brand managers, "People Talking About This" is perhaps the most intriguing. What's more, it will publicly appear on all brand pages, just underneath the "Likes" count. He expects brands to keep an eye on each other with the engagement metric, perhaps even competitively. Baser and his colleague Ami Vora, Facebook product marketing manager, last week briefed ClickZ News about updates to the Page Insights product. Vora explained that the new numbers should help brands optimize their Facebook messaging strategy.
How Facebook Will Fix Its Like Button Problem You can't deny the success of Facebook's Like button. Its popularity quickly skyrocketed; it took less than a month for the button to appear on more than 100,000 websites. Now it is a standard method for endorsing something on the social web. But that's exactly the problem — the Like button is an endorsement. The company did some internal research and found that users, especially younger ones, were afraid to "Like" because of the implied endorsement. Facebook's bet is that more people will click a button that says they've "Listened" to a song or "Watched" a video, rather than simply liking it. Called Gestures, these actions are the next step in integrating Facebook with every part of the web. It's Facebook's partners that will take this capability and turn it into applications that populate Facebook and their websites with these Gestures, though.
Facebook Launches New Metric: "People Talking About" Facebook has overhauled its Pages Insights analytics tool and added a new metric to gauge the health of a page: "People Talking About." That statistic, which users will see on Pages below the total number of "Likes," will be one of four tracked by Pages Insights. The idea is that users will understand a Page with a high People Talking About rating is one that has compelling content. Likewise, content creators will be motivated to make their Pages more comment-worthy. People Talking About (that might not be the final name for the metric; at press time, Facebook wasn't sure) will measure user-initiated activity related to a Page, including posting to a Page's Wall, "liking," commenting, sharing a Page post or content on the Page, answering a Question posed to fans, mentioning a Page, "liking" or sharing a deal or checking in at your Place. The other metrics, which are designed for administrators of brand and media Pages, include "Likes," "Friends of Fans" and "Weekly Total Reach."
5 incredibly helpful aspects of Facebook Insights You’ve joined Facebook, set up a Page for your business and started sharing content with your devoted fans. That’s great, but how do you know if it’s working? It doesn’t do you any good to keep throwing stuff at the wall if it’s not sticking. Lucky for you (and all of us, really), Facebook provides free insights for pages. You may already know that, but what you might not know is how in-depth and incredibly helpful these insights can be if you know how to use them. I’ve used Facebook Insights for multiple clients, all of whom hope to achieve different things with their Facebook pages. Custom Dates Want to look at the stats of your page for the past week, month, quarter or even since the beginning of time? This is a great way to look at how activity has changed over a specific period of time. Note: If you’re moving throughout the different sections in Insights, make sure you re-select your custom dates each time. Export Stats Tabs Viewed Post Impressions/Feedback Like Sources
How to Measure Social Media ROI Like the Experts When getting started with social media, it's fun to watch your follower and fan count grow, see how many retweets you're getting, and watch how much people are commenting on Facebook posts. Look at all that reach! Look at all that engagement! This is how you get your content into cyberspace! That's all true, and all important to monitor. But how does it fit into your larger sales and marketing strategy? 1.) 2.) 3.) 4.) 5.) Many marketers are faced with constantly justifying the time and money spent on social media, so being able to tie actual dollars to the process of generating and converting leads from social media networks is crucial. What metrics do you use to evaluate the effectiveness of your social media strategy? Image credit: daniel_iversen
Only 9 Days Left To Learn The New Facebook Page Analytics Facebook launched new page insights two months ago, and will start phasing out the old metrics on December 15. You’re not alone if you feel any confusion about the new metrics. This post clears up how to read the new data compared to how you read the old data, and if you do the exercise below before Facebook closes old insights, you can find out how often your unique post-viewers are seeing your posts. In the old insights, we saw the impressions and feedback rate for each of our last ten posts. What was missing was reach, the unique number of individuals we were reaching (that differs from impressions, which are essentially hits or views). In the new metrics, we get reach, engaged, talking about this, and virality. If you want to get frequency, right now you can compare the same posts in the old and new insights and figure that out. That frequency is pretty consistent, and that makes sense if it’s related to EdgeRank. Now we can see exactly how many of our fans we’re really reaching.