Facebook Analytics
October 17th, 2012 • Marketing Insights
So a while back when Facebook launched its timeline format, a new metric was launched to help people/companies analyze what’s going on with their pages. As I was researching the metric, I found that a lot of people are skeptical about its effectiveness in measuring what it was designed to, which is interaction. I also found several applications of the metric on blogs and articles that are blatantly incorrect. I made this little snippet of research on Facebook’s “talking about this” metric a while ago and figured I would share it. The first thing to understand is that “talking about this” is a tally of the unique number of people that create a story about your page in a given week. A story is created when someone:
- likes your page
- likes your post
- posts on your wall
- comments on your post
- tags a photo of you
- shares of a photo
- answers a question
- checks-in at your place
- recommends your place
- recommends you
- responds to your event
Many people wonder why the “talking about this” count is often so much smaller than the “like” count. This is predominantly because of the measurement period, which in the case of the “talking about this” metric, is only a week. This vastly differs from the traditional “like” button, which is a total sum of unique people that maintain a “like” status of your page at any given time.
What does this all mean to businesses that have invested money to maintain a Facebook fan page? Well it means that people can now more easily see if your page is active and engaging your fans. If you don’t make an effort to generate stories, one of the two numbers under the name of your page will look pathetically small compared to the other. A fan page is a commitment, and this metric will clearly reveal your fidelity to that commitment.