As I popped over to my Facebook fan page this week, I saw yet another change – and my instant reaction was NOT good. Facebook has added a “People are Talking About This” metric to your page. Really, Facebook? Do fan page owners really need another number to obsess over?
So what is this new metric, how does Facebook come up with the number, and what does this mean for page owners?
The new metric will refresh daily, but is a snapshot of the past 7 days. It is a test of how engaging your fan page has been over this time. Since it only refreshes once a day, you won’t be able to post something, get reactions, and then expect an immediate change in your number (as you would if new users “liked” your page).
The metric is pulled from data that you can find on the new Facebook Insights Page. The new Insights Page just started being available to some page owners this week. To see it, go your fan page and click on “View Insights” in the upper right corner of the page. When you land on the Insights page, you may (or may not) be given the opportunity to see the New Insights Page Layout. If you have this option, click on it and you will get to see EXACTLY how Facebook came up with your “people are talking about” metric. You can see a snapshot of my Swanky Press new insights page below.
From this page, you can learn that the “Talking About This” number is made up of the the number of unique people that have made a story from your post. To be counted, the interaction can be:
- liking a post
- commenting on a post
- sharing a post
- answering a question
- rsvp’ing to an event
For each post, you can click on the blue “Talking About This” number and see a breakdown of each interaction.
If you look at the graphic above, you’ll also see “virality” listed. Basically, this is the number of people who did one of the above interactions, as a percentage of the total number of unique people who saw your post.
In Conclusion
So really, this new “People Are Talking About” isn’t mysterious at all. It is a snapshot of how well you got your users to engage over the past week. And Facebook is very up front about showing you exactly how it derived your number. I guess my initial reaction (of pure annoyance) really wasn’t founded. The new metric is actually a pretty good way to judge how I’m doing interacting with my page readers.
Is it something to obsess over? Probably not, but if you see your numbers going down, it probably means your fan page needs a little fine tuning.
