In yet another new initiative to overhaul its appearance, functionality and utility to both brands and consumers, Facebook has revealed a new metric: People Talking About.  While the name may not be much to ‘like’ (although it may be changed before its official launch), People Talking About has the potential to change the way companies conduct social media campaigns and the way their fans and consumers interact with them.

The new metric will be unique to Facebook Insights, the analytics dashboard offered by the social media platform, but – unlike many other Facebook Insights metrics – will be publicly displayed.  Many other metrics, both within and outside of Facebook, make only the number of friends and followers easily accessible to users, displaying the other, more meaningful metrics to page owners.

So what is this new metric, what goes into it and what does it mean to you?

People Talking About is planned to be one singular rating intended to tell users how compelling and interesting a page’s content is.  As with so many other social media metrics, this is calculated based not on the page’s content, but how users interact with it and how often.  Likes, shares, comments, wall posts, mentions and check-ins all factor into this calculation.  The idea behind this metric – which will be displayed prominently beneath the number of likes a page has – is, of course, that if others like and interact with a page, it’s probably pretty interesting and we would all likely want to check it out as well.

What it means for users:

Facebook wants more than ever for us to have a unique, targeted and effective user experience.  While the unveiling of Facebook’s new layout had many feeling betrayed by the social media site, these new developments are actually in the best interest of the user.  We will now be more likely to find content that we find interesting or entertaining and can avoid pages that push out content blindly without a mind to consumers and what they really want.  It means that users have a more official say in what pages live to go viral and which are to be banished to Facebook exile, never to be shared again.

What it means for companies:

While these new changes are all well and good for the user, they and this new very visible metric, could prove trickier for companies, challenging brands and company pages to produce genuinely interesting, useful, engaging content.  This may have seemed a fairly obvious requirement for effective social media campaigns, but it has already left many page owners scratching their heads as to just how to be engaging (for some ideas, check out 8 Ideas for Generating Engaging Content for the New Facebook).  Now, more than ever, brands and companies must offer something for people to talk about.

This may be the justification that some companies need to finally hire a social media manager.  At the very least, a very good reason to not let your intern head up your social media strategy.  It’s not enough to have a presence and get people to like your page.  Thought must go into who your consumer is, what they expect from their interaction with your page in social media, and how to deliver on that expectation.

However, just like with many other metrics, it is not the be-all, end-all of social media metrics.  It should factor into your social media monitoring and reporting, but only as part of a much larger examination.  This number should help guide your strategy, to tell you if something you’re doing is working and what may be wasted energy.  It also makes it easier for companies to scope out other brands that may be doing a good job, whose pages can then be audited to possibly identify some successful strategies that could be applied to a different brand page.

Yeah, what else?

People Talking About is just one of four new metrics being shined up and added to Facebook Insights.  ‘Likes’ remain ever meaningful and, with the roll-out of Facebook’s new verb buttons (Read, Watched, Listened), will become more indicative of a users’ general affinity for a post’s content.  Brand new to the line-up are “Friends of Fans” which, as you might have guessed, tells a page owner how many friends its fans have, and “Weekly Total Reach,” which attempts to determine (accurately or at least semi-accurately), how many times your content has been referenced and distributed.  Finally, Pages Insights will also very kindly track a page’s last 500 posts and theoretically tell you how many engaged fans it has and its virality, which is to be determined using the number of comments a posts receives.

Is this really useful?

As I mentioned, it will be more important than ever for a brand or company page to be engaging and this number could help give some indication of just how effective a social media strategy is to that effect.  However, it would appear that this new metric may need some tweaking and not just in regards to the name.  ‘Weekly Total Reach’ and the number of engaged fans will likely be helpful to page owners, because it tracks fairly reliable metrics like shares and comments, but it’s unlikely that comments is enough to determine the virality of a post.  This could also serve to trip up some companies and lull them into a false sense of security, with numbers like Friends of Fans which is essentially meaningless if fans aren’t engaging with and sharing a page’s content.  It also does not track sentiment, for better or for worse, counting all comments the same whether positive or negative (See here for other considerations to using social media metrics).

The dive into historical data is unique and could prove useful in providing companies with a baseline reading of engagement to compare future results with.  My advice to companies is to take this new development with a grain of salt.  It is, after all, focused solely on Facebook activity and is at the end of the day, just one of many meaningful metrics to help you determine your social media effectiveness.  In order to have a truly effective social media campaign, remember the foundation of Facebook: its users.  Use the metrics as a guide but be human in your content strategy.  That’s what will really get people talking.

Tags: analytics, Facebook, marketing, measure, SMM, social, social analytics, Social Media

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 4th, 2011 at 8:39 am and is filed under Brand Engagement, Facebook, Social Media, Web Analytics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.