In early March 2009, Facebook began pushing a package of enhanced metric reporting to page administrators as a follow-up to redesigned pages for businesses, celebrities, bands and other non-personal entities.

Facebook’s rollout of these features coincided with MarketNet’s launch of a social media campaign for a new client, which afforded me an excellent opportunity to get to know the new Facebook Insights on a brand-new campaign with fresh data. Now that I’ve had about a month to use the new features, I thought that I would discuss my experiences with the new data and what it means to marketers on Facebook.

New Features

The primary additions to Insights are the engagement metrics. Prior to these changes, number of fans and the metrics surrounding that figure (new vs removed  or unsubscribed fans) was for the most part the sole success metric for pages. By attempting to quantify fan engagement in a number of ways – and placing those metrics in the most prominent place on the Insights page (top-left) – the folks at Facebook seem to be attempting to reframe the conversation about what a successful Facebook page is.

Most of us have seen pages created for an entity with a built-in fan base that quickly runs up fan numbers but doesn’t offer much value to those who raised their hands. Case-in-point: as a native Louisianan , I became a fan of “crawfish;” while “crawfish” has 57,000+ fans and a good number of wall posts by fans, the page administrator has not actively provided updates and engaging content for fans and thus would score lower in engagement metrics. In this way, I think the increased emphasis on engagement is a good thing for both page owners in terms of understanding what success on Facebook looks like, and for Facebook itself, which benefits from more engaging content on the site through increased stickiness (read: increased PPC revenue).

So let’s take a look at these engagement metrics. The first thing you will notice on the new Insights page is the Total Interactions graph at the top left of the page. Each colored line represents a different interaction point. Blue represents Total Interactions, which is the sum of the other three lines on the graph: Comments, Wall Posts and Likes. As stated above, these data points serve as a measure of how engaged fans are in communicating with the brand. It can be assumed that the more engaged consumers are, the more likely they are to be converted to customers, so it is in the page owner’s best interest to keep the conversation going.

You will notice in the screenshot above that at the beginning of July, interactions increase dramatically. This is a direct result of our implementing a scheduled communication plan and consciously engaging every fan that posts to the page. Without these engagement metrics we very well may have missed the opportunity to step up the conversation about the brand we’re representing.

Additional Interaction Metrics

Beyond the default Interactions graph, Facebook has added other more granular interaction metrics, including:

•    Discussion Posts: The number of Discussion topics users have created on the Page.
•    Reviews: The number of times fans have used the Reviews application to rate your Page.
•    Active Fans This Week: Users who have written on your Wall or engaged with your posts are considered active fans.
•    Post Quality: Score measuring how engaging your content is to Facebook users. A higher Post Quality indicates material that better engages users.

While the first three data points are self-explanatory, the final one, Post Quality, warrants a closer look. According to Facebook, “The Post Quality score measures how engaging your Posts have been to Facebook users over a rolling seven-day window.” Facebook derives this score from “the percentage of your fans that engage when you post content to your Page.” That said, this metric remains somewhat of a mystery, as I have not been able to determine what the top of the scale is. On this particular campaign, we started out with a post quality score of 180 but dropped to a score of 16 in one week and are currently at 12. My guess is that the number of fans grew at a significantly faster rate than the number of post interactions. In light of that, I would say that assigning true meaning to the Post Quality score requires some context and insight into how it’s derived and the data points driving the algorithm behind the score.

Beyond the Post Quality Score, Facebook also provides a ‘star rating,’ which is an indicator of “how your Post Quality compares to similar Pages (for example, Pages that have a similar number of fans.)” While interesting, I’m not sure of the practical value of this rating or what – beyond “pages that have a similar number of fans” figures into the classification of being a similar page or what qualifies as “a similar number.” The folks at Facebook would do well to offer a little more insight (no pun intended) into this rating and how it might have practical applications for page owners.

Some Helpful Tips

Facebook does offer some solid advice around increasing the number of interactions and improving your Post Quality. They are:

•    Making sure that your posts, whether they are Status Updates, photos, links, or videos, are relevant to your fans. Posting engaging content is the best way to get people to interact with your Page.
•    Posting frequently, but not posting an overwhelming amount of content that users may find spammy or burdensome to consume.
•    Increasing your total fan base to generate more interactions.

That last bullet included a link to “promote your page with an ad,” which speaks to Facebook’s ultimate motivation for these enhancements. Just like Google, the folks at Facebook know that by providing page owners with valuable tools such as Insights for free they can increase user engagement, which increases pageviews, which increases ad revenue. Furthermore, the more we know about engagement and how our pages stack up to others – which very well may explain the motivation behind the star rating – the more likely we are to pony up for PPC. As an aside, we used Facebook PPC on this campaign; and we’re very happy with the results.

A Look Into the Future

Finally, Facebook says that they’re not done rolling out new engagement metrics. The next couple they plan to add are called “Stream CTR and Stream ETR” which they describe as “a measure of the Click Through Rate and Engagement Rate for your content appearing in the Facebook News Feed. If a user clicks on one of your posts, that will be counted as Stream CTR. If a user likes or comments on one of your posts, that will be counted in the Stream ETR.”

No word on when these new metrics will be added, but if these latest offerings are any indication, I’m looking forward to exploring the practical uses of Facebook’s expanding suite of measurement tools.

Have you begun to use Facebook’s new Insight’s? If so, let us know. We would love to know what others think.