Facebook has new features for your brand

It seems like Facebook has been announcing a lot of changes lately.  For busy small business owners this can be a prescription for paranoia, since it’s hard to keep up with all these changes and quickly analyze how they affect your brand’s page.  However, the Facebook team seems to be working at keeping it clean and simple, with new metrics that help you understand your page’s impact.

The latest changes come as part of Facebook’s new Insight tools, which indicates a shift in Facebook’s  emphasis towards sharing and engagement. Until now there hasn’t really been a way for brands to measure the impact and reach their content and fan pages have. The latest updates will give brands a much better measurement of engagement over the previous offerings.

The new “People Talking About” feature allows users to see not just how many fans a page has, but also the engagement and level of conversation. By showing user-initiated activities such as ‘Likes’, posts, comments, shares, polls, photo-tagging, mentions and check-ins, the “People Talking About” function creates an overall snapshot of the interaction and engagement of your page. This information is publicly displayed on every brand page, sitting below the total number of fans for all to see. Because it’s so visible, it’s important to make this look polished by adding rich and engaging content.  Hopefully, this will shift marketing focus from product messages to conversation and dialogue between fans and brands.

As its name suggests, the “Friends of Fans” feature represents the friends linked to the fans of your page. Think of this is as your potential audience, or the number of people that messages from your page could reach. Brands are able to get a snapshot of just how much word-of-mouth could be achieved via their current fans and followers.

As “Friends of Fans” looks at the potential audience, the new “Weekly Total Reach” metric looks at actual audience.  It reflects how many people have posted about your page and/or mentioned or referenced your page, and how much viral activity your posts and pages have had. “Weekly Total Reach” lets you know which types of posts are working, which have been far-reaching, and which have been duds. Like the others, these metrics are about bringing content, engagement and conversation to the forefront, not just targeting fan acquisition or page ‘Likes’.

With the latest updates all hinting at easier content management, deeper insights into the performance and reach of content, and engagement-focused metrics, it’s obvious that Zuck’s team is still on the forefront of social media technology. These changes might inspire you to put further emphasis on creating rich and engaging content that keeps your customers talking about you.