In its drive of introducing newer features, Facebook has come up with a new “People Talking About This” metric. This fan page metric comes with an upgraded Page Insights tool and shows the discussion on conversation occurring about a brand or its page owner across the web. Facebook has also released a new Page Insights API tool.

What Facebook Has to Say About ‘People Talking About This‘-

For internet marketers, using Facebook pages, this update will give highly useful insights in to consumer behavior. Facebook explains about the metric in this manner -

‘People Talking about this’ counts ‘stories’ – structured content that people choose to share through Facebook that is eligible to appear in a user’s news feed:

• liking your Page.
• posting to your Page’s Wall.
• liking, commenting or sharing one of your Page posts (or other content on your page – like photos, videos, albums).
• answering a Question you posted, RSVP-ing to one of your events.
• mentioning your Page, photo tagging your Page.
• liking or sharing a check-in deal, or checking in at your Place.

Another Metric is ‘Conversations On Pages‘. This lets page owners reach out to further audiences than their fans. Facebook explains the ‘Conversations On Pages’-

Conversations on Pages let brands reach more than just their Fans – which is important in increasing awareness, finding new customers, and even driving sales.

• Friends of Fans represent a larger set of consumers than just a brand’s Fans – 34x larger, on average for the top 100 brand Pages, and 81x larger for the top 1000 (comScore).
• Friends of Fans are also much more likely to visit a store, website, and even purchase a product or service (comScore).
• Starbucks Fans & Friends of Fans spend 8% more in stores and are transacted 11% more frequently than average Starbucks customer (comScore).
• Bing Fans conduct 68% more searches on Bing than average Bing searcher. Friends of Fans conduct 27% more searches on Bing (comScore).

What Facebook Says About The ‘Page Insights Tool’-

The idea behind this tool is to underline the significance of sharing on the pages, among the fans. As Facebook says about the updates tool – “With the new Page Insights, Facebook is emphasizing the importance of sharing on Pages, because this increases a brand’s reach, and reach is an important metric to marketers. Facebook has enhanced Insights to show brands how to get more people talking about and sharing the things Pages/brands put on their Pages, which is key to getting a brand’s message out to more people. And research shows that word-of-mouth conversations among friends are the most influential for getting a brand’s message across.

With the new Page Insights, Pages can:

• See how posts they put on their Page reach people on Facebook – beyond their fans.
• See Total Likes, number of Friends of Fans of a Page, the new public and internal Pages metric, ‘People talking about this’, and Weekly Total Reach of a Page.
• Optimize content for posts whether they’re photos, videos, questions, etc. See what’s working best at reaching the most people, and how to increase the viral nature of these posts.”

Premium Ad Unit-

Facebook has also come up with Premium Ad Unit, which is a unique way to combine ads with social posts. Facebook, explains the Unit in this manner, “Investing in ads helps boost a Page’s brand messages, and we’ve seen that social context around advertising is both better for brands and better for people because the advertising becomes more relevant.

So today Facebook is also introducing a new expanded Premium ad unit that combines Page posts with social context from your friends when available. When the person viewing this brand’s ad has friends connected to this brand’s Page, Facebook will expand the unit to include a line above that shares which friends like the Page – thus combining the brand’s voice in the ad with a friend’s voice, together.”

Facebook Page Insights API-

Facebook took care of the analytics developer community too, and with the new Facebook Page Insights API, allows the developer to create customized Page insights. As Facebook says, “To encourage third party development and analytics innovation, Facebook is also announcing a Page Insights API for the analytics developer community, so that they can create customized Page Insights solutions for existing and potential clients.”

Facebook Marketers stand to gain a lot from these tools, and if you want an insight of essential Facebook marketing, read our post for beginners here.

About The Author: Nav is the founder and CEO of Page Traffic, a premier search engine company known for its assured SEO service, web design and development, copywriting and full time SEO professionals. Navneet has wide experience in natural search engine optimization, internet marketing and PPC campaigns. He is a prolific writer and his articles can be found in the "Best Articles" section of many websites and article banks. As a search engine analyst , he has over 9 years of experience and his knowledge is in application here.