Affinitive’s Social Media Playground

Any marketer who has directly measured or quantified the performance of a Facebook page or application knows full well how primitive and unreliable the Facebook Insights dashboard is.  Fan count, page views, and interaction rates serve as the key metrics which, to Facebook’s argument, does provide ‘insight’ into a page, but offers limited access below the surface.

It appears now that Facebook is ramping up their Insights offering, having debuted a new ‘Impressions’ metric for page admins to sink their teeth into.   Impressions, according to a Facebook spokesperson to AllFacebook.com, is defined as “the raw number of impressions shown to users. These impressions may appear in users’ News Feeds, visits to Pages or through a Fan Box widget.”

As a marketer with a soft spot for hard metrics I’m not amped by this.  For starters, this new metric doesn’t give me unique reach, frequency, or placement.  Facebook counts impressions beneath the fold, and when the majority of these impressions are funneled through a dynamic, vertical news feed, it’s probable that some of my impressions are displayed below the fold and never actually seen by the user.

Second,  I cannot measure with any certainty the number of impressions that are targeted to my intended audience (fans or friends of fans).  Whether passersby visit my publicly accessible page, or if I have a “Fanbox” widget on a site outside of Facebook, ‘Impressions’ lumps together both fans and non-fans into one big fat super-impressive number.  In a time where measuring reach and interactivity can be pinpointed to the individual user, it seems a bit archaic to use ad-based, unwashed masses metrics.  I know neither who viewed my content nor how it was viewed, if at all.

Targeted messaging and engaging opt-in consumers is a key advantage of a Facebook page as a marketing tactic, so why doesn’t Facebook let me measure that?  I’d like to see how many fans I reached, or friends of fans, and whereabouts in the news feed my status update appeared; or integrate more specific content update data into the dashboard to better measure performance and sentiment in lieu of the ambiguous ‘Post Quality.’ I could think of a laundry list of metrics I would rather have seen with this update than ‘Impressions.’  I’m disappointed.

Unfortunately Facebook plays host to more than 400 million people and as long as they provide an outlet for brands to engage with this audience, I will take whatever insights Facebook provides.  They’ve hinted at more sophisticated updates in the past, I just hope more of these updates are in the offing so we can stop regressing and start advancing our measurement standards.