Good.  That should have happened because analytics are important!  Below, some tips to making more out of your “new” Facebook Insights:

Get Past Total Likes

It’s easy to take metrics like People Talking About This (PTAT), Engaged Users, etc. and divide them into total Page Likes as a barometer for fan engagement levels. PTAT and Total Likes are prominently displayed next to one another on your page.  But this overstates your fan engagement, and Facebook wants you to start seeing the forest for the trees.  When grabbing reach metrics, make sure you’re looking at fans, friends of fans, and in some cases the unique visitor traffic to your page (if measuring stats at the page level.)  Engagements and stories are being created by more than just your fans, and should be measured that way.  Total Likes is important, and is just one of several metrics to use when measuring your Facebook audience.

Measure Engagement And Viral Engagement

The level of engagement with your content is the lynchpin to getting more exposure in the news feed and what better way to see that than understanding how many people interact with your content when they see it?  To get Engagement, divide Engaged Users by your Total Reach.  This will give you a % of all the unique users who potentially SAW your content that also clicked on that content in some way.

People Talking About This, a type of engagement, measures a unique user performing an action that creates a story in the engaged user’s news feed (ex – “Jane Doe just commented on Acme Brand’s post.”) Measure PTAT the same way as Engaged Users, dividing by Total Reach, to get % Viral Engagement (or “Virality” as Facebook displays it on the Insights dashboard.) Viral engagement is the more desired type of engagement in most instances, as it spreads your message through the social graph more quickly.

These metrics are helpful in understanding how well your message is resonating with the people you’re reaching.  Aim to keep engagement levels up as your fan base grows, and continue to increase the virality of your engagements by focusing on those actions that create stories, which in turn increases the distribution of your message.

Use People Talking About This For Competitive Analysis

Since PTAT is a public-facing metric, you can now take this number, divide by total Likes (I know I just advised not doing this above, but we don’t have much choice when doing competitive analysis), and trend this percentage over time for your brand and your competitors.  If you’re between 2-4% you’re on the right track (this may be higher for pages with less fans and lower for pages with more fans).  Keep an eye on this to gauge how well your message is resonating as compared to your competitors and similar brands with comparable fan levels.

Pay Attention To The Post Level

Post level metrics are the purest Insights Facebook offers for accurately measuring post content performance.  Try categorizing your post types by subject in advance, then group your posts’ performance by subject to better understand what content topics and execution tactics boost kpi’s like Engaged Users and Virality at the post level.  For example, you’re a wine brand targeting Millenials.  You may post about the properties of the wine, the brand values of the wine, lifestyle attributes of your target customers like the kind of music or food they may like, etc.  Group these posts into their respective topics, and revise your content strategy by learning how these topics generally perform by comparison.

Ultimately you’ll want to measure whatever metrics align with your objectives.  Maybe you’re looking to drive traffic to a product web site, and you want to measure reach with click through rates on sales or product announcements, or maybe your concern is awareness in which Impressions might hold more weight.  Don’t be afraid to experiment with metrics just like you would with your creative tactics.  Just remember that Facebook can, and will, manipulate and change their data and metrics whenever they want and however they want, so be sure to export and store your data regularly to avoid losing anything important.

How have you adapted to the new Insights from Facebook?

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.

I recently returned from WOMMA’s Word of Mouth Marketing Summit in Las Vegas. It was a fun (yet sleepless!) few days and it’s always great running into/reconnecting with familiar faces as well as meeting new ones.

Historically, these events have always left me invigorated and full of new ideas. But this time, something felt… “different” (and it wasn’t the shots of Petron that we did at the Wynn just a few hours earlier after an all-night Blackjack marathon )

In the opening “State of WOM Address” given by WOMMA President John Bell, he said something along the lines of the word of mouth marketing industry reaching a “tipping point“. I think what he meant was that WOM is about to transition from a “niche” form of marketing and a tiny part of the overall marketing mix to a more “mainstream” tactic that is on the top-of-minds of any C-level executive.

Yes! I agree 100%! But after two days of panels and networking with people from a variety of backgrounds (brands, agencies, services), I started to wonder, could word of mouth marketing, rather than reaching a “tipping point”, be “jumping the shark“?

Thinking back to the “early” WOMMA events (2005), there was an electricity/excitement in the air. It’s really hard to explain, but everyone was drinking the proverbial Kool-Aid. The excitement wasn’t about what had been done, but about the potential of what could be done. There were far more questions than answers, but that was fine, because it was forcing people to think about things like tactics, metrics, and business models. And for brands, how can they sell WOM to their boss and how do they budget for it?

Flash forward 3.5 years – word of mouth marketing has matured into a multi-billion dollar industry. There are tons of books, blogs, and even awards dedicated to the concept. So although I didn’t find it surprising that audience members (many of whom were new to the industry and first-timers at a WOM-related conference) were asking many of the same questions as back in 2005, the vibe was much less “electric” and more “uncertain”, and what surprised me was the lack of concrete answers being provided, in particular with respect to:

• Tactics
• Metrics
• ROI
• Ethics

How can that be possible? Are we, as practitioners, really still figuring things out? Or are we hesitant to share too much info with other agencies/potential competitors (since the event was probably 90% vendors/agencies)?

On the agency/vendor front, are folks jumping into the WOM/SM arena out of true passion/belief or are they just trying to latch on the next “big/cool” thing or make a quick buck? Will the industry simply become dominated by a small group of large PR Social Media agencies? If times become tough economy-wise and competition more fierce, will things like ethics be tossed out the window? Please tell me no!

However, I do truly believe that the industry is at a crossroads. The lines are being blurred between PR, marketing, loyalty/CRM, and customer service as these tactics increasingly overlap. Demanding accountability and establishing consistent metrics among both brands and agencies is the only way to ensure things “tip” rather than “jump”. Hopefully this stirs up some healthy dialog – I encourage you to post your thoughts below, or drop me a tweet!

Oh, by the way you can check out all of the live “tweets”/micro-commentary that were posted during the WOMMA Summit by looking for posts tagged #womsum (or just click this link).