With all the changes announced at F8 and the Tickers and Timelines being aimed at the rank & file Facebook user, brand Pages started wondering, “Hey, what about us?”  It’s a safe bet Pages will get a new look sooner rather than later.  All arrows point toward something that operates similar to users’ Timelines.  But Facebook has already announced that marketers will be getting something they love…new Facebook analytics.

Brands will find a tab on their Pages called “Page Insights,” where you’ll be able to find out much more than just how many people “Like” you.  You can take a look at “Friends of Fans” and find out how many people you were able to get to through your fans.  A ticker (what’s with Facebook and tickers these days?) will show you how these numbers are going up and down, like following a stock on a chart.

"People Talking About" YOU?

Then there’s the sparkly new metric, “People Talking About.”  This is Facebook’s assessment of how users are engaging with your brand based on a number of things they deem “conversations”: Liking, posting to your Wall, engaging with a post, responding to an event, photo-tagging you, checking in, sharing a deal, etc.  When a user sees a high “People Talking About” score on your Page, they can assume you regularly put up a lot of content people are interested in and respond to.  That will make them more likely to “Like” the Page.  For your part, you have to regularly put up a lot of content people are interested in, or your “People Talking About” score is going to reveal that you’ve got writer’s block or a creative problem.

Finally, there’s “Weekly Total Reach.”  That’s supposed to tell you how many users posted something about you, how much you were referenced within Facebook, and how viral your viral elements were.

Find "View Insights" (top right corner of your Facebook page) to find the new Facebook analytics available

All this, combined with deeper data on how individual posts are performing, gives you a LOT of data to wade through and make sense of.  For those who rely on 3^rd party tech partners like Vitrue to crunch it and customize it for you, there’s good news on that front as well.  Facebook has given our kind a “Page Insights API” which allows us to access Facebook data so we can enhance our platform’s existing powerful analytics components.

The desired end result, of course, is not just to give marketers so many numbers it makes their eyes roll back in their heads.  The point is to use engagement results to teach and coax those marketers to be more relevant, informative, and entertaining with their posts.  When that happens, marketers and users win.