Value/Importance: [rating=3]
Recommended link: Facebook blog announcement
If you’re a Facebook Admin, watch out for changes to Facebook Page Insights, the analytics tool for monitoring the performance of your Facebook Pages. Product Marketing Manager Galyn Burke told Techcrunch that this is the first time the Page Insights interface has been updated since October 2011.
As with many Facebook changes, this has not been rolled out internationally yet, we’re not seeing it yet, but will update this post when it becomes more widely available. In the meantime, here is a preview of the new interface:
The relevant update from Facebook is shown below - this suggests that, in what looks to me a backwards step, PTAT will be retired in favour of breaking out its components. Having an aggregate engagement measures is valuable. This is how Facebook explain it.
People Talking About This (PTAT)
We heard from many Page admins that they want more insight into the actions that make up PTAT. For instance, how people’s liking their business Page differs from people’s interacting with their posts. For this reason, we’re breaking out PTAT into elements that will now be reported separately as Page Likes, People Engaged (the number of unique people who have clicked on, liked, commented on, or shared your posts), Page tags and mentions, Page checkins, and other interactions on a Page. PTAT as a combined metric will still be available for Page admins not participating in the new Insights preview.Virality
We also heard that the virality metric in Page Insights is often used as a benchmark for Page post quality. However, this metric doesn’t include clicks in its measurement, which are a strong indicator of positive post engagement and a key piece in providing marketers with metrics around overall post quality. So moving forward, we’re including clicks in this metric and renaming ‘virality’ to ‘engagement rate’ to be clearer in our definition.
If you’re not “hands-on” with Facebook, but manage it as part of your marketing, it’s worth being aware of the changes since detailed interaction measures can help you go beyond “Likes” to understand engagement and sharing of your content.
As Marie Page explains in our Guide to Smarter Facebook Marketing it was useful for marketers to review PTAT for this. PTAT is the number of unique people who have created a story about your Page in the last week. A story is created when someone likes the Page, comments on or shares a post, answers a question, responds to an event, mentions or tags the Page, checks in or recommends your Place. So if you’re not aware this, check the trends in your PTAT and how they compare against competitors. It will be worth getting to grips with the detailed breakout once it becomes available.
To give you an idea of how you compare here is the Social Baker’s compilation of Pages with the highest percentage PTAT of Fans.
By Dave Chaffey
Digital strategist Dr Dave Chaffey is co-founder and Content Director of online marketing training platform and publisher Smart Insights. 'Dr Dave' is known for his strategic, but practical, data-driven advice. He has trained and consulted with many business of all sizes in most sectors. These include large international B2B and B2C brands including 3M, BP, Barclaycard, Dell, Confused.com, HSBC, Mercedes-Benz, Microsoft, M&G Investment, Rentokil Initial, O2, Royal Canin (Mars Group) plus many smaller businesses. Dave is editor of the templates, guides and courses in our digital marketing resource library used by our Business members to plan, manage and optimize their marketing. Free members can access our free sample templates here. Dave is also keynote speaker, trainer and consultant who is author of 5 bestselling books on digital marketing including Digital Marketing Excellence and Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice. In 2004 he was recognised by the Chartered Institute of Marketing as one of 50 marketing ‘gurus’ worldwide who have helped shape the future of marketing. My personal site, DaveChaffey.com, lists my latest Digital marketing and E-commerce books and support materials including a digital marketing glossary. Please connect on LinkedIn to receive updates or ask me a question.
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