Facebook can be trusted to roll out features that make it almost impossible for marketers to stay away from it. If people always had a question about what does Facebook really deliver to a marketer who runs a brand page, the answer is on hand. Welcome to the new Facebook insights
New Metrics in Facebook Insights
In addition to existing metrics provided by Facebook Insights, Facebook is now also providing three new metrics: ‘People Talking About This,’ ‘Number of Friends of Fans,’ and ‘Weekly Total Reach.’
What does ‘People Are Talking About This’ Metric mean for Facebook Pages?
This new metric is a way to measure content users share on Facebook that can reflect in the users’ News Feeds. It’s a metric that counts how many people like your page, post to your page’s wall; like the status updates, comment on then, or sharing them, answer a question or RSVP to an events.
What’s important to note is that this metric will not only be available in Facebook Insights for page admins, but will also be visible to page visitors as a publicly facing metric on the Page below fan (‘Likes’) count. Now it would be pretty easy for one to benchmark Facebook pages on how effective they really are and not solely have to rely on the Fan count, which could really be misleading
Marketing Takeaways
The new metrics mean a number of important things for marketers.
While the new metrics available to Facebook page administrators is helpful for marketers to measure and understand how effective their content is at engaging fans, the ‘People Talking About This’ metric is pretty significant. By virtue of being a public metric this will affect the ability of Pages to attract new fans. New visitors to the page may start using the metric to determine whether they would like to be a Fan of the page and not rely purely on the Fan numbers. In effect the task for page admins now become tougher, They would now need to get a high score on this metric apart from pure Fan numbers. This will force marketers on creating a page that generates more engagement and interaction through content. In the end this all leads to Facebook’s stated vision that Brand pages need to start seeing themselves as publishers ad not as pure fan gatherers
How do Indian Fan Pages Measure up?
On the day the metric was rolled out in the public domain we decided to check the top 25 Facebook Fan pages in India for their ‘People Talking About This’ scores. It comes as no surprise that the best scores are clocked by MTV Roadies and Tata DOCOMO. What is new is that pages like Nike Cricket, Shoppers Stop, Pizza Hut, Adidas Cricket, Reebok India and Cadbury’s Celebrations turn up with comparatively poor scores in-spite of the massive Fan numbers. We feel that the public availability of these numbers would actually help brands benchmark their Facebook performance better. Needless to say, 5 of the top 10 most “Talked About” Facebook brands in India are clients of Interface Business Solutions.
| Page | Page Rank | Fan Count | People Talking About This |
| Tata Docomo | 1 | 4,188,002 | 140,075 |
| MTV Roadies | 2 | 3,147,811 | 187,304 |
| MTV India | 3 | 2,933,033 | 87,665 |
| Facebook India | 4 | 2,822,379 | 20,969 |
| Vodafone ZooZoos | 5 | 2,443,537 | 104,109 |
| Kingfisher | 6 | 2,353,017 | 52,991 |
| Mumbai Indians | 7 | 2,158,493 | 81,684 |
| Fastrack | 8 | 2,145,393 | 30,106 |
| Axe Angels Club | 9 | 1,850,209 | 50,276 |
| Pepsi India | 10 | 1,562,732 | 42,565 |
| Shoppers Stop | 11 | 1,478,368 | 21,539 |
| Nike Cricket | 12 | 1,464,700 | 7,529 |
| Times Of India | 13 | 1,434,158 | 44,538 |
| Pizza Hut | 14 | 1,329,729 | 13,076 |
| Playup India | 15 | 1,244,484 | 59,892 |
| Reebok India | 16 | 1,189,432 | 16,964 |
| Adidas Cricket | 17 | 1,159,346 | 3,143 |
| Channel V India | 18 | 1,135,919 | 28,921 |
| ebay India | 19 | 1,111,074 | 18,702 |
| Bingo! | 20 | 1,091,727 | 49,776 |
| Cadbury’s Celebrations | 21 | 1,084,109 | 19,263 |
| MTV Splitsvilla | 22 | 1,068,305 | 44,585 |
| Tata Photon | 23 | 1,038,431 | 1,473 |
| Nyoo TV | 24 | 1,003,155 | 16,169 |
| Blackberry India | 25 | 977,807 | 3,975 |
