Facebook’s Insights Get A Makeover

Facebook is growing and evolving rapidly, and in case you hadn’t noticed, the current focus is monetization. I have written a few articles lately taking a look at some of the recent Facebook advertising breakthroughs and rollouts, with the most important of these being the evolution of their mobile app installs and revamped ad buying interface.

But Facebook isn’t slowing down or letting up, oh no. The past month has seen some more fantastic developments for brands and advertisers alike.

O.K. Great, But We Still Don’t Trust Facebook

One of the commonly cited problems amongst business owners with social media is the ability to accurately measure the results of a campaign and the return on investment seen. A lot of the time, this is due to ignorance and a lack of broader marketing knowledge.

This is why the SEO Company has remained king for so long in the eyes of many small business owners. They understand SEO, SEO is safe. SEO means spending x amount of dollars and seeing  x amount of visitors and leads, nice and safe.

Facebook is still scary and foreign to many. It’s hip, it’s trendy and it represents change. Obviously as marketers we don’t feel the same, but for many local or traditional small business owners, adoption and acceptance of social media platforms like Facebook is still a ways away (unfortunately).

Change, What Change?

Whilst I think the updated Facebook insights are a big step in the right direction, it still isn’t drastic enough to sway the apathetic business owners who still refuse to embrace Facebook. However, what it will, hopefully, do is push more on the fence marketers and SEO Companies towards integrating Facebook into their marketing mix, due to the move towards simpler, yet equally more relevant, metrics.

Facebook is rolling out some pretty damn appealing advertising initiatives at the moment, and they are too lucrative to ignore anymore. With the unveiling of their Cost Per Action ad buying and their foray into remarketing, Facebook now represents a more holistic and integrated marketing medium, but I’ll cover those developments later this month.

What Do The New Insights Mean?

Facebook’s New Insights were cited to be tackling two problems. The first objective of the revamped Insights setup is to simplify the system; Facebook wants to make it easier for marketers to get to the bottom of who’s doing what and why.

Ironically, the new Insights attempt to achieve this by adding in extra layers of sophistication and detail to the metrics available to page owners. This is a move that should not only resonate with social marketers, but SEO’s and SEO Companies alike.

The People Talking About This metric for example has been split into four new metrics – Page Likes, People Engaged, Page Tags and Mentions, Page Check-Ins and other Page Interactions.

In an interesting move Facebook has already rebranded its ‘virality’ metric as engagement rate, in a move to conform to more traditional advertising and marketing parlance.

Perhaps the most important development is the evolution of the Page Reach metric, with page owners now not only being able to see who they’ve reached with each post, but who they’ve engaged, a valuable insight for content creators looking to tailor their content creation to particular audiences to ensure a greater deal of resonation.

What’s Next?

Hopefully this development along with the string of other powerful new advertising initiatives will help sway those businesses and business owners who are still distrusting of Facebook into seriously considering this social media platform as a viable and lucrative advertising platform for their business. The level of sophistication being developed, in particular the recent foray into remarketing and Cost Per Action ad buying is certainly something should make integrated marketers and SEO Companies sit up and take note as well.

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