Facebook Launches New Metric: “People Talking About”

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Facebook has overhauled its Pages Insights analytics tool and added a new metric to gauge the health of a page: “People Talking About.”
That statistic, which users will see on Pages below the total number of “Likes,” will be one of four tracked by Pages Insights. The idea is that users will understand a Page with a high People Talking About rating is one that has compelling content. Likewise, content creators will be motivated to make their Pages more comment-worthy.
People Talking About (that might not be the final name for the metric; at press time, Facebook wasn’t sure) will measure user-initiated activity related to a Page, including posting to a Page’s Wall, “liking,” commenting, sharing a Page post or content on the Page, answering a Question posed to fans, mentioning a Page, “liking” or sharing a deal or checking in at your Place.
The other metrics, which are designed for administrators of brand and media Pages, include “Likes,” “Friends of Fans” and “Weekly Total Reach.” While “Likes” is self-explanatory, Friends of Fans is the actual number of friends your fans have, and weekly total reach is designed to be an accurate assessment of how many total people have posted something about your Page, how many news organizations (within Facebook) have referenced it and how much viral distribution elements of your Page has gotten.
David Baser, product manager for Pages Insights, says that despite a raft of new activities that Facebook will be introducing soon under the Facebook Gestures banner, those four metrics will remain and the “Like” will maintain its ranking as a top measurement. “Likes are an expression of identity,” Baser says. “It’s a user saying that I have a relationship with this brand.”
In addition to tracking the four metrics, Pages Insights will also offer a deeper dive into data around specific updates. Facebook will list your last 500 posts (the company began tracking them in July) and count the total number of engaged users, People Talking About it and virality. The latter measures the percentage of users who commented on the post.
Sentiment, however, will not be part of the calculation. Whether a user is lauding a comment or trashing it, it will count the same.

Facebook Insights Main Page

 

Facebook's primary Insights Page will measure "Likes," Friends of Fans, Weekly Reach and "People Talking About" the Page.

Facebook Insights: Reach

Facebook will now offer a deeper dive into your Page's reach.

Facebook Insights: Post Analysis 

Facebook will also offer more visibility into how your post performed, including its "virality," i.e., the percentage of people exposed to the update that commented on it, "Liked" it or had some other kind of interaction with it.

Sharing on Twitter, Facebook and Google+

There’s little denying that Facebook, Twitter and Google+ are the three most active social networks at this time where billions of pieces of content are shared every single day.

To give you an idea, more than 200 million tweets are written every day by 100+ million users on Twitter while the numbers are even more impressive for Facebook. The 800+ million users of Facebook like and share more than 2 billion posts per day. Google+ is growing at an impressive rate but is still a relatively small player with 43 million users.

Thus, as a web publisher, it definitely makes lot of sense for you to share your content across all these channels but have you ever wondered which of these networks have the highest engagement level? Which of them would bring the maximum eyeballs to your content?

Kevin Rose, best known as the founder of Digg, recently did an interesting experiment. He shared the same web article on his Twitter, Facebook and Google+ profiles simultaneously and, with the help of bit.ly analytics, calculated the number of clicks coming from each of these social networks for the next two days. The results aren’t very surprising.

 

Kevin has 1.2 million followers on Twitter who clicked on the link ~5800 times. Some 135k people have added Kevin to their Google+ circle and that got him ~3600 clicks. Finally, his 261k subscribers on Facebook clicked on the link link more than 11000 times.

The click-through ratio, or the engagement level, was the highest on Facebook which shouldn't surprise many.

Facebook Is Getting Too Damn Complicated

 

Ever noticed how the remote for each new TV you check out seems to have more and more buttons? Or how that online game you used to enjoy is feeling less like fun as the options pile on? It’s not your fault. It’s a well-documented phenomenon, found in hardware, in software and on the Web: feature creep.

Engineers, bless their hearts, want to give us access to all the exciting new functions they’ve come up with. But they’re not great at making them simple enough for the average user, or at removing the buttons we no longer need. When a company does have the courage and discipline to slash away at its engineers’ wish lists, and adhere to the KISS principle of design (Keep It Simple, Stupid), it can rise head and shoulders above its rivals and delight its users. Apple is a great example of that, as is Nintendo (the Wii being one of the most simple — and successful — game console designs of all time.)

Unfortunately for its 800 million users, Facebook does not appear to be that kind of company. It used to be, and its inherent simplicity was part of the reason it was so successful. But now it is falling victim to feature creep — and a roster of settings that are becoming increasingly complex.

Take the Ticker, for example, that real-time stream of information which now crowds the right-side of your Facebook page with a lot of distracting noise. Or look at the Like button, which recently celebrated its first birthday. That was a very popular all-purpose tool that spread rapidly across the Web. Everyone knows what it means to Like something. But Facebook couldn’t leave well enough alone.

At this year’s f8 conference, Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook Gestures, which will allow you to [any verb] a [any noun]. As Zuckerberg pointed out, this will allow you to “read” a book or “hike” a trail rather than like it. That’s great if you like a lot of granularity in your News feed, but I fear that for the vast majority of us it means more confusion, more noise, and the decline of the social network’s single most iconic feature.

Once upon a time, you just friended people; now you have to decide if you want to subscribe to their feed instead. A profile used to be a profile, plain and simple; now it can also be a Page (and converting one to the other can open up a world of pain). And let’s not even get into the debate over Timeline, the radical redesign of the user profile, which will start rolling out to all users in the next week or so and eventually be required for all of us. Got your all-important top-of-the-page picture picked out yet? Booked the hours that it’s going to take to fill in the story of your life, all the way back to birth? (The vast majority of respondents in our poll said filling in their Timeline gaps would take too much time and effort.)

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The Other 792 Million

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The New Facebook Profile: Timeline

Timeline is a radical departure from previous versions of the Facebook user profile. The most prominent feature is the addition of a cover photo at the top of the page. Users can change this to whatever they'd like it to be.

1987

In 1987, my sister was born. Facebook knows these life events and includes them in your timeline.

Being Born

You can even add a picture and context to your birth, which starts the Timeline.

Timeline Interface

The Timeline is a two-column interface with top photos, status updates, friends and more.

Map

Facebook has added a feature that lets you see where you have visited. This is powered by Facebook Places.

Photos in the Timeline

Here's how photos are displayed in the Timeline.

Friends in the New Timeline

Here's what the Friends page looks like.

Changing Settings

Some of the new Timeline's customization features.

2009

More of the new Timeline

Getting Married

You can add life events, such as getting married, to your profile through the Publisher Bar. You can also announce that you broke a bone, got a new job, etc.

Chances are, as a Mashable reader, you’re on top of some of this stuff. Maybe you’ve even gone through the complex steps required to activate your Timeline ahead of time. Great; that puts you in the top 1% of Facebook users: the early adopters, the people who get excited about change rather than fear it. But spare a thought for the other 792 million users, most of whom don’t even know these changes are coming. There are millions of people who think the Ticker is the new Facebook. They’re in for a nasty surprise.

Even for those at the top of the pile, the complexities are growing. Many friends who cover Facebook for a living have their pet peeves about the site and the increasing number of roadblocks it throws in the path to doing something that should be very easy. Take Lists, for example. Facebook used to treat Lists as a way to prevent certain people from seeing certain information; you could exclude your boss and your parents from seeing all those girls’ night out pictures you were tagged in, say.

But now Facebook has changed its mind and decided that Lists are more like Circles on Google+ — ways to share with specific groups of friends rather than block specific groups of friends. In other words, there are now two kinds of Lists. It is possible to merge your old Lists together, but we’ve heard from users that this blasts your privacy settings. And who has the time to sort out this stuff? It’s getting so that managing your social network, and making sure nothing embarrassing slips out, is a full-time occupation in itself.

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Big Announcement Of Facebook Timeline At f8 Conference by Zuckerberg

The Facebook Developer’s Conference concluded early this morning (23 September). Amidst all the hype and excitement Facebook took stage in the form of its various speakers, with the intention of blowing everyone away – Facebook quote about the conference from a few weeks back, “biggest announcements since the birth of the platform”. Did they succeed?

Let’s say, if you were living in a lively coastal town called Social Media and Facebook Developers Conference was a tornado about to hit you, the cyclone would have a magnitude of F8. The magnitude of announcements had already started making news in social circles in the form of blogs and tweets. All of them were true – Facebook Music; new Read, Listened, Watched, and Want Buttons; Facebook media apps etc.But the biggest announcement by far was the Facebook Timeline. In this year itself, Twitter also introduced Twitter Timeline called as “timely tweets’‘ to promote their tweets realizing the its popularity and huge user base.
Some Features

• Stories, Apps incorporated as a new way to express who you are.
• Capability to scroll through your curated Facebook
• history
• photos
• updates, and more, segregated by year.
• Can be seen with photos or even on a map
• Apps can also plug in specifically into the timeline

Not in the least deterred by concerns over privacy and cluttering of personal pages, Facebook has had a popular notoriety in making un-popular releases that users sooner or later get used to. Timeline, though a brilliant leap forward, towards integration of multiple functionalities has been flayed with some expected criticism (both token and genuine). Facebook’s resolve to combine Google+, Myspace and Twitter into one has had some mocking the visual similarity to the Orkut profile while others have genuinely started considering the values of memory curation.Check out this video f8 Keynote Introduction to know more.  

Zuckerberg, however made it clear where they are coming from – “It’s exactly how you’d want to browse through time.”
And when Facebook is this certain about something, history shows us, people tend to agree over time and consecutive Facebook log-ins. It’s best to use it once and form your own opinion. The process to get a Timeline as of now is a little tedious but not enough to deter first movers and adopters.
Furthermore, Timeline will soon be presented equally well on mobile and web devices to make sure every access point is covered.
But what does Facebook Timeline mean to the various users at this point?
Advertisers will have no choice but to learn and get proficient in the new ecosystem. Content will take center stage and there will be lesser benefits from a well-ad supplied, low-creativity campaign. A valuable piece of information (from users or brands) will however end up in important timelines sooner or later. Interesting Facebook times ahead certainly.

How has your experience with Facebook Timeline been?

A Trillion Pageviews for Facebook

Google today released an updated list of the most-visited sites on the web and it should not come as any surprise that Facebook takes the top spot with 870 million uniques. YouTube and Yahoo are next with 790 M and 590 M uniques respectively.
Google, maybe for competitive reasons, doesn’t share traffic data of its own site, or that of Gmail, in the Ad Planner report. Google+ is growing but the user base is still relatively small for the site to become part of this report.
A Trillion Page Views
Facebook hit a new milestone in June this year - the site touched a trillion page views from the 870 million* people who visited Facebook that month. Check this infographic to get an idea of how big a trillion – or a million million – is.

[*] Officially, Facebook has 750+ million users but the number of unique visitors who flock Facebook every month is much higher because certain section of the site – Facebook Pages and Profiles for example – are open to non-users as well.

Facebook says that people spend over 700 billion minutes per month on the site and now we also know that, on an average, one user visits 1150 pages on Facebook in a month. That’s impressive considering that YouTube, with all the entertaining and viral content, manages only 126 views per unique visitor per month.