by samHere is some interesting news for those of you in SMO out there. Last week, on the eve of New York’s advertising week, Facebook announced a big update to their page insights tool, consisting of a number of new metrics that are designed to help creative advertising agencies produce more viral content. This update includes new “friends of fans” and “weekly true reach” figures, but perhaps the most interesting metric is the distinct “people talking about this” feature, which shows the total number of stories that mention your brand. These “stories” basically cover any type of interaction or conversation associated with your brand, including:
- Likes
- Comments
- Sharing your content
- Participating in a question
- Mentioning your page.
- Responding to an event invitation
- Tagging your page in an image
- Using Facebook places to check in
It is not just their insight tool that is seeing an update; alongside these new changes, Facebook has also released what they are calling their “expanded premium ad unit,” a feature where advertisements will simply expand whenever possible to show friends that have connected with that brand’s page. This is set to improve the effectiveness of Facebook’s advertising significantly, as the likelihood that users will view a brand is increased when they see it has been approved by a friend.
This new setup has come at just the right time as the annual advertising week sees industry leaders from around the world gather to debate the new developments in advertising, and Facebook has set its sights on being a big part of their discussions.
The problem that has held Facebook advertising back in the past has broadly been a lack of confidence by companies on how to use the system correctly. Perhaps these new improvements to both the tracking metrics and the ad unit will be enough to turn some heads and see some new adopters take up Facebook marketing.