Yesterday, Facebook announced some fairly major changes to its Pages Insights product.

The ‘People Talking About’ feature is a major step forward and attempts to value brand engagement in a more meaningful way than a mere ‘Like this’. Facebook’s defining this new feature as stories people create about brand pages and could take the form of comments, shares, check-ins, RSVPs and @Mentions.

What’s more, it’s going to be placed right underneath the ‘Like’ statistic so you just know it’s something we’re all going to be paying attention to.

What’s interesting in the grab above is the relative scale of the ‘People Talking About This’ number. It’s going to be far smaller than other metrics.

This is a good thing.

Engagement has been a difficult sell-in for some time. True measures of p2p engagement have been dwarfed by reach and impression googolplexes and often dismissed to the cutting room floor come board level report time.

The obsession with massive figures has obfuscated the true value of social. This move is an iterative step towards encouraging a more balanced presentation of a brand’s social performance – one that considers breadth and depth in more equal measure.

Can I hear a speculative ‘Hallelujah’?

Check out Clickz for a more latitudinal exploration of the changes to Facebook’s insights and premium ad products.

Special thanks to Ken Murphy for the glorious Meh.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 4th, 2011 at 10:59 am and is filed under 1000thoughts, Measurement . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.