Wildfire Launches New Way to Measure Brand Engagement on Facebook.

Wildfire Integrates with Facebook’s new Insights Data to provide Brands with a richer understanding of Engagement.

We’re very excited to announce big news for social media marketers and especially those of you (this should be all of you!) who are interested in better measuring and understanding your social media reach. Several weeks ago, Facebook selected Wildfire to help advise them on the development of some new metrics for Facebook Pages. These metrics are being launched today by Facebook and we’ve integrated them into our analytics dashboard to not only provide our clients with an easy way to digest and track the new Insights metrics, but to go deeper by providing additional insights, including the ability to aggregate the new analytics across multiple Facebook pages and tabs. This blog post will explain in simple terms what these new Facebook metrics mean for you and how Wildfire is enhancing them for our clients.

Some of the most notable new data points Facebook launched today include Friends of Fans, Reach, Engaged Users, and People Talking About This. Before delving into the details of the metrics themselves, it’s worth taking a moment to consider how these new Insights impact you as a social media marketer.

To understand the true value of your communications, you need to know how many users have been exposed to your messaging, and what proportion of your audience is actively responding to that messaging through the means available to the end consumer. In other words, how many people are viewing, Liking, sharing, commenting on, consuming or otherwise engaging with your content? A thorough understanding of how visible your messaging is and the extent of viral activity around it is crucial to optimizing your brand’s impact on Facebook.

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What do these new metrics do?

Think of it as a funnel: when you broadcast a message on Facebook, a portion of your fan base will see that post in their news feed. Of those users who are initially exposed—let’s call them your Organic Reach—a subset of them will respond positively by consuming content (e.g., watching a video, clicking on a link, etc.), Liking it, commenting on it, or taking other actions. These interactions constitute engagement of some kind. Facebook now counts the unique users who interact in one or more of these ways and labels them Engaged Users.

Some Engaged Users are special in that they take actions that cause others to see your brand name and content as well! For example, if one of your fans (let’s call her Mary) comments on your post, her friends will see it in their news feed, too. By commenting on your post, Mary is Talking About you to a broader audience. We refer to the size of this broad audience as your Viral Reach, i.e., the number of people you reached because of people Talking About your brand. By “talking about” your brand, Mary is counted both as an Engaged User and in the more specific People Talking About This metric.

Seeing that some of your fans are Talking About your brand leads to the notion that you could potentially reach many or all of their friends virally. To address this, Facebook also introduced a new metric called Friends of Fans, which is exactly that: the number of unique users who are friends of your Page’s fans, any of whom you could potentially reach with engaging content. For most Pages, Friends of Fans represent a significant multiplier over their direct fan base. Ultimately, the more captivating your message, the more likely you are to reach a larger proportion of the friends of your fans.

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Wildfire Analytics Give You All This, and More!

Wildfire was selected by Facebook to help advise them on their new Insights and we are therefore in a unique position to enable our clients to benefit from these new metrics on day one of the new Insights launch. In addition to providing our clients with an easy way to digest and track the new Insights metrics, Wildfire has gone beyond Facebook’s new metrics to provide additional insight, including the ability to aggregate the Insights across all of your Facebook pages and all tabs published through our Social Marketing Suite.

So, for example, if you manage multiple Facebook Pages Wildfire will enable you to see at a glance your aggregate performance across all these pages, and to then drill down deeper to see the analytics for your individual pages. Even if you only manage one Facebook page but you have multiple tabs associated with this page our aggregation of the Insights data is helpful to you because you can see at a glance how you’re performing, in aggregate, across all your tabs. These metrics allow you to evaluate engagement comprehensively across your social properties, compare your properties side-by-side, and drill down for further details. In this way you can readily identify which of your properties and tabs are generating the greatest engagement and you can learn from them in order to optimize your lower performing pages and tabs.

Our new analytics offerings help you understand your Page’s reach and the size of the audience responding to your message, so you can unlock the potential of your social media presence. With our tools, you’ll be able to optimize your broadcasts to reach a wider audience, engage a broader community, and effectively spread the word about your brand, product, or service.

We will be hosting a free Facebook Insights webinar on October 18. Register now and tune in to learn all you need to know about these new analytics.

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We’re excited about Facebook’s new analytics and our own. What do you think? We’d love to hear from you in the comments below!