Facebook has been busy making changes. While most of the latest additions to the Facebook framework affect the design and interaction of personal profiles, there is a new metric radio managers should be aware of, and new ways to measure your social media goals using Facebook Insights.
The “Talking About This” Metric
The new metric is called “Talking about this”, and lives below the number of likes on your fan page. Defined by Facebook, it “indicates how many people are actually talking about your business to their friends.”
It’s important because it is a public measurement of your Facebook fan page’s engagement. Your listeners can see this and may decide whether to like your page based on this number, which represents the strength of your content and engagement. Radio stations will need to focus on social media content because this new metric doesn’t care about big promotions designed to get likes.
Likes have been the focus of many recent radio marketing campaigns, similar to strategies of other brands active on Facebook. While the “Talking about this” metric will not directly affect your number of likes, it will shed some light on your Facebook activity, which may affect the number of future likes you receive. The higher the number, the more compelling your page’s content, and the more likely listeners are to like your page. So, if your strategy ends at the big Facebook promotion, you may need to shift focus to your online content.
What exactly does Facebook measure to determine the “Talking about this” number? User generated activity, including:
• Listeners’ posts to your page wall
• Listener likes, comments, or shares of your posts, videos, pictures
• Listener mentions or shares
• Response to events
• Photo Tagging
While this new statistic will be helpful in determining the engagement between your station or show and its Facebook fans, it isn’t the only one you should be using to measure your progress.
Using Insights to Measure Engagement
Observe the page posts Insights to determine which posts receive the most exposure, the highest level of engagement, and the highest “talking about this” rating. This will help you determine what types of content your audience responds to most. Do concert announcements, music and entertainment news, hot opinion topics, or contests and promotions get the most activity? Monitor your posts to determine what content your listeners want from your brand.
In addition to measuring your likes (and unlikes) and the new metric “Talking about this”, you should be using Facebook Insights to monitor Friends of Fans and Weekly Total Reach.
Friends of Fans is the number of unique friends of your fans (including your fans themselves), and Weekly Total Reach is designed to assess how many people have seen any content associated with your page. These measure your total exposure, which isn’t limited to the listeners who comment or like posts. (There are plenty of social media voyeurs out there, so these stats shouldn’t be overlooked.)
You can attend webinars and read articles (even mine) all day long, but monitoring what works for your station or show is the best way to achieve your social media goals. Focus on content, and monitor your success, tracking what works and what doesn’t work for you.
If you’re new to using Facebook Insights, or want to read more on the recent changes to Insights, download the Facebook Page Insights Product Guide. You can find the link in your page’s Insights menu (imagine that!).
-written for Radio Ink
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