With the “People Talking About This” metric, Facebook hopes advertisers will pay more attention to the “engagement” that customers have with brands on the siteIn addition to rolling out new features like the Timeline view of your profile and social apps that allow “frictionless sharing,” Facebook has also been working on improving its offerings for advertisers, as it tries to generate enough revenue to justify its alleged $60 billion market value. In a nutshell, the giant social network is trying to convince advertisers to pay more attention to the engagement that their users and customers have with their brands when they are on the site, rather than simply counting click-throughs from ads and links. It’s a message that suits Facebook’s interests, but will advertisers bite?One of the newest moves in this direction is an addition to the Page Insights dashboard, which Facebook provides for brands as a way of seeing all the analytics related to what used to be called their “fan” pages. Along with being able to see the usual “likes” and sharing associated with a page, as well as the demographic and gender breakdown of those who have interacted with it, Facebook now shows something it calls “People Talking About This.” This is a measurement of the number of people who have created what the site calls a “story about your page” in the past seven days — and according to Facebook’s guide to Page Insights (PDF link), this includes anyone who has:
http://gigaom.com/2011/10/07/can-facebook-convince-advertisers-to-forget-about-clicks/
www.businessweek.com/technology/can-facebook-persuade-advertisers-to-forget-about-clicks-10072011.html