You may have recently heard that Facebook upgraded its Page Insights (analytics). Part of the update includes a much more advanced set of metrics for measuring engagement and reach on fan pages. The new metrics allow community managers to focus on what content is getting shared the most and how to tap into the viral power of Facebook.

This new upgrade delivers another blow to social media skeptics. “Going viral” or “virality” until now has been an abstract term or practice that was easily picked apart. But now, Facebook is concretely defining virality based on these new metrics and substantiating its definition with a plethora of data. Using the new metrics, community managers can easily score and rate the virality of their content. In other words, they can assess how apt the data are to be shared. We spoke to a Facebook representative who had the following to say about the changes:

“What we're trying to do with these new updates to Page Insights is to emphasize to marketers – from small businesses to global brands – the importance of creating content on their Pages that gets shared and passed on, so that this content in turn can reach more and more people in the News Feed – including those that are potential Fans/customers.”

A simple way to measure the virality of content using the new metrics is to divide the unique ways your content is being shared by the unique impressions, ultimately providing a virality percentage. Now, to simplify…

Virality = Unique story* creation / unique impressions
Post Virality = Post Talking About This / Post Reach

The new insights platform also introduces two additional metrics to help marketers understand and make better use of the viral nature of Facebook. Viral Reach tracks the number of unique impressions by measuring how many users saw a story because of a friend. Friends of fans is a self-explanatory measurement that identifies the complete audience for viral marketing within Facebook.

Why does Facebook want to move towards these new metrics? Engagement. They want marketers to lead the charge by creating content that has stronger edges and takes advantage of the social graph. According to a Facebook representative:

“The People Talking About This metric is a count of the unique people who have created stories about a particular Page in the last week. We believe this is an important metric not only because it stresses engagement, but also because it is directly correlated to reach – so when you increase People Talking About your Page, you increase your weekly total reach.”

By making virality and engagement more measurable, Facebook has shifted the emphasis from “How many Likes can we generate?” to “How can we create better content and engage our fans?” The onus is now on marketers to use this new data to create engaging experiences and to better predict what will “go viral” in their communities.

-- Marcus Andrews, New Media Specialist, @Marcus_Andrews
--Hiroki Murakami, New Media Intern, @hnmurakami

*Unique Stories include liking your Page, posting to your Page's Wall, liking, commenting or sharing one of your Page posts (or other content on your page - like photos, videos, albums), answering a Question you posted, RSVP-ing to one of your events, mentioning your Page, phototagging your Page, liking or sharing a deal, or checking in at your Place.