Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, educators, Facebook administrators.

Afew days ago Facebook rolled out a new look to Facebook Insights, including some important changes to its metrics reports. Note that it sometimes takes days, even weeks, for such updates to take effect on all 1 billion Facebook accounts.

In the 10-minute video above, I’ll step you through the changes and what they mean for your organization or nonprofit. Specifically, you’ll learn about all the changes to five main reports:

1. Overview: Get a 7-day snapshot of the most important activity on your page.
2. Page Likes: See net likes over time and where your likes come from.
3. Page Reach: See how many people are seeing your posts over time.
4. Page Posts: See how people are engaging with your posts.
5. People: See how your fans are similar and different from people who see and/or engage with your posts.

What do you think of the changes to Insights?

The post Understanding the big changes to Facebook Insights appeared first on Socialbrite.

Why the end goal is to get people talking

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, marketers.

Forrester recently published research proving, yet again, that people overwhelmingly trust what their friends say about a brand.  And they rarely trust what brands say about themselves.

If we apply this to Facebook, it means that your community talking about you is much more powerful than you talking about yourself.

This is why People Talking About This (PTAT) is the ultimate metric on Facebook.

Now, if you ask any marketer to choose between People Talking About This and the number of fans they have, or to choose between People Talking About This and the number of people they reach, any honest Facebook marketer will admit that they fantasize about millions of people sharing their content. And while they might brag about reach to their boss, they certainly don’t fantasize about it.

Why do marketers brag about reach?

If brands ultimately care about people talking about them on Facebook, why is there such an emphasis on increasing reach and fans? Especially because increasing reach and fans doesn’t lead to an increase in virality.

Maybe overvaluing reach and fan quantity is a carryover from pre-social marketing practices: impressions, eyeballs, exposure, etc.

Or maybe it’s just hard to accept that getting people to share your content often feels impossible.

Whatever the reason, valuing reach and fan growth over PTAT is like valuing:

• Delivered emails more than click-throughs
• Landing page views more than conversions
• Handshakes more than new sponsors

Reach and fans are means to an end

Don’t get me wrong, reach and page likes are important. But they are both means to an end. People Talking About This is the ultimate end on Facebook.

Just like the ultimate end on your website is conversions.

To use a baseball analogy:

The Red Sox focus on runs as their ultimate end. The means to that end include having the right number of players (fans) and a nicely mowed field (reach).

Why is valuing PTAT above all other Facebook metrics important?

Imagine the shift in your Facebook results when people stop asking:

“How can we increase our reach on Facebook?”

or: “How can we get more Page likes?”

And they start asking: “How can we get more people to share our page updates with their friends?”

What do you guys think? Does your organization focus on getting others to spread the word? Post your hate mail below, marketers!

The post The only Facebook metric that really matters appeared first on Socialbrite.

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, educators, Facebook page administrators.

The great thing about Facebook is that what works and what doesn’t work can be measured very specifically. And there’s probably nobody more experienced in the science of social media than Dan Zarrella.

Dan recently published an infographic based on more than 1.3 million Facebook updates from the top 10,000 pages.

Here are a few things that stand out:

Photos get the most likes and shares

On your Facebook Page, you can publish updates, videos, photos and links. Of these four type of content, photos get the most likes and shares (as shown below).

Positive or negative is better than neutral

Facebook users want you to pick a side. Take a stand! For or against!

As shown below, posts with a high positive sentiment get more likes,  while posts with a high negative sentiment get more comments.

Best time of day is around 6 to 8 pm

Facebook users like and comment on content the most around 8 pm (local time), but share posts the most around 5 pm (local time).

Check out the rest of the infograph at Dan’s blog.

Does this jibe with what you’ve experienced on Facebook?

The post Facebook engagement: What does the evidence show? appeared first on Socialbrite.

Now that Facebook has rolled out the new Insights to all Pages, you’re probably wondering what some of these new metrics mean.

But you’re also wondering which ones really matter.

Yes, you can still view how many fans you have, and you can even see how many collective friends your fans have! But these numbers really don’t matter if no one cares about your organization.

The Insights metrics that matter

Some of you might be saying: “Yeah, but this Page has over 3,000 fans!” Still others might be saying “3,000 is nothing…We have over 50,000 fans.” Whether you have 3,000 fans or 50,000 means nothing if:

1. No one’s seeing any of your Page stories.
2. No one’s talking about your organization.
3. No one’s telling their friends.

How many people are seeing your Page stories?

One thing that really matters is if people actually see your Page stories – right? Insights shows you how many Facebook users are seeing your Page stories in their news feed or on your Page. In the graph below, almost half of the Page’s fans are not getting this Page’s updates in their news feed.

Fortunately, many Facebook users are taking action on what they see (commenting, liking, sharing, etc.), and those actions are seen by their friends:

Viral reach (the number of people who see stories about your Page from their friends) is what Facebook is all about!

Metric: People are talking about your Page

So how many people are talking about your nonprofit? And what are they saying?

You can see a rollup of all these actions on the Insights Dashboard, right above data about the posts you’re publishing.

Knowing how much they’re talking is one thing, but knowing what they’re saying is what’s meaningful. Are they liking your post? Liking your Page? Commenting and sharing?

“Talking About This” includes the following actions:

• Liking your Page
• Liking, commenting on or sharing your Page update
• Commenting on or liking a Sponsored Story
• Answering a Question posted by a Page
• Posting to a Page’s Wall
• RSVPing to an Event hosted by the Page
• Mentioning (or tagging) your Page
• Tagging a person or Page in one of your photos
• Checking in (if you have Facebook Place)

So what metrics should you pay attention to?

In one sense, social media measurement is like using a compass. Both answer three essential questions:

1. How far you are from your destination (our compass includes GPS).
2. When and how you need to change course.
3. When you’ve arrived at your destination.

And now the really important question:

What’s your destination?

The post Which Facebook Insights metrics matter to your nonprofit? appeared first on Socialbrite.

What you need to know about recent changes to two key social networks

Target audience: Nonprofits, NGOs, cause organizations, businesses, brands, Web publishers, bloggers, educators, social media managers, individuals.

The social media landscape continually evolves, and it’s hard to keep up with all the changes. Platforms and apps I know and love suddenly have new capabilities, add-ons and new wrinkles. In this new feature, “New and Improved on the Social Web,” I’ll be highlighting some of the latest changes to social media platforms, apps and tools, and commenting on their implications. Let’s start by tackling the recent changes to Delicious (social bookmarking) and Facebook.

Delicious stacks

Delicious, the social bookmarking site — acquired not long ago by the founders of YouTube — just rolled out a completely new Web interface as well as a new product, Delicious stacks. The new interface is fun and updated and brings the brand experience in line with today’s Web experience and expectations. While Delicious has always enabled users to bookmark, tag and publicly share bookmarked URLs and tags, users were not able to compile sharable topic areas. The new feature, Stacks, is Delicious’ version of publicly curated content streams. Any Delicious user may create a topic (called a stack) and add links from around the web to create a stack of the topic. Delicious users can follow stacks, share stacks with others and save individual links within others’ stacks.

With the stacks rollout, Delicious is clearly trying to be a player in the content curation trend. If this succeeds, stacks could easily compete with other curation tools such as Google Reader, scoop.it and Pearltrees.

Open commenting allowed on Facebook pages

Facebook announced a lot of upcoming changes at their F8 developer conference in September. Some of those changes are rolling out now, with implications for your organization’s page.

One of the more significant changes to your page is that any Facebook user can comment on your posts and on your wall, without Liking the page first. Just as you had previously managed your settings to allow fans to write or post content to your Facebook wall, the new permission allows “users” to do so. One note: this is a change that you can opt out of – if you allowed fans to post, the new settings automatically allow any Facebook user to post.

Potentially more people will post to your page and Like (or Subscribe to) its content because they can interact with it more easily. Ideally, more Facebook users will see your content because the increased commenting will appear in users’ newsfeeds (now called “tickers”). A user still has to Like a page for that specific page’s updates to show up in his/her ticker. On the other hand, there is less incentive to Like a page if a user just wants to post or comment. The largest implication I see is that page admins now have an even better incentive to create engaging and sharable content.

New Facebook Insights & the ‘People are Talking About’ metric

The new “People are Talking About” metric appears below your page’s Likes, on the left-hand side of the wall. It is Facebook’s attempt to benchmark and reveal how engaging your page’s content is. The PATA metric includes people who:

• like, share, or comment on a post or on the wall
• answer a question on your page
• mention your page by tagging it, or tag a photo of yours
• like or share a check-in deal, or check-in at your Facebook place

The new Facebook Insights offers a more subtle breakdown of engagement by individual post than the old Insights did. The previous individual Post Impressions metric has been replaced with multiple engagement metrics: Reach, Engaged Users, Talking About This, and Virality.

According to Search Engine Land’s comprehensive summary of the new Insights:

“The goal of Pages Insights for Page admins is to understand what drives that number and how they can best engage their advocates, so that they can get a sense of how to optimize their Page content to increase the people they’re reaching with their messages. Which means that no matter the size of your Page’s audience, you can really get a good sense for which posts spread and get shared with others.”

I believe the new Insights will offer admins a more accurate sense of how engaging their pages’ content is with fans. If nonprofits are using social media to move online fans to take action, and to help the organization further its mission of changing the world, then creating more online engagement is a critical step in that path.

Related resources on Socialbrite

• Video tutorial: How to use the new Facebook Insights
• Facebook nuked the Like button, now what?
• 7 ways Facebook’s subscribe button could be a nonprofit game-changer

The post Inside the upgrades to Facebook & Delicious appeared first on Socialbrite.