As part of its latest makeover, Facebook has launched a new set of metrics that gives page administrators a detailed look into the reach, engagement and overall performance of their social media marketing efforts. These new insights are separated by individual posts, so now marketers can better identify which subjects, themes and formats are most effective with users. Additionally, with a new focus on engagement as the main measure of brand activity, marketers can now gauge the overall success of a post through the amount of action taken by users. So to help you understand and use these numbers to your advantage, I will highlight three metrics that now hold a prevailing position on the new Facebook insights.

Talking About This
The new “Talking About This” metric is a raw number that allows page administrators to take a glimpse into how many people are talking about their brand by measuring the engagement of each post. This is an all encompassing score that includes various types of user actions, including:

• Liking your Page
• Liking, commenting on, or sharing your Page post
• Answering a Question you’ve asked
• Responding to your event
• Mentioning your Page
• Tagging your Page in a photo
• Checking in or recommending your Place

With a large variety of engagement actions now available through Facebook, this is an easy way to gauge the overall popularity of specific themes and subjects. Additionally, if you click on the number itself, you can see a pie chart that provides a breakdown of how users chose to share information about your brand. As a whole, this metric will provide administrators with a new way to measure overall performance, giving them the data needed to develop realistic goals and a more narrowly focused strategy.

Virality
Now that virality is a major goal for brands engaging in today’s social web, Facebook added a new “viral” metric to give administrators an overview of how many unique users are talking about their posts after seeing it. This figure is a percentage that is calculated by dividing the number of people “Talking About This” by the actual number of people who viewed the post. So it takes into account the same user engagement actions that are found on the “Talking About This” metric, making it the first insight of its type for the social network. With this data, community managers can now determine the organic conversation taking place about their content, giving them a chance to measure and compare numbers beyond the post itself.

Engaged Users
Engaged Users is a number that represents the quantity of unique users, both fans and non-fans, who have clicked anywhere on a post. This metric differs from “Talking About This” because it represents every type of action taken by Facebook’s audience, from photo views to stories generated. In other words, this is the one measurement that also includes the number of clicks that are not accounted for anywhere else on the insights report, such as clicks on people’s names in comments, on the like count and on the time stamp. Additionally, by clicking on the engaged user metric for any post, administrators can see a breakdown of the types of engagement the post generated. This can help community mangers identify how users prefer to engage with their content and the type of information their audience is interested in seeing.