How many people are talking about your facebook fan page?

Red salt pig 

This week facebook have rolled out yet more new features.  This time there are some new metrics for facebook pages.  I've used these new metrics to compare some popular crafty pages and see which is the most engaged, the vital stats are at the end of the post!

"... are talking about this"

Most interesting and what I'm focusing on in this post is the addition of the publicly displayed 'x people are talking about this' just below your follower number.

The figure is calculated by -

Follows
Likes
Comments
Wall posts (from others)
Tags and Photo Tags

Facebook Page Engagement Metric

I'm always banging on about how it's engagement on a facebook fan page that is important and not just fan numbers. 500 fans and lots of likes and comments is a better page than 5000 fans and no comments.  This new metric is just that, a measure of engagement. It's very similar to the way 'edge-rank' create their score.

Fan numbers do of course count as the more fans, the more chance you have of a fan seeing one of your posts.  Return on investment with social networking is notoriously difficult to measure, so stats like this where you can quickly compare how well you are doing based on differing approaches are great.

More Engagement = More Reach
More Reach = More Fans

I know, I've said that all before very recently - sorry, I'm just quite passionate about convincing people that my job (social media consultancy) is actually worth the investment.

More figures to obsess over!

I'm certainly going to find it hard not to frown and scratch my head as this figure goes up and down, but to be honest I do this already when a post that has worked so well in the past seems to bomb out of facebooks good books and not get seen.  It can be frustrating but each page has a different audience and it's usually case of educated guessing to find what suits your audience. So don't beat yourself up!


I think this new figure is a great way to quickly compare your efforts with that of competitors, or even the industry greats.  You can simply take the number of fans a page has and divide that by the number of people 'talking about it' and use that figure to determine if their page is better engaged than your page. A low figure being desirable as it denotes most engagement.

I'm going to use a page I've talked about in the past.  It's one of the best examples of a well engaged page within the craft community I've found.



Vital Facebook Page statistics!

Using my way of rating a page, and taking Kirsty's page stats, she has a very low score of  -   6.38  (the lower the score the better remember) There's actually no reason why the 'talking about'  figure couldn't be higher than the fan figure, if it is, you are so engaged you are married with a baby on the way!

Now look at some of those bigger crafty fish! (figures as at 6/10/11)

NameFansTalking AboutScore
Not on the High Street 15,094   26856.32
UK Handmade  6,227   37416.65
Folksy  7972   26030.66
Etsy  514,407   14,37335.79
U-Handbag  4084   15526.34
Mollie Makes20,431   71628.53
Craft Blog UK 1093   9711.26

So you see, Kirsty's engagement is super high!  Now that means her fans are very supportive of her posts with lots of comments and likes.  These fans are genuine.  They haven't been scavenged and collected through silent tagging and marches.  They are actually people that are prepared to talk about her work and no doubt buy it too, she always sounds very busy, and Folksy announced in their seller email that her shop was the in the top 5 most visited this month!  (ps Hello Kisrty, promise I'm not stalking you!)

Do the sums and then please come back and share your facebook page link and your Facebook Engagement Score with us, it will be really interesting to see if any one can beat Kirsty's score of 6.38!