Facebook launches 'are talking about this' metric

Did anybody else noticed the new 'are talking about this' metric on Facebook Pages?

After the sad news about Steve Jobs, I entered today on the Facebook page dedicated to him. Beneath the 'Like this' metric, there is a new one now and it's called 'are talking about this'.

It surely looks like a promissing metric: I personally have 'liked' a lot of pages, which I haven't visited since, so 'are talking about' sounds like a more 'active' metric.
A bit of googling around shows that Facebook announced the change this week and implemented today.

How is the metric defined?

Facebook told in an email earlier this week that the metric would be defined like this:

“People Talking about this” counts ‘stories” – structured content that people choose to share through Facebook that is eligible to appear in a user’s news feed:

• 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 check-in deal, or checking in at your Place.

Why is this interesting?

It's important for Search: as already pointed out in this brilliant post of BlindFiveYearOld, the new Facebook design from a couple of weeks ago includes an actual redefinition of Search. Facebook is very ready to compete with Google and has now moved towards 'social search': based on what pages we visit, web-content we read and share and even what songs we listen to on Spotify or what we watch on Netflix, Facebook indexes the web based on our social action and the way we use internet.

Facebook is already showing search-results outside Facebook. Here's an example of external links:

They also show songs from Spotify, like in this example.  

The metric is public: like pointed out in this post, the metric is public. This shows Facebook-users a new way of the 'relevant pages' on Facebook, i.e. where the people are, which is another way of saying, what content is socially relevant.
It also shows companies and Facebook page owners how good they are doing. For instance, the Facebook page of my main competitor has more than twice my 'are talking about this' metric. Bugger!

The metric is good for content: marketing people like me will have to focus more on what's relevant, not just on the people who like my page to get an occasional discount and never come back to my page.

Facebook competing with Twitter: there are already a lot of 'action-based' social metrics for Twitter, like trending topics. Now facebook, together with the 'subsribe button', competes directly with Twitter.

So, well done for Facebook, and thanks for this. We'll still have to see some more detail on this metric and it's definition: for instance, does phototagging count twice as much as someone sharing of the page?
The metric can can also evolve of course. It doesn't seem real-time for now. For instance, the Steve Jobs page has had the same 7883 are talking about metric this whole morning. But it can certainly move upwards & onwards.

[Quick update on 07/10/2011 - seems like the metric is updated daily. For instance today Steve Jobs' page has '394.990 are talking about', coming from 7.883 yesterday, and it has been during the whole morning]

For more about this you can read here in SearchEngineLand.

Analytics for ShareThis, AddThis, AddToAny and SocialTwist

You recognize the services offering Social Bookmarking and Sharing by the buttons you see announcing 'Share this in facebook' on many websites nowadays. When you use these services, you share a URL of a page on your favourite social network or email service. There are a lot of free services which cover an amazing number of services and in this post, I compare the Analytics features they offer.

The services I'm comparing in this post are:

1. SocialTwist
2. AddToAny
3. AddThis
4. ShareThis

All these 4 services offer all of the following features:

• They include a huge list (some 300+) of social networks where the page can be shared.
• They all do bookmarking and emailing.
• They all come in a lot of languages.
• The are all free.

One of the main differences is their approach to Analytics. When used the right way, these services can provide very good social media metrics: you can see how many times your site or page is shared and in which social media. You can track how many people click these shared links and how many visits your site gets back.
A lot has been discussed on social media metrics. Consider this a solid and important first metric when defining your KPIs for Social Media: how do people share your content and does it drive traffic to your site. It's not yet a metric which tells you qualitatively how people value your brand or site, but it's a first useful step.

Here are my findings of how the above mentioned 4 services offer Analytics.

1. SocialTwist
You can find the analytics for Social Twist ('Te!! a Friend') within their own site: you create a login to get the service and the stats are found within the platform. For the free subscription, you just get to see the times your page or site was shared in 'Social', 'Bookmark' or 'Email', without any breakdown. And you get to see what is the most used service, but not more. You can upgrade to a 'Pro' account (100$ each 1000 referrals) and you can get more detailed analytics. Social Twist doesn't offer integration with Google Analytics or any other Web Analytics platform. You can't measure traffic coming back from the times your page was 'shared'.

2. AddToAny
AddToAny doesn't have any statistics on their own platform, but they do have an integration with Google Anlytics. The integration is automatic: as soon as you have a Google Analytics script on your page, you get the 'Shares' tracked as events. AddToAny doesn't offer a way to track if people get back to your site after it was shared.

Little parentesis: AddToAny is the only one of the 4 who let's you share on Tuenti. Tuenti is a ver important social network in Spain, and it's quite amazing that the other services just doesn't offer this option on their platform. Why?

3. AddThis
AddThis is good on analytics. You have a very nice interface on the AddThis site using your login. You get different features: top shared content, tops services used, geography.
You also get to see Click-backs: the number of visits who come from people clicked a shared URL of your site.
There is a pretty easy integration with Google Analytics, and you can also integrate it with Omniture.

On top of that, there is a freely accessible application which shows the most used services over the world, you can breakdown and compare countries, and every service has a little 'resume' which shows you where it is popular. A lot of data, which you can access here. Do you know what services are mostly used in your country?

4. ShareThis
Social Twist and AddThis give you some data, AddThis is better since it offers some analysis. But ShareThis is the one who goes all the way and provides real insights based on 'Shareing' behaviour.
First of all, ShareThis does everything that AddThis does: their own site has an analytics dashboard, and you have integrations with Google Analytics and Omniture.
They have something called 'Social Reach', which is very similar to what AddThis calls 'Click-Back': it measures how many people click on the links which are shared via ShareThis.
But the really BIG thing is this: ShareThis is the most used service of sharing, and is now starting to use all this data to give something as precious as competative analysis. You can actually compare the data from your site with data from similar websites: for instance, I can see how my blog is doing compared to other small blogs.
Second, I can check how my site performs versus other sites from my catagory (for example, you can compare against 'Automotive'). And ShareThis is even working on a 'know-your-audience' feature, which indicated that your site is popular for sharing for people interested in, say, 'Music' and 'Family'.

2 Important Remarks

1. Data integration is important, so I completely understand that some people will argue that another analytics interface might not be what is needed right now.
2. Note that all 4 features are external services. So when using them, you are giving access to your site to an external provider to obtain data. The competative analysis features from ShareThis can work in your advantage, since you can compare your data with competitors. But it is important to think about provacy and sensative data you are actually giving away for free.

So what's next?
If you'd ask me, we're missing a feature which measures Click-backs or Social Reach crossed with the conversion of our site goals, like brochure downloads, access to a demo, or buying a product. It's nice to know your site is shared in social media, it's better to know that people click on the shared link to come back to your site. But no doubt, it will be massive to see how many of the people coming back to your site via facebook convert in prospects. Since the sharing scripts are implemented on almost all pages, and they track which pages are shared, it can't be too difficult to let site-owners define what the goals on their site are and integrate them on the analytics dashboards.

¿Who will be the first to provide this feature?

Related post:
Track click-backs from Facebook


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