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.

Track click-backs from 'Share this in Facebook'

On almost every web page today, there is some kind of 'Social Bookmarking' installed. Social Bookmarking is the method of posting a site or a page in a social network, like Twitter or LinkedIn. Every time you press a link which says 'Share this with your friends in Facebook' you are 'social bookmarking'.
What you actually do with social bookmarking is posting a link on your wall in facebook or on your twitter status. This is important for people managing a website. First of all, every link counts as an incoming link, which is good for Organic Search results (SEO).
But maybe more important: it means an extra links to your site, which can mean extra visitors and extra conversion/subscriptions/revenue for your site. And it's very probable that you get good quality visitors: a friend has recommended  to visit the page, and a friend's recommendation is always a good thing.

It's impressive, which so much links and external provider offering solutions for Social Bookmarking, that so few people actually bother with trying to measure how many people actually get back to your site from a Social Bookmark.

In this post, I'll explain how to measure the incoming traffic for visitors coming from social bookmarking on Facebook. This is: somebody shared a link of a site on Facebook, and one of his friends or connections sees the link and clicks on it to visit the site.

¿How does social bookmarking on facebook work?

Sharing a link on Facebook is very easy: you just need to use the following URL:

http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=here-comes-the-url-you-want-to-share

After the parameter 'u=' you insert the URL of the page you want to share. Say that I want to share the blog of my friend Michael Notté, Kaizen-Analytics, then I need to use the following URL:

http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http://www.kaizen-analytics.com

It's interesting to note that you can include every page on a share this link or button. It doesn't have to be he page where you put on the link or button hat needs to be shared.

When you use this URL, say as a text link or a button on your site, you'll get to see this:

As you can see, there are 4 things published by facebook:

The title of the page

The URL of the page

A description of he page

An image found on the page

The title and the description are both taken from the so-called 'Meta Tags' of the page. For every page you can give a small title and a description. This is generally used for search engines: the 'title' is what you see in blue on a page of the search results and the 'description' is the little bit of text you see on the page of the search results.

This is good to know: you can make a separate 'landing page' for sharing in facebook. Like you've seen above: you can implement any URL in the facebook-share page so technically there is no problem using any URL you choose. So you can make a personalised landing page, in which you can personalize the Title and the Description as you please. This can be a nice way to make a special offer to somebody who comes 'recommended by a friend'.

It's not really clear on what basis facebook selects the images you get to share with the URL mentioned above. But it looks like it just takes all images from the body of the page and you can change to the one you like most.

The trick for measuring the incoming traffic from this link mentioned above is the URL. Instead of including just the link of the page we want people to share, we're going to add some parameters to the URL so that, when somebody clicks on the URL, we can track this.

How to measuring traffic from the 'Share his': Link Tracking

Link tracking is a pretty simple method to track visitors coming to your site. You simply add some parameters to your URL, and when somebody visits your page, with a URL that holds these parameters, we can pick this up in our Web Analytics tool and soon you'll see where your traffic is coming from.

In this example, I implement link tracking for Google Analytics. I think everybody who uses a Web Analytics tool which is not GA, knows the idea behind Google Analytics link tracking and I'm pretty convinced everybody will be able to translate this method to their own tool.

Step 1: Create the campaign parameters (UTM's)
Google Analytics gives you the possibility to include parameters in the URLs that you use to drive traffic to your site. These parameters are called UTM's and you can use a different number of parameters. As a standard, Google Analytics uses 3 basic parameters. If needed, you can add more.
The 3 are:
Source: where the traffic is coming from, like another the site or a search engine.
Medium: the method used for driving traffic, like 'email' or 'banner ad'.
Campaign: whatever you want to call your campaign, like '10€Offer' or 'ProductXLaunch'.

In the case of the click-backs for Social Bookmarking in facebook, I use the following UTMs:

utm_source=Facebook
utm_medium=SocialBookmarking
utm_camapaign=ClickBackOfferY

The campaign I've called ClickBackOfferY, since I need to know this is a click-back after sharing, and I've included the 'Offer Y', which can help you in case you have a special offer linked to the sharing of the page. You could also include this in an extra UTM, the UTM_content=OfferY.

Step 2 Add the UTM's to the URL
Now we add the parameters to the URL. Say that the page you want to share is 'http://myoffer.com', then the URL with Link Tracking will be:

http://myoffer.com?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=SocialBookmarking&utm_campaign=ClickBackOfferY

Step 3 Implement the URL in the facebook URL

Once we've created this URL, which will be the URL we share in Facebook, we implement this into the URL for sharing

http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http://myoffer.com?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=SocialBookmarking&utm_campaign=ClickBackOfferY

Easy, right? Why don't you just try to share this article with your facebook friends using this 'Share this' button below and you'll see how this works: I've implemented the system explained in this post!