People Are Talking About This V. Likes

Earlier this week Facebook released a new metric called “People are talking about this”. This metric attempts to capture how many people are engaged with your brand page and should be taken into account with the amount of Likes a brand has. In order to understand this it helps to look at the definition of each so we can understand the implications.

Likes

Likes are a measure of the total amount of fans a brand has. Consider this to be a page’s Facebook audience. This number will most likely always trend up or remain constant. Fans disengaging from you will be considered to be unsubscribed.

People are Talking About This

People are talking about this is a measure of how many people have engaged with your brand in the last 7 days. This is a rolling statistic and will go up or down based on how often people have engaged with your brand. This includes likes, check-ins, comments, shares and posting to a brand’s wall. This metric will rise and lower based on the amount of engagement your brand’s posts will generate.

This is Facebook’s attempt to measure how interesting your brand is to people and quantifies their Edge Rank algorithm. A brand page with 1,000 likes with 200 people are talking about this will have an engagement rate of 0.2 and may end up being show more as a top story v. a page with 10,000 likes and only 500 people talking about them and a .05 engagement rate.

For brands, what this means is pretty simple. The amount of fans you have is merely the potential audience of your message. If you don’t entertain them, then you are aren’t going to be talked about. So post good content, and post it often enough that people want to click on it.