Clients often ask their social media managers about how many people their brand is reaching on Facebook. Facebook provides two answers to this question.
Total Likes is Facebook’s measurement for a page’s audience – the number of people who have “liked” your page. Friends of Fans is a statistic that calculates the potential ad audience for sponsored stories. The Friends of Fans number can be located only on your Facebook Insight page.
An even more important metric than reach is engagement. Posts that show higher user engagement appear more prominently in user news feeds. Facebook offers two measures of engagement: “People Talking About This” or “Engaged Users.”
People Talking About This is a metric that reflects “generated stories” by viewers: any like, comment, or share in regards to a page’s content. When your fans interact with your page in this way, your message gets circulated among your fans’ friends, reaching a much larger audience.
Engaged Users refers to the number of people who have clicked on a post. Clicks can include just that, a click, a photo viewed at its full size, or a generated story. Engaged Users is a measure of fan interest in a post, and a good indicator of what content users are responding to: A fan simply needs to click and watch a video, even if he doesn’t share it.
The key purpose of all these metrics is to make sure you’re creating content that is appealing to your fans. If you have questions about how to interpret your Facebook Insights, you should seek out a social media pro.
