After shaking up user timelines Facebook is turning to advertising and is taking the wraps off of a new ad unit and measurement tool called “People Talking About” that’s designed to help brands get closer to users.

The changes are designed to address concerns by advertisers who have wanted more detail from Facebook in terms of metrics.

The changes echo what some have been saying about brands needing to get much more social in their advertising while other advertisers have talked about how some brands are disappointed with their level of engagement with users on Facebook as the number of people ‘liking’ brands wanes.

Like sponsored stories the ad units are built around user engagement with branded content and the brand’s message being integrated into the ads, which will feature on on the right hand side of a user’s home page.

A Facebook spokeswoman told Ad Age that the new premium offering is slightly bigger than typical premium ads because of the added social context and aimed at larger brands looking to become more social on Facebook.

It is another sign that Facebook is tailoring its ad offering to big spending advertisers and giving them what they want.

The ‘People Talking About’ metric will show those runnnig Facebook campaigns and pages a range of user activity including total likes, comments, sharing a Page post or content on the Page,  as well as “Friends of Fans” and “Weekly Total Reach.”

Brands widen their social reach

Friends of Fans is designed to show the maximum social reach of a brands’ content and is the number of friends your fans have and thereby showing how many people brands are potentially connected to in an extended context.

This metric suggests a change in the complexity of social advertising where brands can start to try to influence not only their fans but the friends of their fans as well and thereby potentially dramatically widening their overall social reach.

A page’s 500 most recent posts will also be listed in Insights with four metrics: Reach, showing total audience; Engaged Users, showing the number of users who took some kind of action around a post, including clicking on a link or viewing a photo or video; Talking About This, showing the number of users who took more active action by liking, commenting, or sharing; and “Virality,” where “Talking About This” is divided by “Reach.”

Product manager David Baser noted that Facebook hasn’t set a benchmark for its so-called “virality” metric to indicate when a post is performing well within the new Insights. Rates will vary between industries, as well as the type of post. A brand looking to share a new video might be less concerned about the number of likes and comments, which would boost the “virality” rate, but still be pleased with the performance of the content because they can tell that a lot of people were engaged enough to watch the video, Ad Age reports.

Like remains top metric

Baser also said that despite the new activities that Facebook will be introducing the “Like” will maintain its ranking as a top measurement. “Likes are an expression of identity. It’s a user saying that I have a relationship with this brand,” Baser told Mashable.

The changes are interesting as, of course, people often wonder just how much a like is really worth and how accurate the Facebook Like count is particularly as noted earlier some say likes are on the wane.

The changes come in the run up to when marketers are planning their Super Bowl campaigns.

For instance that USA Today is shifting the focus of its Super Bowl Ad Meter to Facebook so that next year users will be able score the 2012 ads with a real-time app called the USA Today-Facebook Super Bowl Ad Meter.

The app will let users everywhere view, rate and share Super Bowl ads.

“Making the Ad Meter social brings it to an entirely new level, and we’re proud to be a part of it,” Facebook marketing executive Mike Hoefflinger told Mashable.