The importance of social media to an overall marketing strategy is no longer in doubt. However, it’s easy for brands to launch campaigns without ever really analysing the results and the behaviour of the target audience. In order to understand the behaviour of customers and users, it’s essential that brands understand the true reach and impact of their communication on social networks.

Facebook, understanding this, yesterday announced new metrics as part of its Insights capability, which will allow companies to measure user engagement, in terms of ‘Engaged Users’, ‘People Talking About This’ and ‘Friends of Fans’. We at Wildfire were selected by Facebook to advise on the new metrics for Insights and we think they’re going to be a powerful tool for marketers everywhere.

What do these new metrics do?

When a brand broadcasts content on Facebook, a portion of those people who have liked the brand’s page will see that post in their news feeds. These people represent the brand’s ‘organic’ reach. A subset of those users will then respond actively, by liking it, commenting on it, consuming content (by watching a video or clicking on a link for example), or taking some other action. In doing so, these users are engaging with the post and Facebook now labels them as ‘Engaged Users’, counting the number of unique users who interact in this way.

Of those ‘Engaged Users’, some will take actions that cause others to see the brand’s name and content as well. For example, if a user comments on the post that has been broadcast, this will appear as a story in the news feeds of his or her friends. As a consequence, he or she is ‘talking about’ the content to a new audience for the brand, beyond the fans that have already liked the page. This is what we call ‘viral reach’ and such users appear as both ‘Engaged Users’ and ‘People Talking About This’ in the metrics.

Of course, the fact that some fans are ‘talking about’ a brand, means that a post on Facebook could potentially reach many or all of their friends virally. In the case of most brands, there are ways of reaching a significantly larger audience than the direct fan base with a Facebook post.

Facebook has therefore introduced a new metric called ‘Friends of Fans’, which quantifies the number of unique users who are friends of a page’s fans, any of whom you could potentially reach with engaging content.

What do they mean for marketers?

All of these metrics provide social media marketers with a much more in-depth understanding of a brand’s true reach. To understand the value of Facebook communication, it’s vital to know how many users have been exposed to the messaging and what proportion of your audience is actively responding to it, by viewing, liking, sharing, commenting etc. with the content.

Without that knowledge, it’s impossible to judge how effective a campaign is and to understand how to optimise the brand’s impact on Facebook. Facebook’s new metrics allow marketers to craft and adjust their social media strategies with greater precision and monitor the success rate of campaigns on an unprecedented scale.

For example, consider that engaging content can, over time, increase the affinity between the brand and its end consumers as perceived by Facebook. One aspect of this relates to post visibility, which is how broadly a message is seen organically before it is spread virally. As with any social campaign, the more interesting the message, the more likely it is to reach a lot of people. Facebook’s new metrics provide a foundation to evaluate how visible a given post is, as well as determine the trend in visibility over time.

As a consequence of these and other factors, we at Wildfire have integrated the metrics with our own analytics dashboard to make sure that our clients have access to as much relevant data as possible. We’ve also gone beyond them to provide additional insight, making the information as actionable as possible, including the ability to aggregate the Insights across all of your Facebook pages and all tabs published through our Social Marketing Suite. This allows brands and marketers who manage multiple social properties to quickly spot macro trends without sifting through many individual reports. Of course, we also provide drill-down functionality to explore every detail.

It’s not a magic formula; marketers will still have to ensure that the content they’re posting on a brand’s page is dynamic and consequently shareable. Yet these metrics will provide page managers with a far better idea of what the potential reach is and which users within that reach are reacting.

Facebook marketing is here to stay and the opportunity for marketers to provide real and quantifiable results is becoming increasingly accessible.

Alain Chuard is founder & head of product management at Wildfire Interactive