Sometimes the talking about value that appears on Facebook pages is not updated by Facebook, that just leaves the value of the day before (the number of fans instead changes regularly).

For 99.999999999999999% of the world population this is both irrelevant and uninteresting.

For me it is not, since I use the metric to calculate the number of engaged fans (talking about minus new fans in the last seven days) and I might get incorrect results for those “repeated”days.

Starting today Brandbook’s engagement dashboard filters out the talking about data of the days when this data is not updated by Facebook.

We added some new visuals to our engagement dashboard, aggregating pages that belong to the same group. Since companies might have similar Facebook policies across their different pages/brands this view could deliver interesting insights.

This is the company ranking by average number of fans in the period (from November to now).

This is the ranking by average weekly increase in fans.

And this is the ranking by engagement.

Here are essentially the same numbers in the form of double scatter chart. Some groups do very well growing their fan base – Ferrero seems to be an example. On the engagement side however, you do not really see that many outliers, if you exclude the case of large sport fan page, and Anheuser-Busch, with its Guarana Antartica page.

As a page admin you might be interested mostly in how many impressions you get, how many people see your page. Having an impression means the post showed up on the news feed, not necessarily that it was actually seen – but it is certainly the first step.

Facebook rewards more impressions to pages that are more engaging, probably with a twist (probably because I have no hard data to prove this assertion). Facebook considers new fans as a measure of engagement, and new fans can be “bought” with ad spend. By buying ads on Facebook, you can increase your fan base and increase your edgerank number.

In exactly the same way, on Google you can pull up your “organic” ranking by buying adwords, since Google counts organic and not organic clicks to judge the “relevance” of results.

We define “engaging” as talking about minus new fans (basically we try to measure the fans’  feedback to the pages activity).

Is it “bad” if I have a high talking about number made up of a lot of new fans (some acquired through ad spend, other organically) but a low “engagement” number?

I think this depends on the “cost” of increasing “real” engagement compared to the “cost” of sustaining a given level of impressions via ad spend.

For instance, some pages might find out that the only way of increasing comments and likes is to post entertaining content that has little to do with the brand. For some pages/brands this might make perfect sense, while for others (more “specialized” products and services) trying to engage fans by posting about the Super Bowl might not be a sustainable editorial choice.

As a side note, there is little indication (as a very rough analysis of the talking about ratio might suggest) that large pages are less engaging than smaller ones (dark red bars). The difference in the talking ratio (blue bar) is simply tied to the weight of the “new” fans in the equation (orange bar) –  it is easier to grow 1% per day if you are smaller.

Having many pages supporting the same brand, especially if the all post in one language, costs more, and might not have significant advantages. I just noticed that Skittles “killed” its 3 million fan UK page and merged it into its main page, even though the main page only grey by less than a million fans.

I believe data (as collected, for instance, by Brandbook) can make these choices and trade-offs like these easier.

We added a new feature to our engagement dashboard that shows the most engaging pages of the day. This means the pages whose engagement rate has at least doubled in the last 7 days relative to the last 30.

Just a word of caution.

If page A has increased its engagement ratio a lot over the past week, this should mean that is has done something cool that works. Therefore you can learn something from page A and possibly apply it to your page, right?

Not necessarily.

While we try to separate “talking about” in “engagement” and “new fans” this is not always possible (sometimes the people talking about figure is not updated by Facebook for 2-3 days, while the number of fans changes).

Many of the pages that have spiked in engagement have also spiked in terms of number of new fans acquired per week. This might be correlation – something very engaging the page did convinced a lot of non-fans to like the page, or causality – the increase of fans due to an ad campaign has created some increase in engagement or is partially “read” as an increase in engagement.

So do not confuse a spike in engagement with a spike in the number of new fans per week that the page is getting. Both are great news, but the increase in fans might have little to do with something “engaging” that the page has done, and more to do with (an effective) promotional spend by the page.

The viz allows you do see the top engaging pages in different days (above those of the 22nd of February, below those of the 20th). This should allow you to distinguish “peaks” of new fans (probably tied to promotional activities, that of course can be very interesting and engaging and be much more than a simple ad campaign) from “peaks of engagement” – probably tied to some kind of more-effective-than-average interaction of the page with its fans.