Facebook explodes PTAT, giving page owners more data — and marketers clues about news feed visibility

Facebook page owners have long yearned for more insight than PTAT — Facebook’s people talking about this metric — offers. Starting today, they’re getting their wish.

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Facebook announced today that the statistics and numbers that make up PTAT are now going to be available, by default, in their individual elements along with other metrics on page owners’ Insights overviews. That includes:

• Page likes
• People engaged: People who have clicked on, liked, commented on, or shared something from your page.
• Page tags and mentions
• Page checkins

In addition, the former Page Insights virality metric, which Facebook says is often used as a benchmark for post quality, is getting more data. Clicks on post links, which have not been included in virality measures, are now being added in, along with the existing count of how many people saw your posts. Since clicks are being added in, Facebook is tossing the “virality” monicker and substituting “engagement rate.”

Facebook is also adding new metrics and data around page engagement, showing not only who you’ve reached by who you is engaged with your content, down to sex, geography, country, city, and language:

Perhaps most interesting is what Facebook had to say about getting your posts featured in your fans’ news feeds.

We all know that Facebook rewards “quality posts” with greater reach, and that posts with more likes, shares, and comments are more likely to be seen by fans. Facebook said today that one major consideration is the ratio of positive interactions to negative interactions. This means that posts with plenty of likes, comments, and shares — and no hide posts, hide all posts, report as spam, or unlike page actions — will do very well.

But if the negative reactions go up, your post dies.

In the new Page Insights, Facebook will aggregate all those metrics into a single per-post score card, so you’ll be able to see and evaluate those positive and negative interactions, and fine-tune your content strategy for the future.

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The changes will be rolling out over the next few weeks and months, and Facebook expects to complete the roll-out by the end of summer.

Sadly, there is no waiting list you can sign up on to speed access.

Image credits: Jolie O’Dell/VentureBeat, MailChimp® via photopin cc

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