Yesterday Facebook began rolling out post insights to Facebook Page administrators but since then many are wondering what they mean. While Facebook hasn’t officially announced the upgrade we have reached out to Facebook to find out what these numbers represent and got a response. The ultimate question is: do Post Insights really provide more insight?
What Are Impressions?
The first thing many page administrators began asking me last night was: What on earth is an “impression”? As one commenter, pictured below, told us, they had over 800,000 views on a page with 350,000 fans. We also noticed that some of our posts had more impressions then we have fans. So where are these additional views coming from? Facebook has given the us the following definition of impressions:
The number of impressions displayed for a post is the raw number of impressions shown to users. These impressions may appear in users’ News Feeds, visits to Pages or through a Fan Box widget.
For example, a user may load up their homepage and somewhere in their stream will be your story. While not all users are necessarily viewing that story (as they may have to scroll down), Facebook made a request for your story so it counts as an “impression”. What we have not heard back about yet is whether or not reposts are included in that calculation. Facebook has let us know that reposts are not included in this calculation.
Is This Useful?
As many other page administrators have noticed, the average feedback level on any given story is absolutely horrendous. While we’ve seen feedback levels as high as 0.50 percent our average feedback level is somewhere around 0.10 percent. This number will vary from post to post and from Page to Page though. Before discussing the use of these numbers, it’s important to define what determines “feedback”.
Feedback is the total number of comments and likes on your story divided by the total number of impressions. Not currently presented are the number of users who viewed your story or the number of clicks on that specific story. So what can you do with this knowledge? The most obvious is to produce more content that generates a larger amount of feedback.
However there may not be a direct correlation between clicks (something many are attempting to drive) and feedback. For example, after posting our This Week In Facebook article on Sunday, an entire thread was generated around an off topic. The two comments below sparked an entire conversation (24 comments) about one of our fans’ choice of grammar:
Was this conversation thread valuable for our page? Maybe. Will similar posts result in the same feedback level? Probably not. So in this instance, the insights were not particularly useful for us. However, it can be used as a basic guide for determining what content was popular with our fans with the exception of conversation threads like the one pictured above.
What would be extremely useful is to monitor these numbers across other pages and get some sort of comparison to see if all these numbers tend to hover in a standard range. What would also be useful is to know those Pages that are performing extremely well. What sort of feedback levels are you seeing on your page stories? Is the new Post Insights feature available to you yet?
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Thanks for the helping post. I'm curious about, if they count reposts, too.
Comment by Koray Kapon — January 21, 2010 @ 1:06 pm
still not seeing the new insights on my page.
Comment by Rick Delashmit — January 21, 2010 @ 1:06 pm
yeah. I second that.
Comment by Facebook User — January 21, 2010 @ 1:10 pm
maybe it's not updated yet?
Comment by Facebook User — January 21, 2010 @ 1:11 pm
I think the suggestion in the blog is that it's only just being rolled out so I would guess the bigger fan page owners may have it to ensure facebook are happy with it before it gets rolled out to everyone.
just my two cents worth.
Comment by Robert Love — January 21, 2010 @ 1:54 pm
If all posts are fed to the walls of all the fans of the page I admin, why wouldn't all the impression counts be the same?
Comment by bruce — January 21, 2010 @ 7:06 pm
No post insights visible for me (in Germany) so far…
But calculating feedback by comments per impressions (defined that way) doesn't seem logical to me. If they counted impressions by people logged in to facebook seperately and took this to calculate the feedback, it would be more logical to me. Because those who are not logeed in yet, cannot comment directly anyway.
Comment by Annette Schwindt — January 22, 2010 @ 3:46 am
We've been seeing the insights here at our official Penn State FB page. I was curious about having more impressions than fans, so thanks for the info. However, sometimes we have fewer impressions than we do fans. What's up with that?
Our feedback rates range from 0.01% to 0.50%, but we're interested in every comment we get. We're also putting out a mix of information and chat.
I'd like to see something that includes reposts, also.
Comment by Laurie Creasy — January 22, 2010 @ 5:53 am
Well, it appears that, at least for now, it is only for authenticated pages with at least 10,000 fans. Oh well, only 7700 more to go….
Comment by Dave Kommel — January 25, 2010 @ 10:12 pm
I posted my thoughts on this on my blog and personally I think it's amazing!
Comment by FYIofficial — November 23, 2010 @ 8:10 pm
I get feedback from 0 to 1.5. The 0 feedback post was posted at 2AM (insomniac, yes) higher feedback was posted between 8:30 – 10. Does anyone see a correlation between impressions and feedback with time posted?
Comment by @FossatiUS — November 25, 2010 @ 11:02 pm
Still confused about what exactly an impression is. I saw that explanation in the FB help center, but anytime you use the word being defined within the definition of the word itself, the definition is of marginal value (e.g., an impression is an impression).
Comment by Joe — November 28, 2010 @ 1:47 pm
Joe: I couldn't agree with you more! I'm surprised no one else commented on that. One should avoid defining a word by using the word being defined! Crazy….
Comment by Penelope — December 14, 2010 @ 5:11 pm
Oh OK!
So Impressions are considered impressions…
…Awesome
Comment by Lisa Doherty — December 30, 2010 @ 10:52 pm
Hello! Thanks for the info! I'm currently manager and content developer for IKEA Santo Domingo's facebook page and I've gotten feedback percentages as high as .96%.. reading that on average, most get a .10% really motivates me to keep at it! Thanks for the info.. extremely helpful!
Comment by RoRoAmelie — August 20, 2011 @ 2:08 pm