Massive Update to Facebook Social: New Look & New Metrics

Oh boy, do I ever have a treat in store for you guys today…

We're in the middle of a major, multi-week initiative to update and overhaul the look of each of our social media integrations. But Facebook isn't just another social media platform. For many of our customers, the amount of time, effort, and funding that go into marketing on Facebook dwarfs all other social media platforms. And with nearly 2 billion monthly users on the platform, it's not difficult to see why.

When we first launched our Facebook social integration a few years ago, the idea of marketing on Facebook as a primary channel was still in it's infancy. The only metrics that Facebook made readily available to page admins were Likes, Reach, Engaged Users, and a few other minor stats.

But in the past 18 months, Facebook has rolled out a fully mature analytics platform to page admins – with a variety of demographic and even psychographic metrics – that's poised to eventually rival the complexity of Google Analytics.

And we're thrilled to announce the rollout of a fresh look for our Facebook social integration that now incorporates many of those new metrics.

So what exactly did we change ?

The old Facebook social integration provided a basic breakdown of "Page Reach" and "Engaged Users" over time in a monochrome "line graph" format:

Post engagement metrics (Reach, Engaged Users, and "Talking About This") was included in an abbreviated format on that same page, below the main graphs:

In contrast, the new Facebook Social integration breaks Likes, Engagement, and Reach out into their own separate tabs:

"Likes" tab:Under the new "Likes" tab, you'll of course find your total likes, as well as new metrics that include a breakdown of Paid versus Organic likes, and a graphical analysis of organic, paid, and lost likes over time.

And now, in addition, if you scroll down you'll also find "Likes" broken down by demographic data including Age, Gender, Countries, Cities, and Languages:

Engagement Tab:Similarly, the "Engagement" tab provides an "Overview" line graph, along with a breakdown of Engagement by Shares, Likes, and Comments (Facebook defines engagement as Shares + Likes + Comments). Below those graphs are demographic data points, with breakdowns mirroring those on the "Likes" tab, and including Age, Gender, Countries, Cities, and Languages:

Reach Tab:The "Reach" tab offers the same metrics and demographics as "Likes" and "Engagement" with the addition of a "Video Views" metric, further broken down into "Paid" and "UnPaid":

Posts Tab:We're especially excited about the new look for the "Posts" tab. It's a complete redesign that offers a huge improvement over the way that posts were previously displayed. The new posts tab mimics the native look on Facebook itself, with a scrollable "feed" showing each individual post with a breakdown of comments, likes, reach, clicks, and more.

User Permissions:As always, we've also added brand new granular permissions settings within the client/staff user "permissions" tab, so that you can decide during the client onboarding process (or at any point during the client contract) exactly which Facebook data to display to each user.

Automated Reporting: Finally, you'll also find brand new report sections allowing you to separate out your "Likes", "Engagement", and "Reach" data, while displaying as much or as little of the granular data from the dashboard as you choose.

A similar update to our Instagram integration was released last week, and additional updates with a matching look and new metrics are coming to our Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube integrations before the end of summer 2017.

What do you think of the new look? Are there any other metrics that you'd like to see included in our Facebook dashboard or the broader social media dashboard? Let us know in the comments section! And don't forget to check out the Facebook Ads Reporting Tool to track and report all of your paid campaigns!