Who is talking about you?

At the end of last week Facebook added a new feature to pages that tells visitors the number of people who are talking about the page. The number appears under the number who “Like” the page, so that visitors can instantly see how popular the page is.

What does it mean?

Facebook measures who is talking about the page by:

• Post “Likes”.
• Comments on posts.
• Posts on the wall.
• Sharing of posts.

The more engaged, as in the more people are interacting and sharing with the page, the higher the number who are talking about the page.

Why?

Facebook is trying to get pages to interact with their visitors on the wall more and more, which is I think why they have added this function. In trying to force this Facebook:

• Will be deleting the discussions tab at the end of October.
• Will be deleting the reviews tab at the end of October.
• Have already discontinued the ability for page updates to be sent.

The interesting part of this new insight, is that with the new Facebook insights you can actually see the demographics of who is talking about your page (as opposed to just everyone who “Likes” your page). The demographics include age, location and gender. By seeing who is talking about your page you will be able to see if it is a cross section of your page “likers” or just a specific group, this will potentially help you to tailor your posts more to get even more interaction.

Downsides

Once visitors to your page realise that this number exists, it potentially means that they won’t “Like” the page, because they can see that no one is talking about it, and the perception that gives is that the posts and/or page aren’t very interesting. Not really that relevant for bigger brands, as often people will “Like” a page because they like the brand not for the content. For service based businesses this is more relevant as the reason for “Liking” a page is often due to the content that they produce.

In some ways I like this new addition to pages, as it should increase the quality of what is shared on pages, but I can also see it working as reverse social proof, ie. no one is talking about this page it must be rubbish, therefore I won’t “Like” it. What do you think? Will it be positive or negative?

Lara Solomon is the founder of Mocks mobile phone socks, Chief Rabbit at Social Rabbit – your guide in the world of social media, founder of Steps – the online Facebook and LinkedIn training course and author of ‘Brand New Day – the Highs & Lows of Starting a Small Business’. Lara’s business LaRoo was the winner of the NSW Telstra Micro-Business Award in 2008.