Facebook announced a new Page Insights tool, a new public metric for “People Talking About This” on all Pages, and a new expanded premium ad unit.

“Facebook has unveiled a new Page Insights tool so that all Pages – small businesses, global brands, celebs, public figures, etc – on Facebook will be able to measure the value of social like never before – and act on it,” a representative for the company tells WebProNews in an email. “As part of this announcement, a new metric -“People Talking About This”- will be made public and appear on every Page underneath ‘Likes’ to show the conversations happening around the brand or business Page. This will help marketers and Page owners understand how to make their content more engaging and shareable, which increases the reach of their messages on Facebook.  It will also help users get a sense for what Pages are relevant, engaging and interesting to them when discovering and connection to Pages on Facebook.”

Some bullets about the new Page Insights from the email:

• See how posts they put on their Page reach people on Facebook – beyond their fans.
• See Total Likes, number of  Friends of Fans of a Page, the new public and internal Pages metric, ‘People talking about this’, and Weekly Total Reach of a Page
• “People Talking about this” counts ‘stories” – structured content that people choose to share through Facebook that is eligible to appear in a user’s news feed: liking your Page, posting to your Page’s Wall, liking, commenting or sharing one of your Page posts (or other content on your page – like photos, videos, albums), answering a Question you posted, RSVP-ing to one of your events, mentioning your Page, phototagging your Page, liking or sharing a check-in deal, or checking in at your Place. 
• Optimize content for posts -whether they’re photos, videos, questions, etc. – see what’s working best at reaching the most people, and how to increase the viral nature of these posts.

“To encourage third party development and analytics innovation, Facebook is also announcing a Page Insights API for the analytics developer community, so that they can create customized Page Insights solutions for existing and potential clients,” the rep tells us. “Webtrends (Gatorade, Simon Malls), Wildfire (Electronic Arts and Virgin Atlantic) and Context Optional (Sony Playstation and Levis) are already creating customized insights tools for clients based on the new Page Insights through the Facebook Insights API.”

As far as the new ad unit, it allows brands to promote page posts to anyone on Facebook.

“When the person viewing this brand’s ad has friends connected to this brand’s Page, Facebook will expand the unit to include a line above that shares which friends like the Page,” the rep explains. “Adding how friends engage give the ad social context, which research has shown increases ad recall.”

”Together, brands will be able to measure their success and enhance their strategies with the combination of Page Insights and thIS new Premium ad unit,” she adds.

According to Facebook, friends of fans represent a 34x larger set of consumers than the fans themselves, on average for the top 100 brands. For the top 1,000, it’s 81x. They are also more likely to visit a store or site and purchase a product or service, Facebook says.