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Tag Archives: Mobile Apps

Everything You Need to Know About the Facebook Page Insights Bug

25 Monday Feb 2013

Posted by leonidesignoryblog in Facebook

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Advertising, Analytics, Engagement, Enterprise Social, Facebook, facebook page insights bug, Marketing, Metrics, Mobile, Mobile Apps, News, Social Media Marketing, Strategy

Last Friday Facebook announced that it had discovered bugs in Facebook Page Insights. These bugs were likely introduced around the same time that Facebook made changes to its EdgeRank algorithm, however the bugs were unrelated to the EdgeRank changes, originating with changes made to Facebook’s Android and iOS apps.

Facebook didn’t specify exactly when they became aware that Page Insights were not being properly reported, only that they began working on a solution immediately once the errors were found.I don’t have any new information for you here, however I have taken information from three sources, Facebook’s original announcement on FacebookStudio.com, TechCrunch’s article a few hours later, and the notification that all Facebook page admins will see at least twice.

I’ve stripped out all of the fluff to give you this easily digestible guide that answers your most pertinent questions and provides you with the next steps you should take to understand and minimize the fallout in your own reporting structure.

Which Facebook Metrics Were Affected?

Reach: Paid Reach, Organic Reach, and Viral Reach

Impressions: Organic, Paid, and Viral Impressions

(Note: Check out the link if you’re not familiar with the difference between Reach and Impressions.)

Engagement: Metrics that include Reach or Impressions in their calculation, such as individual post virality, will also be incorrect.

How Are Those Metrics Incorrect?

Reach and Impressions were not recorded for mobile users. Essentially, as far as Page Insights were concerned, fans who saw your posts on mobile devices didn’t exist, and were not counted.

Impressions for ads that appear in the newsfeed were counted twice. Once as organic and once as paid. This bug only affected PC/Mac/Linux users, not mobile users.

Facebook says that all ads were delivered properly, however, and thus no one was over or under-charged for ads. Facebook also reported that their ads platform has extensive monitoring and verification measures already in place to prevent something like this from happening to their Ad Insights.

Engagement metrics, Virality being one example, that are calculated by comparing one metric to Reach or Impressions will also be affected. When Reach increases and engagement does not, Virality drops. So, if your Reach was under-reported, then your post’s Virality has likely been reported as higher than it actually was.

What Changes In Metrics Should I Expect Going Forward?

Facebook reports that changes will vary from page to page, and some may not be affected at all, or at least not very significantly. You may however see an increase in Reach and Impressions, and if so, you’ll likely also see a decrease in post virality, because it’s a comparison of people who saw your post vs. people who interacted with your post.

How Long Has This Been Going On?

Facebook did not specify exactly how long their Page Insights have been incorrectly reported, but it’s safe to assume that data reported from late September up until today is not accurate. You should expect accurate data to be reported once again starting tomorrow (Monday, February 24th, 2013).

Facebook also announced that metrics affected during this period can’t be corrected for historical data, so the currently incorrect data from this time period will remain in place.

What Is Facebook Doing About it?

Facebook claims to have already placed new quality and verification measures in with their metrics data to both verify the data and actively monitor for bugs in the future.

So, What Should I do?

Don’t trust your metrics data from August of 2012 through February 24th, 2013. Reach and Engagement are essential Facebook metrics for most brands, so these bugs make the meat and potatoes of your metrics data useless for this period.

Starting February 25th, 2013 you should monitor the metrics mentioned in this post for about a month. Looking at data from February 25th through around March 27th will give you a better idea of what your actual numbers are for the affected metrics.

Comparing the correct data starting on February 25th to the measurements for the same metrics from August 2012 – February 24th, 2013 will give you some idea of just how off the reported metrics were for your page while the bugs were active. So, you can at least have an accurate ballpark figure as to what your true measurements were while these bugs were active, and know if the changes caused these metrics to be over-reported, or under-reported for your page.

Some people are speculating that these bugs coinciding with the changes in how Facebook calculates EdgeRank are too much of a coincidence. I doubt this is the case, after all, having to admit that key metrics have been miss-reported for months is far more embarrassing than having to admit that EdgeRank was altered to encourage additional ad spend from brands. In fact it could lead to less confidence in Facebook ads and Facebook as a business marketing platform.

It certainly does lead to some interesting questions about the data Facebook has shared with us though, particularly their claims that the changes to EdgeRank at the end of September did not hurt Reach for most brands, when the bugs would have certainly caused a noticeable decrease in Reach, which Facebook should have seen and attributed to something. Considering that Facebook now admits Reach most likely did decrease for many brands, just not for the reasons we all thought, their previous denial of any decrease stands at odds with their own data.

For the optimist in all of us, at least once you compare the buggy metrics to your month’s worth of correct metrics, you’ll have some great data for proving to management exactly how important mobile is for your brand’s efforts on Facebook (since the bugs essentially caused insights to pretend like mobile users didn’t exist), and what you stand to miss out on if you don’t optimize content for those users!

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No-Cost Social Media Listening Tools

25 Monday Feb 2013

Posted by leonidesignoryblog in Uncategorized

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Advertising, Analytics, Best Practices, Engagement, Enterprise Social, Facebook, facebook page insights bug, Listening, Marketing, Metrics, Mobile, Mobile Apps, Monitoring Tools, News, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Strategy

Think you can’t afford to have a good social media management system? Think again. Budget should never be a deterrent in monitoring the chatter around your brand. Listening to online buzz should be part of everyone’s day whether you are an enterprise level operation or a one-man shop.

Even though the market is saturated with low cost and high cost listening tools, you can put together a pretty good basic listening dashboard with no-cost tools. Most of all, your listening dashboard should have the power to double as a social media management system (SMMS) that allows you to do elementary functions such as post, comment, and schedule posts. This allows you to manage and monitor from the same dashboard. Here are my favorite free tools. A mix of these will work for your basic needs, depending on what you want to monitor.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is the best place to start. With the free version of HootSuite, you have the ability to manage a total of five accounts  from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Ping, WordPress, MySpace, or Google Pages. You are allowed one admin to control those accounts. But when it comes to monitoring, you have the ability to stream search terms, hashtag feeds, and Twitter lists as well. You can monitor up to ten streams per tab and have 20 tabs on your free account.   Note: there is no good search engine for Facebook. The only thing you can really do effectively is monitor the pages you manage.

HootSuite Screen shot

In the screen shot above is a Hootsuite dashboard, the tabs I have are along the orange highlighted line. One tab for all Twitter lists and other tabs for specific search terms. As you can see in the blue, there is only three managed accounts in this example of Hootsuite. The little icon highlighted in purple is the calendar function that lets you schedule posts to all your social networks. The green highlighted panel is where all the reports and settings reside.

Google Alerts

I have a number of Google Alerts set up to be delivered to my email daily. Occasionally I set some up to be delivered in real-time. This tool covers the web well, but not social media.

Social Mention

Social Mention is good for real-time searches. Depending on how strong and precise your search term is, you will get good results.  You can see from the da shboard above that there are two ways to search: on social platforms or on the web platforms on the “All” pull-down menu on top. I recommend trying it out and seeing if it works well for you.

RSS Readers

I recommend setting up a newsfeed that you can peruse on a daily basis.  I would include competitors’ blogs, sector blogs, internal blogs, news feeds, and any other online information you want to keep track of. I use Google Reader so I can track it from any other Google platform I have open. I glance at titles and read anything I feel I need to. There are a number of news aggregators out there including Netvibes, NewsGator, Feed Demon and others. Find one you like.

Finally, here are a few reasons why you should monitor your brand online:

  1. Discover early warning signs of negative or false information that can trigger a crisis, if left unattended.
  2. Identify your key critics and watchdogs; key influencers and advocates.
  3. Identify which social media channels best suit your organizational culture, and which ones your stakeholders frequent.
  4. Follow your competitors and discover what is engaging and trending in your sector.
  5. Uncover ethical blind spots your organization may have.

This is just a short list of free tools you can piece together for a good monitoring system.  Do you have a preferred monitoring system set up? Tell us how does it work for youi?

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