A Few Facebook Insights Definitions

Before defining "reach" it was important for me to understand another definition: "Impressions" or "The number of times a post from your page is displayed, whether the post is clicked on or not. People may see multiple impressions of the same post. For example, a fan might see a Page update in their News Feed once, and then a second time if their friend shares it".


Reach- Measures the number of people who received impression(s) of a Page post. The reach number may be less than the impressions number since one person can see multiple impressions.

- This is interesting to me because the filtering of Facebook is so complex now. Just because I post something from the Blue Moonies page doesn't necessarily mean that every one of their "fans" will see that post. So checking this statistic will give me an accurate number of how many people have actually seen the post.

"People Talking about This" (PTAT)      vs.         Engaged Users

This one is still a little confusing for me, but I found an article online that seems to explain the difference pretty well... so I will include it below. They use the term "page", but in this case, I think they mean "post".

(The following was taken from http://pagelever.com/understanding-insights-people-talking-engaged-users/)
What is People Talking About This?

People Talking About This (or PTAT) is the number of individual people who have engaged with your Page in a way that it created a “Story” that went out into the Newsfeed.  This includes commenting / liking / sharing a specific post, liking the Page, mentioning the Page in a post, checking in, RSVP’ing to one of your events, photo-tagging the Page and writing a post on your Page’s Wall.   PTAT doesn’t include people using your Page’s name in one of their personal posts without @-mentioning or tagging it (“I love Disney!” vs “I Love Disney!”)  Facebook chose to showcase this number because the Stories generated from PTAT actions drive any type of viral engagements that in turn help increase growth..

Wait…then what is Engaged Users?

Engaged Users is the number of individual people who have engaged with your Page, regardless if the engagement created a Story or not.  This includes everything from PTAT, plus actions like clicking on a post, opening up a link, watching a video, or viewing out your photos.  All of these additional actions do not create a Story in the Newsfeed, so you won’t see a Story of “David Turner watched PageLever’s video”.  The correct term for these actions is Consumptions, but you can also think of them as clicks, especially if you’re trying to explain this to someone who isn’t deeply familiar with Facebook.  The reason the word Consumptions is used is a matter of semantics – you consumed a video, not just clicked on a video.

Engaged Users- Measures the number of users who have clicked anywhere on the post in the past 28 days. They can have clicked anywhere on the post (ie. "Liked" it, Clicked on it to link to your page, clicked on it to link to that article, commented, shared it, watched a video, etc).

People Talking About This (PTAT)- Facebook defines this as, "The number of people who have created a story from your pages post including: sharing, liking, commenting, answering a question, responding to an event, or claiming an offer".

.... So therefore, the number of engaged users will always be larger than the PTAT number. What I take away from this is that Reach is the # of people who have seen your post, PTAT is the # of people who are interacting with your post in a way that spreads the word to others, and Engaged Users are the number of people who have seen your post and interacted with it in some way.

Which leads us to "virality"= PTAT/Reach

Virality- The number of people who have created a story from your post as a percentage of the number of people who have seen it.