Following the announcement of Timeline, Facebook also revealed to its brand and social media agency contacts the new layout, structure and contents of its insights offering to brand Facebook pages. As George Guildford mentioned in his great overview of the top-level page metrics in the new insights platform last week, brands stand to benefit significantly from the new information that can now be extracted from pages, predominantly around brand visibility and ROI within the Facebook platform.
Having delved deeper into the capabilities of the new platform, it is increasingly apparent that brands will also be able to use some of the new post-level metrics to improve their content too, which is exactly what Facebook wants. Facebook is certainly driving brands to focus on engagement as a priority, which doesn't come as much surprise given that this is in the best interests of all of Facebook's users. The new insights metrics will allow pages to do this better moving forward (assuming they are used properly).
By looking at the appeal of specific posts within a page in terms of demographics, brands can now see through Facebook insights which demographics like (or don't like) specific types of content, allowing them to optimise their content by tweaking the sentiment and direction of each post. For example, if 18-24 year olds are engaging but the target is 35-40 year olds, this insight will allow content to be optimised accordingly.
Brand pages can now also look at the frequency with which people are shown page content on a weekly basis. Previously, the only way of gauging which user saw which content was to look at the impressions figure, but since this figure wasn't for unique impressions, it wasn't particularly accurate. Whilst this isn't totally remedied by the changes, the impressions per post are now unique, and the frequency metric will give a broad overview of how EdgeRank is impacting the reach of page content.
Metrics to show the effectiveness of adverts within the Facebook platform (impressions etc) are now also included within Facebook insights, whilst more improvements to the "like sources" elements will provide added ROI given than brands will be able to better define where their Facebook traffic is coming from.
Overall, the changes are a big value-add for brands, whether they have already established communities on Facebook or not, so long as they have the correct people in place to analyse the data (probably either their in-house digital PR or marketing teams). With the full potential of Google+ still to be realised, there's some optimism from fans of the G+ that any implementation of Google Analytics with social metrics integrated into it will easily trump Facebook insights, but ultimately it will all come down to the product on offer - the users. Whichever way the tree falls, Facebook has taken a big step forward to add to its offering to brands.