Earlier this year, Facebook announced that some of their page level metrics were being deprecated (which happened about 30 days later in April). Maybe you saw your engagements go the same direction as this chart from one of our clients.
At the time, it looked like it was just “reactions” (formerly called likes) that were no longer being calculated because of the new Pages Experience or the migration from Classic Pages. If this is mystifying to you, Facebook has been rolling out a new page structure for what seems like forever, and every time they make a change in the backend, it sets off a chain of malfunctions and glitches. And then every page manager in the world throws something at their computer screen.
Well, buckle up because more changes are on the way. And, honestly, I really don’t understand all of them. Here’s what I’ve learned so far. At the end of this post, you will find links to my source material so you can make your own assessment.
What Changes Might be Happening on Facebook
Video Views remain, but all the subsets like 3 second plays, 10 second plays, replays etc. will be removed. It will just be one giant number.
Reach demographics will become fan demographics, but from the current source material, it’s hard to tell what this actually changes – if you’re reaching people outside your fan base, you will never know? Or is it just a name change?
New calculations for reach are total, organic, paid. But on some tools, they are just subtracting paid from total to calculate organic. If engagements are calculated into the reach, are the calculations only coming from comments and shares, since “reactions” is already gone? Not sure how robust or sustainable that one will be over time as it’s already fractured.
In one source, it appeared as if everything about engagements is changing even though comments and shares were going to be intact as of April. We saw a dramatic drop in engagements for all our clients when this change occurred in mid April. So we are wondering if the reaction buttons will be removed? Why have them if they’re not being measured?
Every subset of Page Impressions will be gone and for Instagram, you can only see this number in ads manager. So it appears that when you get page impressions, it will be one giant number.
Depending on your management tool, you’ll get different metrics for a while depending on the API and how your tool deals with historic data.
OUR ADVICE: if there is a metric that is key to your reporting or you might need to track a specific metric for historical reasons, we recommend downloading versions of those reports before the September 16 cutoff date.
Instagram Announced Changes Last Week Too
On Instagram it’s all about “views” as a key metric and from my first look at this, they are getting highly criticized for it.
In their post, Instagram said “Views will be the primary metric” for Non Reels, and for Reels, they said “Plays will be relabeled Views.” So everything is a “View.”
Many of the commenters to Instagram’s announcement post wondered:
- Is this just a name change?
- Am I finally gonna get my content seen?
- Tell the AI bots that they’re getting it wrong.
- Please fix the algorithm.
Fran’s Take on These Metric Changes
It seems like Meta is removing all metrics related to engagement and are going to views for everything. This is disheartening because we have focused our efforts with clients on building engagements because it was the only way that you knew someone actually saw your content. They liked it, said something, shared it. In changing to views, you can only verify that someone scrolled by your content.
Reach demographics have always been confusing and now that they’re being called fan demographics, what does that mean? The explanations in my source material were unclear.
In the source material, there’s a lot of talk about impressions, but our team has never used that metric as a KPI for a client. It was always squishy in terms of how it was calculated on social media platforms, so to us, it was not solid enough to include in a report. But it will be tempting to use that big number each month to prove the value of social efforts.
There will no doubt be additional interpretations in the lead up to these changes in mid-September.
Please read the source material because I know there’s a lot more to unpack. And the ramifications of some of these changes will take time to absorb enough to explain to clients. And I’d love to hear if you have a different interpretation or find additional sources.