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Facebook's: People Talking About This

1,594 views · Published 12 July 2012 · 1:52 · Indexed 23 September 2026

Channel: Gartner for Marketing · 2012 · People & Blogs

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Another L2 Case Study on Facebook, where we set out to unlock the primary inputs driving the new metric. Do size and posting frequency equal engagement?


In early October, Facebook launched "People Talking about This" a metric published publically on brand pages.  The new benchmark is designed to measure "the number of conversations" occurring around a brand and its Facebook page.  Updated daily, it reflects the last seven days of activity.

Using "People Talking About This" data from 20 iconic luxury brands we set out to unlock the primary inputs driving the new metric.

While a relationship exists between the size of a brand's page and the "People Talking About This" metric, size does not equal engagement.

There is even less of a relationship between the frequency with which a brand posts on its wall and the "People Talking about This" metric.

Going deeper, we looked at the percentage of the Facebook community responding by "liking" or "commenting" on brand posts and the ratio of People Talking About This" to the size of the community.   Surprisingly, while there is some correlation, the relationship was limited.

Finally we looked at the relationship between the past seven days of Facebook page growth and "People Talking About This" The data demonstrates an almost perfect correlation of 0.98, suggesting that the ratio of "People Talking About This" to page size is almost entirely driven by the number of fans a brand has added in the past week.

Cartier added 40,000 likes over the last seven days with its "A Colour and a Name" campaign, registering a "People Talking About This" ratio nearly four times higher the next closest luxury brand.

Our conclusion: The name is misleading. "People Talking About This" is a great measurement of episodic activity, but the metric does necessarily measure conversation.

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