Ok, so you’re a small business, posting furiously on Facebook, thinking that you have achieved a great fanpage, but wondering why it is not leading to better engagement or even sales.
It all boils down to four letters: PTAT
PTAT stands for People Talking About This. Launched as part of a 2011 update to Facebook Insights, PTAT was a Facebook engagement metric that reflects the number of people who have a created a story based on your fanpage post.
The metric’s existence is part of a larger view regarding crafting messages for friends of fans instead of fans. Doing so is more valuable. Encouraging more people to share and create stories based on your post increases the exposure of the message. Plus people respond to word of mouth, which is what PTAT represented digitally.
PTAT has since been removed as a Facebook Insights metric. Reporting on Likes, Shares, and Comments are conducted separately, as well as an additional report to show where your likes come from.
In addition to the visitor action, time decay is a factor. The decay - how recent the post is relative to the measured period - is part of a Facebook ranking algorhthm metric, once called Edgerank. Edgerank is meant to weight various Facebook activity such as a like or comment. The metric also scores on the relationship of the Facebook user to the administrator, and considers the time since post first appeared.
PTAT and Edgerank may be gone and renamed, but they are why posting a series of messages the same way as Twitter is not as effective. Too many messages can give fans a stream of notes with no focus on the message.
With all the above said, here are some tips for increasing Fanpage activity with less posting frequency and more emphasis on the message.
