A month ago, I wrote an early report on the impact that Facebook Timeline has made on my Page. At the time, I had only seen about two weeks worth of data since I moved to Timeline, but early results pointed to a significant increase in tab views.
But I realized that the data wasn’t worth much since at least some of the spike could be attributed to curiosity after the switch. So a month later, am I still seeing the benefits of Facebook Timeline?
Not really. In some cases, numbers are slightly up. In others, they are slightly down. In most cases, not a lot has changed. Even in the case of tab views, the spike has leveled out (though there is still improvement there).
Note that in each case I am comparing the data to total Likes at the time. Number of likes has increased (as it did prior to Timeline), so that needs to be factored out of the equation.
The period of time being compared is February 10 – May 9. In each chart, you’ll see a red line representing my switch to Timeline.
Talking About This
Talking About This is the the number of people sharing stories about my Page. Stories include liking my Page, posting to my Page’s Wall, liking, commenting on or sharing one of my Page posts, answering a Question I posted, etc.
As you can see, my Talking About This was actually a bit stronger prior to my switch to Timeline. I did have a spike in the beginning of May, but overall I’ve seen less engagement since I made the change.
Daily Engaged Users
Daily Engaged Users includes anyone who clicked on my posts or created a story. While I would consider engagement to be more consistent now, I did receive spikes in engagement more often prior to my switch to Timeline.
Daily Organic Reach
Daily Organic Reach is the number of people who visited my Page or saw my Page or one of its posts in the News Feed or Ticker. No obvious change here, though there is a slight improvement in organic reach since I made the switch.
Page Views
Page Views measures the number of times your actual Page has been viewed by logged in users. This is one that you would expect to go up since the entire purpose of Timeline was to make your Page a destination. Well, that hasn’t really been the case. There was a big spike when I made the switch, but then it normalized to the old range — and even below.
Page Consumptions
Page Consumptions measures any clicks on my content. Outside of a spike earlier this week, this represents a pretty clear drop from what I was seeing during the couple of months prior to Timeline.
Tab Views
This was the big one last time. It was the one measurement that seemed to show a clear boost post-Timeline. Now?
Well, it’s more consistent. There aren’t the drops that were there before. It seems to be normalizing, but still a tad better than pre-Timeline. It’s just not 309% better like it was before. It’s leveled out a bit, but tabs remain a high-trafficked area on your Page.
This shouldn’t be discounted. Remember again that before we had default landing pages, so non-fans were landing on tabs whether they wanted to or not. Now that there’s no landing page, one might expect a steep drop in views of that content. But that is certainly not the case, so this is one area where brands can and should benefit from if used properly.
Conclusions
It must be pointed out that this is only one Page. It’s a very small sample size. It’s also not particularly easy to say that Timeline was the cause of any rise or drop in results. Other factors come into play, namely my ability to create engaging content.
Additionally, I have a hard time believing that Timeline has much of any effect on Reach, Engagement or Talking About This. I included them because I was curious, but much of this activity will occur in the News Feed.
Still, Timeline was supposed to make my Page a destination. If that had happened, then maybe those numbers would have risen as well.
So in the end, tabs are more effective than before. Other than that, it would seem that my fans aren’t any more excited about what I bring to the table than they were before.
And I guess that shouldn’t be all that surprising. It’s the quality of content that ultimately matters, right?
