Two questions about Facebook Fan Pages: Video Play Counts, Facebook Impressions

January 25, 2011 7:08 AM

Two Questions about Facebook Fan Pages: 1. How can I best track the number of times a posted video is played? 2. What is going on with "Impressions"?

Perhaps my Google-Fu is weakening...

My company is interested in tracking the way our Facebook page is used, and two things stand in the way.

1) We post a lot of videos directly to Facebook, but there doesn't seem to be way to see how many times and individual video was played. Am I missing something? Would it be better to upload to a different service and embed on the Facebook page?
I did discover that there is a "Daily Video Views" column in the Insights data export spreadsheet, which is probably helpful in a different way.

2) We also we're enjoying the new Impressions data (how may times a post appeared to users), but lately the numbers are either non-existent or really strange (like 0 Impressions even though 8 people left some kind of feedback).
Again, I did discover that digging into the Insights report led me to accurate Impression data for the last 10 posts, but we'd like them all.

posted by jander03 to computers & internet (3 answers total)

If you post your videos to Vimeo and then post the Vimeo link to Facebook, you will be able to tell how many people viewed the video on your Vimeo page. That's how I do it.
posted by kdern at 11:46 AM on January 25, 2011

The Impressions data is not real time. Often I will see mine jump from 0 to 100 in space of a reload. If you are looking at any data less than a day old it's probably not that accurate. I would suggest not getting too hung up on the numbers regardless. For anything other than tracking a trend they are pretty worthless.
posted by cjorgensen at 5:27 PM on January 25, 2011

@kdern - might look into that and YouTube, thank you!

@cjorgensen - I'm getting the same results. It's funny because two weeks ago Impressions made since, it seemed to be the count of the total times that a post appeared on someone's screen (via newsfeed or what have you). The numbers appeared to be pretty steady. Now I can't imagine what they're measuring.
Here's how it would be useful: When something is posted it goes to the top of user newsfeeds (if they "Like" the page), then drifts down. The more people have a chance to see our posts at the top of their newsfeeds, the more likely they are to visit our page. So the Impressions would give us a good hint as to the best times of day and the best days of the week to put up posts.
posted by jander03 at 4:13 PM on January 26, 2011