Have you noticed a new metric on your Facebook Business Page? This number is displayed right under the number that shows how many people have liked your page. The “# are talking about you” metric represents a total for all user-initiated activity related to your Business Page. This number takes into account all of your wall posts, comments, likes, shares, check-ins, photo tags, recommendations, etc have have generated user-initiated activity. You can also find this feature in your page insights.

If you have ever wondered about the real value of your Facebook Business Page, this is the closest we have come to calculating the value since business pages were launched. We’ve tried other methods in the past, counting # of friends, # of comments and # of posts shared. Facebook now attempts to quantify the value and it will be interesting to see where this takes us.

Facebook is also working to help Business Page owners better understand their brand reach beyond their fan base with two new insight features – “Friends of Fans” and “Weekly Total Reach.” The new insight features will also measure the brand reach of specific posts by taking the of people talking about it by all of the people who saw it to measure the post’s popularity or viral nature.