Facebook interactions drive page views and not vice versa
Monday, August 2, 2010 at 5:15PM Jon M Bishop 
After an interesting talk by @joshuamarch on his theory on IPM (interactions per 1000 fans) I dug deeper into my Facebook page insights to have a look at whether interaction is a key driver of metrics on Facebook and the early results show this to be true.
Have a look at the pink ‘orbs’ on the graphs above and you will see that in November there was a massive spike in page views but there was absolutely no affect on interactions. Again there is a page view spike in April with no affect on interaction.
But then in May and June, we witnessed a sustained period of high interaction number and the PVs also peaked. What is even more interesting is the continued higher level of PVs as compared to before the activity peaks.
On the back of listening to Josh’s talk, I had a go at pushing the IPM metrics and you can see a big spike at the end of the interactions graph. I will be very interested to see the affect on PVs when the data comes in.
My best explanation for this phenomenon is that the more interaction a post receives the more visibility it gets in users’ feeds, the more their friends see it, bringing new and returning fans to the page.
So based on this evidence, interactions is the main proxy for driving page views to a Facebook page and should be seen as the key metric to push on Facebook. The reason this excites me is because my seniors are more interested in reach metrics (visits and PVs) than in engagement metrics (interactions) which, of course, I think are very important, more so than reach.
So proving (with solid numbers and graphs and all the stuff bosses like) that engagement drives reach metrics is a game changer for me and probably a lot of other people in my role.
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