Facebook’s new views metric has little impact on social strategy, publishers say

“The signs that [social media platforms] have given to publishers over the last year is: our priority in determining what is a good piece of content is how many people see it on the platform,” said Wes Bonner, svp of marketing and audience development and head of social at BDG.

So far, the change has so little bearing on publishers’ social strategy that one head of social media at a large publisher told Digiday they hadn’t even had a chance to really look at what the change means (mostly because they were busy with Election Day coverage). 

“I haven’t even gotten a chance to even think about the views metric,” the social media manager said. “It sounds more of an all encompassing version of reach… which is obviously one of our KPIs on platforms like Instagram, [which] has never been a major traffic driver for us.”

Bonner called the move a “rebranding” of impressions, or how many times a piece of content was seen.

“Rebranding them ‘views’ doesn’t really change the strategy, but I do think we have had to have serious conversations about looking at our view count — our reach, our impressions — and gaining insights on what does well [when looking at videos, image and link posts],” Bonner said. “We really had to unbuckle ourselves from having traffic be the primary KPI.”

Bonner said BDG hasn’t seen any major changes in the dataset on Facebook’s content dashboard since the platform announced the change, other than the “replay” metric disappearing. However, BDG has seen a “slight uptick” in the views number for images and stories posted on Facebook, now that the metric is counting duplicate views from the same person for those post types. “It is not significant, but we plan to monitor month over month,” Bonner said.

Facebook did not respond to a request for comment by publishing time. The platform’s blog post announcing the change said it gives creators “a single distribution metric for all content types that’s calculated the same way across Facebook and Instagram.” In other words, the idea is this change will make it easier to measure performance across Meta’s social platforms with more simplified data.

“This update provides an easy way to measure and benchmark Facebook and Instagram content now that metrics like ‘views’ are aligned across both platforms,” said Chris Anthony, CRO at Gallery Media Group.