{"id":31503,"date":"2017-11-17T13:30:00","date_gmt":"2017-11-17T12:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sotrender.com\/blog\/?p=31503\/"},"modified":"2020-05-19T15:36:51","modified_gmt":"2020-05-19T13:36:51","slug":"storytellers-ptat-metric-shouldnt-exist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sotrender.com\/blog\/2017\/11\/storytellers-ptat-metric-shouldnt-exist\/","title":{"rendered":"Storytellers (PTAT – People Talking About This) – The metric that shouldn’t exist?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Facebook and its advertising system is always the source of doubt and controversy. The reasons for that include the system\u2019s size, complexity, and the varying levels of user education. But let\u2019s not forget one of the most important reasons: sometimes the social media giant doesn\u2019t give users enough of an explanation. Because of this, one of the mysteries that marketers struggle with is the PTAT (People Talking About This; storytellers) metric.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

What is PTAT?<\/h2>\n

Facebook doesn\u2019t offer anything more than an ambiguous\u00a0definition of this indicator. In order to learn what it actually means, we need to use data from other sources. Basic information can be found in \u00a0Facebook\u2019s Insights API<\/a><\/span>\u00a0documentation. That\u2019s where we find the \u00a0\u2018page_storytellers\u2019 indicator, which is explained as follows:<\/p>\n

The number of people sharing stories about your page (‘People Talking About This’ \/ PTAT). These stories include liking your Page, posting to your Page’s Timeline, liking, commenting on or sharing one of your Page posts, answering a Question you posted, RSVPing to one of your events, mentioning your Page, phototagging your Page or checking in at your Place.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So you can see the PTAT has a much wider definition than just engagement. On top of that, it can also include results that occurred after a page sponsored, for example, events or posts (dark\/unpublished page posts). So it wouldn\u2019t be accurate to compare PTAT and engagement directly. But that\u2019s not the only challenge.<\/p>\n

Does PTAT change every time I reload a Page?<\/h2>\n

It\u2019s possible. The number of storytellers refreshes itself in real time (almost; it\u2019s actually every 15 minutes). Each time it refreshes, the metric will refer to the last 7 days.<\/p>\n

So how does PTAT work in practice? Let\u2019s look at an example. A metric registered on Wednesday at 12 PM will contain all the people who \u2018created a story\u2019 no earlier than 7 days ago. That means it won\u2019t contain people who performed the same action on the same Wednesday, but at 11:25 AM, for example.<\/p>\n

But I\u00a0heard Facebook has a deprecated PTAT metric<\/h2>\n

Facebook has informed<\/a><\/span>\u00a0users\u00a0about the deprecating PTAT, but only in Insights. To replace it, they\u2019ve decided to show us more detailed indicators:<\/p>\n

To better see how people interact with a pages content, the PTAT metrics have been split into separate elements: Page Likes, People Engaged (the number of unique people who have clicked on, liked, commented on, or shared your posts), Page tags and mentions, Page checkins and other interactions on a Page.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On most Pages PTAT is still visible for everyone under the \u2018Likes\u2019 tab:<\/p>\n

\"ptat,

People Talking About This<\/p><\/div>\n

If there are so many problems, why bother showing Storytellers?<\/h2>\n

In the new version of our Trends reports<\/a>, next to Engagement, we\u2019ve decided to show the number of Storytellers. We even added them to our app! <\/a>If you\u2019re still wondering why, don’t worry about it. We’ll explain.<\/p>\n

The PTAT metric demonstrates how people interact with a Page across a much wider context<\/strong>. According to the definition, the only connection between the data from Facebook Insights and public data is the number of Storytellers itself<\/strong> (which we publish in Trends reports<\/a>). In other words, the data from non-public brands, which is unavailable to the wider public, is somewhat represented by the PTAT metric.<\/p>\n

Is this data reliable?<\/h2>\n

We wouldn\u2019t be Sotrender if we didn\u2019t check! But.. how did we do that? This indicator is strongly correlated with Page reach and is the only one that better demonstrates a correlation with paid reach.<\/p>\n

\"ptat,

Relationship between weekly PTAT median and sum of impressions for Facebook pages<\/p><\/div>\n

FROM THE CHART:<\/span><\/p>\n