In an effort to help businesses better measure social interactions with customers, Facebook has launched a new Pages Insights tool, which will help brands keep track of conversations around a business.

Facebook Insights provides Facebook Pages owners with a variety of metrics that aim to help you track the growth of your brand’s presence on the social network.

The new “People Talking About This” metric – which will appear below the total number of Likes – will measure the number of times people perform an action on your Page, such as clicking a Like button, posting a comment to the Wall, or sharing a photo.

Facebook is also providing a metric – Friends of Fans – that will show how many friends of fans a Page can reach and how many people were reached by a story or Page update. More information is provided to determine whether a Page update was reached by visiting the Page, through seeing a story by a friend, or through an ad.

A third metric worth noting is “Weekly Total Reach,” which will measure how many people have posted something about your Page, how many news organizations within Facebook have referenced it, and which parts of your page have received viral distribution.

Additionally, Facebook is launched a new Expanded Premium Ad that will combine Pages posts with social context from friends. This means that when a person viewing a brand’s ad has friends connected to the brand’s Page, Facebook will expand the ad to include information about which friend’s Like the Page.

The addition of the new type of ad aims to bring more people to your Page based on the influence of friends. The new metrics will give Page admins a better sense of how many people are actively engaging with a brand. This new information should help you determine how to better interact with your visitors.

[Via: Mashable, Image credit: Beth Kanter]