Sharing on Facebook is getting out of hand. People joke about not using Twitter because they don’t care what they’re friends had for breakfast or when they cleaned the cat’s litter box and yet Facebook is adding updates in our newsfeed from apps that let us know what our friends are listening to, watching, and doing as they’re doing it.

I really, really don’t care what you’re listening to or watching right now. Seriously, I don’t. But this morning I noticed Disqus comments in my newsfeed. Really? Why would I want my friends’ blog comments in my stream? I clicked the “Hide all by Disqus” button and took care of that, along with Spotify, Hulu and all the other places Facebook thinks I want to know what you’re doing. Next thing you know they’ll come up with a device to attach to our toilet like this. Is there anything Zuckerberg thinks is TMI?

You call yourself a “network marketing coach” and you’ve got a hot tip. Hey, why not post it on Facebook? Good info too; don’t post spam on someone else’s Wall because it’s not professional and would be a bad way to promote your business. Only one problem. You posted this on another network marketing coach’s Facebook Page Wall as your Page so didn’t you just ignore your own tip?

Something occured to me yesterday as I was checking some of my Facebook Insights and wondering why some Pages can seemingly have a reasonable number of comments, shares, and post Likes and yet have a very low “Talking About This” number when compared to the total number of fans. The average seems to be about 5% or less, with 10% being on the high side, although some Pages do achieve a higher percentage. Many Pages, especially those with hundreds of thousands or millions of fans, like Justin Beiber or Lady Gaga, have extremely low percentages, many are below 1%.

I’ve spent a good bit of time analyzing many Facebook Pages, ranging in fans from a few hundred to millions, trying to understand just exactly what affected the engagement numbers. The obvious way to get high interactions per individual post is to provide information that others find interesting enough to comment on, Like, and share with their friends, but I found plenty of Pages who were doing that quite well with very high engagement numbers yet still with low Talking About This numbers when seen as a percentage of the total number of fans. Then, it came to me and the answer is actually quite simple.

The Talking About This metric is based on the number of unique people who interacted with your content in some way during the past 7 days. If you’ve noticed that even though you seem to have lots of people commenting, Liking, and sharing your individual posts but still seem to have a low percentage compared to your overall Likes (fans), you probably just aren’t posting often enough.

Let’s do some simple 5th grade math. Mary has 5,000 fans and they like her Page very much and many of them interact with her updates daily, with an average of 50 interactions per post. She posts 1 update a day. What is her Talking About This percentage?

Don’t worry, I’m not going to make you do math. The answer is that she would have 350 Talking About This — 50 interactions a day times 7 days. Her percentage wouldn’t be too bad either at 7% but Mary wishes it was higher, like her friend Jimmy’s.

Jimmy also has 5,000 fans but his Talking About This number is 1,750 which results in a 35% ratio. Mary is very jealous. The thing she can’t figure out is that Jimmy also has an average of 50 interactions per status update so how can he have a much higher Talking About percentage?

The answer? Jimmy doesn’t post only 1 status update per day like Mary does, he posts 5 times a day, spaced out evenly about once every 5 hours so he doesn’t upset his fans with too many daily updates. 5 updates per day with 50 interactions per update is 250 interactions per day or 1750 interactions per week or a whopping 35%.

So, if you want to increase your Talking About This number you just need to post more often. Of course you also need to make sure that by posting more often you don’t reduce the number of interactions per post because your fans just don’t feel like commenting or Liking too many updates a day. Studies show that posting 3 status updates per day seems to be a good number.

Please note that these exampes are highly simplified to make a point. The actual Talking About number is based on the “unique” number of people who interacted with one of your updates in some way. Obviously, if the same 50 people engage with each of Jimmy’s 5 updates a day his number would be the same as Mary’s so it’s not likely that doubling or tripling your daily posts will double or triple your Talking About number, but if you vary the topics so that each post is of interest to a different group of fans, the number will definitely increase.

Several weeks ago Facebook rolled out a bunch of new changes to our newsfeed including adding a Ticker and changing the option to view updates in either chronological order or in the order Facebook chooses for us based on an algorithm that supposedly shows us stories we’ll consider the most interesting. Instead of being able to choose the order, we always see “Top Stories” first and need to either scroll down or click a link that drops us down the page to view “Recent Stories”.

Yesterday, in a blog update, Facebook announced that they were changing back to the old system by giving us a drop down that lets us choose whether we want to view “Top Stories”, which are now referred to as “Highlighted Stories”, or “Recent Stories” first. This will come as very good news to Facebook business (fan) Page owners. The way the system works now, it’s not likely that a Page’s updates will be considered as important by Facebook’s algorithm as updates from friends and family members, therefor, it’s less likely their updates will be seen if someone doesn’t check their newsfeed often and only scans the “Top Stories”.

Facebook has indicated that this update will take a few days to roll out for everyone, but this morning I was greeted with a pleasant surprise and now have the new (old) option to choose whether I prefer to see all stories in chronological order or in the order Facebook decides I consider the most interesting. Thanks, Facebook, but I much prefer to read all stories in the order they come in.

Page owners will be very pleased to notice that in the screen shot below there are two updates from Pages showing right near the top. I believe this change back will rectify the drop most of us have experienced in our impressions.

Check out the screen shot below and you’ll notice that the “Weekly Total Reach” Insights metric for my Social Identities Facebook fan page seems to have had a very strange drop off, then a dead period, and then a steep rise back. What happened? Did that particular stat stop recording for a week? It must have because my “Impressions” had remained consistent during that period.

Imagine my elation when I had checked this stat in early October and saw that my Weekly Reach had climbed quite quickly from 5,377 “People Reached” to over 49,000 and then stayed that way for about a week. Then try to comprehend the horror I felt as I watched that number plummet and then level off at about 2,500. And then, bang, it started shooting right back up again and notice the latest reading of 42,636 shows an increase of 1,638.83%? Wow! Okay, enough already, my emotions just can’t take this. I like roller coasters a lot but this one sucks.

My first assumption after seeing that big valley in the graph was that for some reason there had been a glitch in the system and my stats had stopped recording for about a week. Cool, that made me feel better. But guess what? That’s not what happened at all. What had actually happened was that I run a Facebook ad and periodically turn it off for a week or so to let it cool off. I never remember seeing this part in the explanation before but Facebook has added, in parentheses, the following little tidbit to their explanation of what the “Weekly Total Reach” is: (including any Ads or Sponsored Stories pointing to your Page). What? How is that information of any use to me now? I can view stats for my Ads on the advertising page and can see how many impressions my Ads are getting so why would I want that data included in a stat that could have some real value to me; telling me how many people my content was reaching?

To be fair, this isn’t the only way you can view this particular metric, but it is the one big graphic that greets you when you first visit your Insights. So, if you run paid advertising on Facebook, don’t do what I did and assume this stat represents your actual reach. To find that information click “Reach” in the sidebar and then deselect “Paid” and “Total” in the “Reach” graph, as shown below.