As they do every Tuesday, Facebook made some code changes…resulting in this. They took away the “percent reach” that has been displayed on each post on your fan page, and they now show you the exact number of organic views and viral views.

Here’s my best guess – Organic views will be how many times it showed up in feeds, and viral views will be the views that it gets from people sharing and liking, and showing up in non-fan news feeds. And when it shows up in non-fan news feeds…what does that mean? Viral growth. The non-fans will be intrigued by what’s showing up in their news feed and click on your page’s link…and quite possibly become a new fan!  There is no question that the $5 Dinners fan page sees a little boost in growth when posts (like the one above), go viral.

Other changes in mobile reach data…

It also seems that mobile reach data is now included with the desktop data, although I don’t see any differentiation in numbers in the admin panel, or after exporting my insights data. Perhaps that’s coming with next Tuesday’s code changes?

Also, changes in the way they load stories into newsfeeds...

“And Facebook added that it will load new stories quickly, eliminating interruption in how users scroll through their news feeds. The social network said reach may be affected in insights, but the way users see the stories will be unchanged.” -AllFacebook

“To improve speed, we’re changing the way posts load in news feed. This means we’ll count views of your posts when they’re higher up in news feed.” – from Facebook

At the end of the day, as a small business owner with a small Facebook fan page, I’m more interested in getting more views in fans’ news feeds. This is a complicated formula with many factors, but I’m hoping that this new “organic” vs. “viral,” and mobile reach information can tell us more about what kind of content works, what time of day works, and what doesn’t work.

How will you use these new changes from Facebook to your advantage?