This week Facebook will be unveiling a new ad unit and insights tool to help brands communicate better with users according to a report on Ad Age.  A spokeswoman for the company told the publication that the new “premium offering” unit will be slightly bigger than typical advertisements and will be incorporated into social context similar to sponsored stories.  It will appear on the right side of a user’s home page with no other ads present.  Facebook recently provided an example using the upcoming movie “The Ides of March:”

Notice to the right of the figure where it displays the number of people who have “liked” the film.  Their goal is to make larger brands more social on Facebook.

The new Insights Tool is designed to let Facebook fan page administrators see more about their pages than just impressions and “Likes.”  Four metrics will be displayed at top of the page:

• Total Likes (currently existing)
• Friends of Fans (displays current social reach of a brand’s content)
• People Talking About This (the number of users who engaged with a page’s content in the past week)
• Weekly Total Reach (the total number of Facebook users who have been exposed to both a brand’s organically shared content and its paid media)

The “People Talking About” metric will also be viewable to any Facebook user who visits a fan page, published below the number of page likes.

The 500 most recent posts will also be listed in the Insights with four metrics:

• Reach (total audience)
• Engaged Users (the number of users who took action on a post)
• Talking About This (users who took more action by liking, commenting, or sharing)
• Virality (talking about this divided by reach)

The new Insights Tool will be rolled out sometime this week as a preview but will remain opt-in (invite) only for some period of time.  Below is a screen capture of the tool from Ad Age: