Todd Wasserman (from Mashable)

But just as marketers are feeling the pressure to boost engagement, Facebook is raising the stakes. In early October, the social networking giant introduced some new engagement metrics including People Talking About This. As the name suggests, PTAT (also known as just “Talking About This”) measures user-initiated activities, like posting to a Page’s wall, liking, commenting, sharing a Page post or content on a Page, answering a Question posed to fans mentioning a Page, liking or sharing a deal or checking in at your Place.

For Electronic Arts, PTAT offered a new opportunity to try some stuff out and see if it actually boosted engagement. More than three months on, the video game giant’s Madden and Battlefield 3 Facebook Pages posted PTAT rates of 30% and even 44%. Is that good? Apparently, given the PTAT rates of other brands like Angry Birds (15%) and Coca-Cola (5%). (FanPageList tracks the brand sites with the overall highest engagements, but doesn’t rank them by engagement rates. The rates are very dynamic and are constantly updated.)

Chris Thorne, senior director of marketing at EA, is clearly jazzed by the brand’s PTAT score and says the higher engagement has led to a boost in sales as well, though he declined to discuss that topic further. But Thorne didn’t mind talking about tips and tricks that EA used to get those PTAT numbers so high — below are some lessons EA learned from PTAT.

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