Companies set up Facebook Pages to market themselves. But until now, they’ve only had fairly blunt instruments–like the number of Likes–to measure how well they’re doing. Now Facebook is releasing a new set of tools that the social network says will give marketers better insights into how well their Pages are reaching Facebook users–and ultimately make those Pages more useful to brands.

Among the tools Facebook is releasing today in conjunction with New York’s annual Advertising Week are a new dashboard to measure the reach of individual Page posts, an API to allow third-party agencies build their own tools on top of this new Facebook data, and a new ad unit that allows companies to create ads out of their Page posts.

The tools reflect the company’s increasing emphasis on driving sharing among users–an area of focus CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced this summer, saying that the company now views the amount that people share on Facebook as a stronger indication of the value of the network than the previous metric, which simply measured the total number of users.

“With the new Page Insights, Facebook is emphasizing the importance of sharing on Pages, because this increases a brand’s reach,” the company said in a press release.

The new dashboard, called Insights (pictured, right), appears as a tab on the company’s Page and is only available to adminstrators of the Page. The Insights tab lists the Page’s total number of fans (“Total Likes”) and the total number of other people reached via those fans (“Friends of Fans”). It also offers a ticker to show whether those numbers are going up or down.

With the Insights tab, Facebook is launching a new metric: “People Talking About This,” which doesn’t just measure how much people are talking about the Page in the conventional sense (such as a user commenting on a post on the brand’s Page). It also includes all the activities that Facebook considers a “conversation”–things that indicate a user is in some way engaged with the brand.