Facebook & it's New Metric Demystification

Do you  ever wondered why you can have 500 odd friends on Facebook friends list, yet only 15-20 show up in your news feed..? It’s not that those other friends have stopped using Facebook; chances are they’re still there. It’s just that they aren’t showing up in your news feed.

If you haven’t noticed, there are now two settings on your Facebook news feed: “Most Recent” which shows most of the content published by your Facebook friends in chronological order and “Top News” which filters content based on EdgeRank.

Edge Rank is the new metrics which Facebook has recently unveiled that allows us to monitor Shares and Clicks. Shares are a very important aspect of EdgeRank. You may not realize it, but News Feed only displays a subset of the stories generated by your friends — if it displayed everything, there’s a good chance you’d be overwhelmed. Developers are always trying to make sure their sites and apps are publishing stories that make the cut, which has led to the concept of “News Feed Optimization”, and their success is dictated by EdgeRank.

Facebook looks at everything published as “objects.” These can be status updates, links, photos, video or anything else that can be shared on Facebook. Every object receives a ranking (EdgeRank), which determines if it will show in your personal newsfeed. Objects with a high EdgeRank appear in your “Top News” feed. Objects with a low EdgeRank will not.

Let’s take a closer look at the three factors that determine EdgeRank.

News Feed Optimization (NFO),

EdgeRank = ∑u_e w_e d_e

u_e = Affinity score between the Viewing User and the Edge Creator.

w_e = Weight of this Edge type (Likes, Comments, tag etc..,)

d_e = Time Decay Factor based on how long ago the edge was created.

Affinity is dependent on a user’s relationship with an object in the news feed.

Weight is determined by the type of object, such as a photo/video/link/etc.

Time Decay, as an object gets older, the lower the value.

So how will you get High EdgeRank Score..????

Here we go the following lists factors that determine ranking of items in news feeds or could influence news feed ranking on Facebook.

ELEMENT	TOPIC	Description
Fresh news and activities	Recency	Recency of activity (news, tags, comments, likes, link clicks.
The type of content	Content	Status updates, photos, videos, comments
Who has published the content item	Author	It may be a person, a page, a group, an application. Each will have its own authority and affinity.
Comments from friends	Engagement (EDGE)	The greater the number of comments from friends, the more likely that a story will appear.
Likes	Engagement (EDGE)	Counts could be used, particularly those made recently, possibly calibrated on the basis of the authority of who has done the liking and / or the rate of liking.
Clicks on links, if present	Engagement (EDGE)	Facebook tracks all links to external sites. It is easy to imagine that this data is used as news feed item ranking signal.
Personal Behavior history	Engagement (EDGE)	A user has historically shown greater interest in news by a certain author or of a certain type.

Something else you should know about is the lifecycle of Facebook “news”. No piece of news will last forever. Unlike ranking on Google where you have an unlimited life span, Facebook news is sort of limiting. As users constantly update their profiles and post new content, it has to be seen. Pretty much all Facebook content is displayed in the news feed. There is just no way of keeping yourself “in the news”. However, you can definitely increase the life span of a certain piece of news which you would like to have by simply using the factors above and by Engagement especially which I explained above.

In my next post will dicuss few more on the stuff required to attain high EgdeRank and factors need to do in Optimizing our NFO (News Feed Optimization).

Your suggestions and feedback are most welcome...!!!!

Social Media Marketing

Impact of Social Media Marketing

As social media has grown in functionality and reach over the years, it has changed the ways brands interact with their audience of current and potential consumers.

Impact of Social Media




Go through the below Presentation to have a brief on the Transformation that Social Media has produced as the Generation Goes on...

Transformational Impact of Social Media

View more presentations from Steve MacLaughlin

The Evolution of Social Media

A dozen or so years ago when the internet was just beginning to gain a foothold in our culture, forward-thinking businesses established their online presence in a world where they had a high degree of control over their message. Interactivity and conversations were limited to putting an email link or a contact form on your website;  comments systems, feedback, and reviews were nearly nonexistent, and “going viral” meant emails with subject lines like “Fwd: fwd: fwd: fwd: fwd: You have to see this!”  Early forums and BBS were used by only a tiny fraction of the internet-connected population and search engines were slow and inefficient, so there was very little interference in business-to-consumer communications.

MetaFilter was probably the first true social media site, but with the very small demographic of sophisticated early adopters, getting a marketing message on the site was nearly impossible. There was a very low tolerance for any type of promotional activity, and the community would ruthlessly go after any appearance of commercial intent. This is still true on many strictly social media sites; content must pass a fairly stringent test of ‘interestingness’ in order to rise to the top. Social media marketing takes place in a democratic environment that has shifted the power over last decade from the company to the individual, and smart businesses have adapted to this model and learned to take advantage of the system without relying too much on ‘gaming the system’ which often has very negative results. To prosper in the social media universe, a brand must find ways to offer value along with their message in order to gain the number of up-votes, likes, or shares it takes to rise to the top.

Whether or Not Use Social Media, it has changed your Business

Social media, and social networking, have changed the business landscape, both for companies that have adopted them and for those who have not.  By definition, social media is where members share content with a wide audience, with the focus on the content, while social networking is more centered on conversations and groups with shared interests.  Facebook, which straddles the line dividing the two types of interactions, has 600,000 regular users worldwide and welcomes companies, organizations, and brands to utilize its platform to connect with their audience.

Almost all social networks have incorporated a measure of social media, allowing users to become curators of the interesting content they find, sharing links, images, and short personal stories. Businesses who have learned to create content and engage in conversations are already ‘in the stream’ – and more and more, internet users have the expectation they will be able to interact with their favorite brands. Companies that have embraced this have an ever-growing advantage over those who have not.

Why Social Media..???

The Internet users now visit a social network site at least once a month. Lets see some stats how necesserily Socila media is turned out. Social networking and media sites accounted for 12% of all time spent online in 2010 with the average user spending 4.5 hours on these sites. Globally, social networking accounts for 15.6 percent of online time among those age 15 and older.  

Web-based email usage has decreased in every age group except those 55 and older, as more and more communication takes place on the various social websites. The sharp increases in web email usage in the over 55 demographic is accompanied by a similar increase in their usage of social sites; the fastest-growing demographic on Facebook is women 55 and older. Social media is here to stay, and chances are, your customer or client base is already spending a significant amount of time there.

Web Analytics & SEO - Go Hand-in-Hand

I this post I will be covering the correlation that SEO and Web Analytics seeeks and how important it is in the field of Business.

The World Wide Web is the home for millions of online businesses that compete against each other for top Search Engine Optimization (SEO) page renks. So What sets your businesses apart from your compettitors.? and what will attract the users to visit your website or Search engine to rank your site at the top.?. Before planning your SEO Campaign yu should have a fair idea of your targeted audience and how they navigate thrpugh the Web - i.e Web Analytics. By Aligining your web site to improve your user experience as a result of Web Analytics, you'll increase the SEO ranking.

If you want to see successful return from SEO, then you'll nedd to step back and consider the construction design of your website as the starting point. Web analytics is all about understanding the user behavior over a website, which gives the insight into how the further enhancement for your site to improve the user experience. Web Analytics keeps track of all the user actions over the web site. From this records a quantitative report is being compiled providing the Web site performance, which inturn your website can be improved, in turn a boost for SEO.

In short, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of constructing your site's architecture and using relevant keywords within your content to ensure that your site shows up high in search results for those keywords.

Web analytics is basically a collection of the statistics for your site, such as how many unique visitors, location of visitors, type of browsers they are using, etc. Interestingly, Web analytics can be used to view what keywords are being used by visitors to come to your site, so analytics are often used to determine which keywords you will be optimizing for.

 Most of them thinking that once website being listed at the top in the natural seach list the job is done no need analytics. But the foremost thing is that once you've optimized (SEOed) your website, you go back to analytics and look at what's working and what's there to optimize further.

You need to remember that SEO is a journey, not a destination. This means that you'll have to continuously use your web analytic tools to analyze your site and fine tune your SEO strategy. It's an ongoing task that you should turn into a structured process t ensure you get good results out of it.

Hope this post tells all about the hand-in-hand correlation of Web Analytics and SEO...