Comments:"You Are More Influential Than You Think You Are — Jay Shah"
URL:http://jayshah.me/blog/facebook-anayltics-you-are-more-influential-than-you-think-you-are
Imagine yourself on a stage. A sizable audience comprised of all your peers sits quietly before you; co-workers, ex-girlfriends, and roommates are eagerly waiting for you to begin your act. The performance? Reading to them your Facebook status.
How large would you guess your audience is? How many people would need to be in that room to make you think twice before you click "Post"? 25? 50? I recently asked myself these same questions when I repeatedly saw people in my network post obscene statuses or sensitive photos. Did they realize how many people saw their activity?
Facebook "Stalking"
There's a large population of people interested in their own Facebook analytics. Remember Stalker Check, that app in 2009 that showed you your biggest stalkers? Of course, it was bogus but it still gained hundreds of thousands of users because people were desperate to know who viewed their profile the most. Unfortunately, Facebook guards its data very carefully and I have yet to come across a study that quantifies the number of people who view your profile, so I took my own stab at it.
Measuring Impressions
Getting a measurement on my profile's traffic was tricky. I couldn't install an app that would count views, so I needed people to interact with my profile somehow to indicate that they had viewed it. The most obvious method is to count the number of likes/comments on my activity, but only a small portion of people that view Facebook content actually like or comment on it. I needed a better way.
What if I used bitly to track the number of clicks I had on all my links? Think about how often you enlarge a picture or click on a link someone has posted without commenting on it. Pretty often, right? By using bitly, I could measure exactly how often one my posts was clicked on and if anything, it would understate the amount of people that saw my post, since not everyone who saw a post would click it.
I posted 18 articles over the period of a month that ranged in a variety of topics and observed how many times each article was clicked. I specifically chose to post articles that I thought were the most interesting/would generate the most traffic.