Why Liking Your Own Facebook Status Makes No Sense

It’s not exactly cool to like your own Facebook status nor to give yourself a high-five in public but for those hating on them self-likers on Facebook, there might actually be a reason why they’re doing it – they want to increase their Facebook EdgeRank Score!

I know there’s a recent update where you’re now able to sort your Facebook stories either by Highlighted stories (this is where you’ll be showing up if you have a high EdgeRank score) or by Most Recent, but this really doesn’t change a lot of things because I know a lot of people who haven’t changed this setting, or know that it even exists.

 

1. Affinity 

I like George Clooney, and if I were friends with him on Facebook I’d probably like most (not all because I plan on not being too creepy) of his posts, poke him and write comments on all his status messages and photos. Maybe I’ll even tag him in my pictures or notes or comments to my friends. I’m doing this, of course, so he’ll notice me.

 

BUT, with Facebook’s affinity score, just because I’m doing all these creepy things on George’s Facebook account, doesn’t mean my posts will show up on his newsfeed. All of his posts, tags, or whatever else he does on Facebook though, I’ll see. Oh the heartbreak.

 
See, on Facebook, we all get affinity scores from our friends while they get affinity scores from us. Think of it as a grading system and the test is interacting on Facebook. I’m giving George Clooney a high affinity score of course because I keep liking and commenting on all his shee. Unfortunately, he’s ignoring me which means he’s giving me a really really low score which is why whatever I post on Facebook won’t show up on his newsfeed.
 
And since there are probably a lot of people like me trying to stalk him on Facebook, he will definitely show up on their newsfeeds and possibly on other people too even though they didn’t interact with him. This is what makes him popular on Facebook.
 
That person you’ve been stalking on Facebook? He’ll keep showing up on your newsfeed.
 
To increase your affinity score, whether for a Facebook fan page or for your own account, you need to make sure that people interact with you. That they write on your wall, comment on your statuses, send you private messages, etc.

 

2. Weight

Your Facebook posts are basically objects that has its own weight. With Facebook, if it’s a video, a picture or a link, it adds more “weight.” According to the Facebook experts, photos, videos, and links weigh more than your typical status message with Facebook app updates having the least weight.

 

3. Time or Age

This is the easiest. Newer posts will score higher. The older your post is, the less relevant it is and the less interaction it will get. Bam. So keep posting! For brands, I’ve seen it work better if you post every other day with once every day as your limit. For personal profiles, I find that they show up more if they post a lot and that’s not fun if you’re being flooded by rants or lookbook pictures of themselves. The good news is, if you don’t like what you’re seeing, you know you can always de-clutter and unsubscribe.

There you have it kids! Affinity Score + Weight + Time = EdgeRank Score!
 
As for the friend liking her own post to increase her EdgeRank score, she helped add some weight to her post, plus her affinity score from herself just increased!
 
If you want to read more on this, head on over to http://edgerankchecker.com.

What is this new Facebook Page metric called “People Talking About”?

Facebook just released three new metrics to add to your Facebook Page Insights just last week. The other 2 metrics are just different versions of what the old Facebook analytics had – Likes and Reach (in the old version it was Weekly/Monthly Likes and Interactions)
 
The newest one that’s being talked about is called “People Talking About.”
 
Here’s how the old Facebook Insights page used to look like:



 
When I read an article about this on Mashable, I was sure they weren’t going to use “People Talking About” as the final product feature name. I mean, what is that?! Why not use something like “Brand Activity” or something?! At least use a noun. But I digress.

So what does this People Talking About have?
 
It measures ‘stories’ generated by your Facebook page’s post. It includes:

1. Post Likes
2. Number of Post Shares
3. Post Comments
4. Number of Answers to Your Question
5. Event RSVPs

Here’s how it looks like on our other brand page:

A note to HootSuite users: You’re supposed to see the pink dots on dates where your page posted but I didn’t see any on ours. My guess is that this is because we didn’t post using Facebook directly. Interestingly, we had one post on the 2nd of October which was a Facebook Question (meaning we didn’t use HootSuite) but obviously, it still didn’t show up in there. Not sure what happened. (I’ll post again if I see any changes on our Insights page.)

I don’t know if I’m blind but I can’t seem to find the Engaged Users and Talking About This graph that Facebook included in their Insights document. It’s supposed to look like this:



If you’re able to see this on your Insights page, please let me know where you found it.
 
What’s good about this new set of metrics is that you get to drill down on where your most active Facebook fans are from. You also get to find out if they like answering your questions more than commenting on your posts or even analyze which type of content is most likely to be shared.
 
AND you find out that no matter how annoying the Ticker was (I’m used to it now), it actually helps your Facebook page. But I’m pretty sure you already knew that. Check out our Like sources:



I wish they broke it down even more though. I want to see which Facebook Likes are directly from our Page, from the News Feed or from the Ticker.
 
Overall this is good news. The weekly Active Users and New Likes didn’t really help much and I’m happy Facebook is offering even more detailed analytics.  
 
….Except for this one bit of change they’re going to make. Facebook will soon be getting rid of the Reviews tab.
 
This does not make me happy because we now have a lot of reviews and they’re all 5 stars (fine, maybe 99%)! We’ve had this tab up since 2009 and I cherish this section of our page just because it’s so hard to get people started on writing reviews.
 
Since the brand we handle does not have a physical location, I’m not sure our Facebook fans will even get a chance to write a recommendation for us.
 
This is sad news. So if you have a lot of reviews on Facebook (using the Reviews tab of course), I suggest you save them now for future reference… and for sentimental reasons.
 
For Facebook Page owners and admins, you can try out this new Insights page by going to http://www.facebook.com/insights/ and clicking the link up top to view the new Facebook Page Insights.

The New Facebook Timeline

Yes yes, I’m one of the many people who pretended to be a Facebook developer just to see how this new timeline feature looks like. After reading about it on almost every single tech blog after the f8 conference, and seeing the video for it, I decided that testing out the new Facebook Timeline should be on my to-do list. Surprisingly, it was really easy to do!

If you haven’t tried it out yet, head on over to Mashable’s how-to blog post. It’s pretty straightforward and the process is not complicated at all.

Now that Facebook has their own ‘timeline’, I wonder how this will affect Twitter’s version of it?

See, the word ‘timeline’ used to be just for Twitter even though some people claim it’s a ‘Twitter thread’ (I don’t know why when it doesn’t look anything like a forum) while some call it ‘Twitter stream’ (which makes more sense). But still, most people who really use Twitter should know that it’s called a timeline.

Facebook on the other hand, takes ‘timeline’ to the next level mainly because theirs is the real thing. It’s literally a timeline. Your posts, photos and wall posts are organized by month, year and even from when you were born! With Twitter? It’s just a tweet stream that disappears eventually depending if you’ve been archiving them.

While it may look complicated during the first 2 seconds you see it, it’s really not. In fact, the design is clean and… I hate to say this, but it actually looks nice. Timeline makes more sense than how the old Facebook profile page looks like… IF you like looking back at your old posts or photos.

The design also encourages users to add old photos or even places you’ve been to. Check this out, you can even add your life events – with surgery and breaking a bone already added in there!

Some may want to make full use of this and have their ‘lifebook’ open for all their friends to see but I know a bunch who just want to put the past behind and forget that they even wore elephant jeans when they were in high school or that they actually dyed their hair blue in college. It’s a good memory bank but not everyone wants other people to see that!

My aunties, uncles and parents will probably like this because this gives them a chance to show the world that they actually used to be skinny or that at one point, they also used to have hair. (Now if only they can figure out how to use it.)

The Facebook timeline is cool but I don’t think I’ll be adding old pictures to complete my very own lifebook. I’m happy using Facebook to share links, some pictures and to talk to my friends and family. I don’t think I’m the real target demographic for this release.

You have to think, “Why are they suddenly asking me to add details of my entire life on Facebook?”

Is it because they just want you to tell your life story so you can express who you are to your friends? Or is it because they want you to live on Facebook so that they will have more chances of serving Facebook ads to you and make more money from it?

Remember, Facebook is expected to IPO late next year so these changes are intended not just to increase users’ time on Facebook but to add more ways to serve even more targeted ads.

If you’re interested in how this works, check out what they released just a month ago: Facebook Ad Targeting by Topic.