

You Are More Influential Than You Think You Are - jayshahtx
http://jayshah.me/blog/facebook-anayltics-you-are-more-influential-than-you-think-you-are

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satori99
I think his overall point is valid.

I am not a Facebook user, or a heavy user of any social networks or sites, but
several days ago I joined a 2nd level discussion on Reddit with a one sentence
post, and wiki url, about a shipwreck that was slightly relevant to the
discussion. I received about a dozen up-votes for this post.

After reading this article I went to Wikipedia to check their article view
stats. I was slightly surprised to see that on the day I posted, the page view
stats for the wiki article went from a usual 300 page views, to 1500 for that
day only.

So even though I did not create any new content, I did perhaps influence 1200
or so people to spend a little time thinking about a shipwreck that I was
thinking about, with a single sentence.

<http://stats.grok.se/en/latest/Batavia_%28ship%29>

edit: spelling

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yahelc
One thing you might not be accounting for is whether or not bit.ly is tracking
Facebook's crawlers as clicks, since Facebook will follow the bit.ly link, and
while bit.ly tries to exclude bots, who knows how successful it is.

You could test by posting a status with a bit.ly link where you're the only
one who has permission to view the status, and see if you get any clicks on
that link.

~~~
hayksaakian
presumably, each link would be crawled an equal number of times.

this seems like a constant rather than a variable.

~~~
yahelc
Maybe, but that's an untested assumption. AFAIK, Facebook's crawler behavior
is a black box. Who knows how often it recrawls? Or if there's even a constant
behavior?

Either way, from an experimental design perspective, leaving that assumption
untested is unwise.

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ilaksh
LOL. This guy has 1,176 Facebook 'Friends'. I have 24, and that is mainly
family. And I actually have logged in to Facebook a few times, although I
generally avoid it.

So yeah, no, I am not influential on Facebook.

Can anyone who actually has logged in to Facebook in the last year beat that?
24?

~~~
hkmurakami
I haven't read the article since I honestly don't care about trying to
manipulate my "influence", but I've seen friends with 1000+ facebook friends
who don't care in the slightest about personal branding and influence and
whatnot, so we certainly shouldn't equate "many Fb friends" as an indicator of
"slimeball" either (though I've seen those too)

~~~
seanlinehan
Perhaps you should have read the article. It has nothing to do with
manipulating your influence. At all.

~~~
hkmurakami
As a matter of fact, I'm not purporting that the OP has done so either. :)

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exratione
Clicks and views do not equate to influence; there's simply no meaningful
correspondence at all. You find this out pretty quickly if you're in the
business of advocacy for a cause, since there are metrics like donations,
membership, attendance, and other material contributions that you can look
over.

There are three responses: (a) find a way to make it look like clicks and
views are relevant (and there's a whole set of evangelists who are into that
form of self- and other forms of deception, and I believe they're all doing
the world a grave disfavor), or (b) look for other metrics, or (c) don't worry
about it and stick to the common wisdom regarding how to go about persuasion
and networking while being essentially decent about it.

~~~
gwern
Yes, 'influence' is perhaps a questionable term. If we rewrite it as
'attention' or 'judging you', then it becomes true and something worth
knowing: OP did not realize that ~80 people were clicking through to the
articles he was recommending (to grab one random number), and that could well
make him realize he was risking his reputation or angering people to an extent
he didn't appreciate before and that he should be more careful.

It's almost an obvious application of the '1% rule', but the nature of this
sort of thing is that it's hard to appreciate at a gut level until you
generate some data yourself. The imbalances between actual audience and
intuitively-observed audience is just too extreme.

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mpaula_oliveira
Talking regionally, I can say that Brazilians are heavy Facebook users, but it
is becoming more and more common that people just loose it and over-share, or
just totally forget the sense of usefulness. An increasing movement is people
leaving Facebook (or threatening to).

~~~
teamonkey
Interesting. I thought that Orkut was the dominant social network in Brazil?

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ivzar
The numbers can be even greater if you allow friends of friends to view your
posts.

I for one read this on HN and then saw it on one of my friend's Facebook
immediately after (you and I have 27 mutual friends apparently).

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cafard
Yesterday HN told me I was less beautiful than I think I am. Is this an
attempt to soothe my wounded vanity?

Edit: Pity if so, since I'm not on Facebook.

