(2012-10-26) Facebook Edgerank Filtering Vs Brands

Richard Metzger is angry that FaceBook's Edge Rank filtering means that his posts get seen by only a portion of his followers/likers. Why is it that our pageviews—our actual inventory, what we sell to advertisers—coming from Facebook shares are off by half to two thirds when the number of new “likes” has risen so dramatically during this same time period?!?!

Ryan Holiday made the same complaint back in September. Facebook acknowledged it as recently as last week: messages now reach, on average, just 15 percent of an account’s fans. In a wonderful coincidence, Facebook has rolled out a solution for this problem: Pay them for better access. As their advertising head, Gokul Rajaram, explained, if you want to speak to the other 80 to 85 percent of people who signed up to hear from you, “sponsoring posts is important.”

• I'd like to hear more about the hit-rate. I'd assume it's highly dependent on the number of people/pages being followed by a given reader (so if they only follow 1, they get 100% of that flow).

Nov08 update: George Takei is also angry. I am curious as to why interactivity rates on my page appear to fluctuate so much when I have done nothing different. I have not been pressured to use Promoted Pages [Advertising], but I have had to take active steps to get fans to add my page to their ‘Interests’ so that it has a higher likelihood of appearing in their newsfeed.

Robert Scoble sides with FaceBook, as he sees Edge Rank as serving the reader who would otherwise miss most of what goes through their firehose. The Contextual Age means we’re going to have to go to war on noise.

Personally, I'd rather get the firehose and have my own Universal Inbox make filtering (Personalization) decisions for me.

Nov13 update: Mark Cuban is moving his businesses away from FaceBook toward Twitter, TumblR, etc. If someone likes your brand, it seems like common sense to me that you can expect your posts to reach 100% of those that like your brand... We won't abandon Facebook, we will still use it, but our priority is to add followers that our brands can reach on non-Facebook platforms first.

• If I were a BigCo Marketing VP who's been putting my FaceBook URL at the bottom of my Off-Line Advertising, I'd be worried about my job.
• Nov19: Dave Winer notes that jumping into yet another Walled Garden is a foolish response. We need to use the Internet itself as Social Media. Then you won't have to worry about Facebook putting their finger on the scale. Let's create the software you need to license. You can run it on your own servers, or let's start a company to run the service for media companies like the Dallas Mavericks and the NBA.

Dalton Caldwell thinks they're doing the right thing. If you only log into Facebook once every few days, the optimizer will go back over that timespan and show you the most interesting content it can during those few days... We depend on the newsfeed optimizer to protect our limited attention span, and as a consequence, Facebook gets to choose what stories we do and don’t see, just as Google chooses which search results we do and don’t see. Mostly he likes how it solves FaceBook's revenue problem, esp around mobile: Bringing earnings expectations into this, the key to Facebook “fixing” their mobile advertising problem is not to create a new ad-unit that performs better on mobile. Rather, it is for them to sell the placement of stories in the omnipresent single column newsfeed. If they are able to nail end-to-end promoted stories system, then their current monetization issues on mobile disappear.

• He sees Twitter going the same way. What is post-pivot Twitter supposed to look like? The best way to consume “news and information”.
• Marc Canter thinks: What’s really depressing is that young turks like Dalton Caldwell don’t see anything wrong with this interpretation of the attention economy. They think it’s perfectly fine to have Facebook’s paywall charge brands to sneakily insert ads, which look like stories into user’s activity streams. This is because these people don’t really believe in the free and open web.
  • There's some discussion of Marc's point on this gloss.

Dave Winer relates this to how he sees Twitter becomes a News Big Media player.