Facebook statistics and a mid-season clip-show OR Obligatory self-promotional ramblings

I know that some of you follow the updates of this blog on facebook (by the way, I don’t ever capitalize facebook – the fact that it’s capitalized in the title is because of title formatting, nothing else), as I’ve had several of you mention that you missed a post because you didn’t see it pop up in your news feed (or live feed, or news live feed, or timeline, or timeline feed, or timeline news feed, or livetime news feed, or linetime livefeed news ticker, or wall).  

If you’ve never had a ‘non-regular’ page on facebook, you might not have a good feel for the statistics that get put out on my end when I go and look at it. 

By the way, before we go too much further I should say that the page in question is here:

https://www.facebook.com/TheSkepticalStatistician

though even in a post specifically about it I’m remiss not to mention that I actually hate the facebook ‘like’ pages process and a lot of how it’s utilized.  That said, if you want to use facebook as a means of keeping up with things, then go for it.  If you have your own qualms about it – as I do – well, there are other (potentially better) ways.  I don’t ‘dislike’ you for not ‘like’ing the page. 

I’m sorry, this post isn’t supposed to be facebook bashing, it’s supposed to be talking about the stats that facebook gives me about your actions.  So let’s start with a picture and go from there:

  

So one of the big things that I can see whenever I post something through the facebook page is how many people have ‘seen’ that post.  You can ‘see’ it in this image, though don’t stare at it too long waiting for it to go up – it’s just a picture.  See, you’re not really ‘seeing’ it.  Facebook knows when you ‘see’ things, unless you’re ‘seeing’ it some other way.  Well, at least at the moment.  They’re probably ‘working’ on that.

I’m not sure exactly what facebook means by ‘see’ (or rather ‘saw’), but I would imagine that they’re assuming that if it comes across your screen then you’ve looked at it.  There are some parts of the internets that I’d advise browsing with your eyes closed, but facebook isn’t part of it (if you’re doing it right, at least).  

The number of people who ‘see’ any given post on facebook are actually quite interesting.  It’s fairly consistent with the number of people who ‘like’ the page, but it can be lower if the post doesn’t come across your wall, or higher if something happens that facebook measures with ‘virality’.  Unfortunately I don’t have an easy way to map the number of people who ‘like’d the page at any given time (I said easy), so it’s hard to show how those change over time.

Time of day of posting seems to have some impact, though I’m also not really going to sit around and do the math on that – and you know the kinds of things that I sit around doing math on.  I’m not looking to take advantage of you to that degree.

There are some other ‘admin’ tools that facebook gives me to look at things, which give a picture of some of the demographics of the people who like the page, etc.  Most of them are actually pretty stupid, but if you’re curious here’s what some of them look like:

The thing that should really stand out to you is the way that facebook markets to the people who are one step up the ‘commoditizing people’ scale (e.g. me).  You can see that there are 56 people who ‘like’ the facebook page, but the number that facebook wants to shove in my face is 22,835 – the number of friends that all of you have.  Fifty-eight to some factor. 

You may have noticed the ‘promote’ thing in earlier pictures – it’s because by throwing a little bit of money at facebook you can actually buy access to those 22,835 people.  That’s what facebook is trying to commoditize – and they’re doing it really well.

Yes, by liking this page you give me access to buy rights to your friends.  Re-read that.  Seriously, re-read that.  I’ll wait.

Now, I’m not a total jerk (and I’m also cheap) so I’m not going to do that.  But all of facebook’s stats make you feel bad if you don’t.  All of facebook’s methods are set up so that you do.

One of the ways they do this, (if all of you haven’t immediately un’like’d the page now that you’ve ‘seen’ how the sausage is made, so to speak) is through another thing you’ll notice that facebook talks about, which is ‘virality.’  This is how things are spreading away from just your ‘likes’ into other areas – friends of ‘friends’ and beyond.  Now, I’ve just told you that you can buy access to this network, and that I don’t.  So, how do I rely on ‘achieving’ ‘virality’?

Well, by ‘you’ telling other people about posts, and especially by you guys ‘sharing’ the posts that you like with your friends (so I don’t have to pay to just do it myself and actually share the posts that everyone hates).
The idea would be that your friends would then ‘share’ things with their friends, etc, etc.  Your friends are one step more away from me, and especially if you’re talking about their friends, well, I don’t know them, right? Let’s talk about your friends’ friends’ friends.  And after we’re done talking about them, let’s commoditize them.  Yeeeeeeeeeeeees.  Too early?  Okay, let’s continue.

In any case, I think the best information comes out of the number of views of posts and the actual page views from Blogger relating to any given post (which don’t take into account people who simply check the main page when it contains new content).  We can toss actual views of specific posts on a graph along with facebook ‘sees’ as well as more specific facebook ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ – this is what it looks like:

You can see that the Star Wars posts seemed to drive a somewhat lagged boost in views, and before you ask, yes I am working on the final post on the Star Wars stuff.

You can also see that the facebook stuff is pretty robustly indifferent to actual change.  No matter how many people ‘see’ or ‘like’ or ‘share’ or ‘view’ or ‘whatever’, it doesn’t seem to have much bearing on how many people actually view the post itself.  Throughput, if you will. 

There are other ways that people keep up with the blog, from what I’m told.  Some people have talked about RSS, and some have complained about it.  I think it works?  Blogger also lets you subscribe by email, but I’ve also never done it.  I guess it would be pretty nice, though.

Twitter is also always an option, as they seem to care a whole lot less about money than facebook does.  If you happen to have an account feel free to follow @skepticalstats – I’d talk more about it but twitter gives me a ton fewer (i.e. none) stats than facebook does.  Again, probably because I’m not elevated to a separate Twitter tier the same way I am in facebook. 

Before I started using facebook (and thus before I have stats on the above graph), I was using Twitter for this stuff and having some pretty good results – the fact that the graph is starting a little higher and trending down is because it was up pretty high from some of the The Price is Right posts that got spread a bit around Twitter.

But if you start using Twitter – whatever you do – don’t get @skepticalstats confused with @ellipticalcats.

Oh, and tell your friends, so that I don’t have to.