Of shoes and Facebook: Are you smarter than an algorithm?
Offbeat Bride’s Facebook page posts as many as 10 times a day (including these ridiculous SHOES AT 2 shoe posts I’ve started doing), but you only see all those posts if Facebook understands that you WANT to see all those posts. If you consistently ignore them? You see maybe only 1 post a day, or none. In other words: Facebook’s algorithms are smarter than we could ever be.
…And they’re getting smarter.
FUCK YEAH, April Fools
In years past, we’ve done whole elaborate April Fools schemes with posts laser-targeted to freak out (and yes, enrage) our readers. This year, we’re going so subtle that some of you may not even notice. Just a tiny little text change that only the most engaged of our readers will even notice. …Find it yet?
Offbeat Families traffic 6 months later: it’s all about scandal, sex, and sadness
Here are the site analytics for Offbeat Families, six months after we ceased publication. This traffic is mostly Facebook-driven, and the sad truth is that the posts that seem to do best over there are always the most Jerry Springer-ish…
Favorite comments: altered jeans & duct-taped babies
Another week, another wave of hilarious, insightful, fabulous commenting across the Offbeat Empire blogs. In this morning’s staff video conference, we discussed how one of the upsides of the shift toward people being too lazy to comment anywhere except Facebook is that the quality of blog comments on our posts has generally shifted upward. For the most part, folks who want to snark or leave a crappy drive-by comment are too lazy to click through to the post, type their names and email, and then type their comment. The snarkers seem be self-selecting to stay on Facebook, which is fine by us. The result is that the folks who ARE invested in the comment communities on the Offbeat Empire sites have a (generally) safe haven to have (generally) valuable conversations. It’s honestly kind of amazing.
So gather close, my little offbeatlings, as I run through a selection of the Empire staff’s favorite comments this week.