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.
Offbeat Bride Facebook survey results
I’ve talked a LOT about my conflicted feelings about Facebook, but things have changed over the course of this year as I’ve been shifting my thinking about recency vs relevancy. Also, the recent performance of Offbeat Families’ Facebook page has pretty much blown my mind. Moral of the story: my contentious publisher relationship with Facebook is shifting, and I conducted this survey to help me confirm some hunches.
Is social media sharing the new commenting?
As a publisher, I’ve always prioritized toward comments because it’s content that I “own.” Yeah, someone else wrote it, but I own the pageviews (and the related ad sales)… and in exchange, I bear the responsibility of keeping those conversations in-line with my brand. Hence, our stringent commenting policies because I believe VERY strongly that if your website’s full of assholes, it’s your fault.
That said, it’s started to sink in that readers aren’t coming back to blog comments… and really, social media shares are more valuable for me anyway. Here’s why…
See it, click it: the follow up
This post I wrote six months ago may be the most important thing I’ve written all year. After we stopped publishing new posts on Offbeat Families in September. Then traffic and revenue then went UP… and it’s all because of shares on Facebook. Content recency is OUT. Content relevancy is IN.