beautiful bytes – Some frickin’ good ideas

Facebook Page analytics after the newsfeed changes

According to EdgeRank Checker, after Facebook’s recent changes to the news feed, Pages are receiving 21% more comments and 9% more Likes but 25% fewer impressions per post, published by InsideFacebook.

Facebook redesigned the home page to merge the Top News and Most Recent feeds into a single hybrid news feed in September. We’ve posted before that this could be an effort from Facebook to get Pages to create quality content, rather than at a high quantity – and these results confirm this.

The drop in user impressions could be that people are scrolling through less of the news feed because they more quickly find engaging updates thanks to the new design (the hybrid news feed favours posts published recently and that have received a lot of feedback). Also, EdgeRank Checker believes the redesign and improvements to the news feed sorting algorithm have made Facebook’s EdgeRank more focused. This means that more compelling updates are receiving higher visibility than ever before.

More Insightful

Facebook have also altered the way that we can measure user engagement. We mentioned two weeks ago that Facebook added the public ‘people talking about’ measurement which considers every level of interaction Likers have with the Page. It has now also added the following new private Insights to help you understand if and how your users are engaging with you, what’s effective and, vitally, what is not working.

’Virality‘ tells you the number of unique people who have shared your story as a percentage of the number of people who have seen it. This will be particularly useful for charities campaigning and awareness raising, allowing you to see how many people are acting on your asks compared to the amount of people who have seen it.
‘Reach‘ is simply the amount of unique people who have seen your post. This will allow you to better time your stories, optimising them at a time when your audience is most likely to be online.
‘Engaged users‘ is a simple but important new measurement which tells you how many people have clicked anywhere on your post – whether it’s to ‘see more’, Like or comment. This will tell you, not how many people have seen your post, but how many have interacted with it at the most basic level and thus a better indication of whether they have actually read the post.

Green on Facebook

Facebook has just announced that it will partner with Opower and the US National Resources Defense Council to launch a new energy efficiency Facebook app in 2012. Users of the app will log into a US network to share their energy usage with other homes around the country. According to inhabitat, they will then be able compare their energy consumption with peers, share tips to decrease power use, and participate in online contests that encourage energy efficiency. The interesting thing about this app is that you can opt-in for it to update your household energy use automatically. This will be a huge breakthrough for Facebook and is yet another signal that we are centralising our internet use around the network as its usership is so wide and significant.

Whilst it’s a great new use of technology, it may create some more privacy issues around Facebook. It’s a useful and interesting new way to share energy saving tips and pressure people into changing bad habits but will people be so willing to feed the data hungry network any more of their most personal information?

And Finally …

A frickin’ good idea from those mother lovers at UNICEF.

SwearJar is a Twitter app, in which you can pledge to donate £1 to the charity everytime you use a swear word in your 140 character posts. So if your Twitter syntax is littered with profanities, you can connect SwearJar to your account and it will add up all of the swear words you say and at the end of each week, tweet you a link to pay up.

According to the site, its reasons for doing this are:

Because swearing is frigging funny.
Because swearing is something people do on Twitter.
Because it’s a little bit controversial, and so will draw attention to the issue.

The app has got great share appeal; it’s easy to understand, for a widely recognised cause and also funny and relevant to people who use Twitter. It’s a great example of a charity campaign that is appropriate to the medium it is using. I can imagine a lot of people sending it to their most foul mouthed friends and colleagues for a laugh. However, owing to its simplicity, SwearJar relies heavily on people already having knowledge on Africa’s famine and the work of UNICEF, as the focus is more on the fun of the campaign than where the money goes and why.

For those with a few extra quid, there is also the dedicated hashtag #fuckfamine you can use each time you tweet to donate lots more money UNICEF.

Its irreverence is also backed up by a logical loophole. There are other words that equal a £1 pledge if your network isn’t ready to hear a slew of anglo saxonsisms from you – much like swear words they are compulsive words that you use without thinking of a more eloquent synonym and are often quite offensive – words like “awesome”, “synergy” and “epic”.

What a bloody good concept.

Lucy J