Facebook changes and the brave new lie of Social Media Marketing

It's now Friday 9/23/11 and we've all been buzzing about recent and planned changes at Facebook.

I've been keenly watching as these changes affect me directly, but I'm also enthralled to see how Facebook will annoy people. Blah Blah Blah. We've beat that to death.

Well today a former co-worker posted a link to an interesting article about one proposed change. It is on slate.com and called "Not sharing is caring". Great read on how Facebook is going to take away the meaningfulness of you "share". While that is a travesty for the users of facebook, I mean think of it: Everything you do being shared by default. Where's the value in your vote, gone i tell you... gone. R.I.P. like button.


This change has a great impact for facebook and a not so great impact for Social Media Marketers though. But you can count your chickens on this for some time to come: The act of going viral just got a whole lot easier!

OR DID IT???????

Actually it has gotten only more difficult (to track that is). What has gotten easier is the appearance of going viral. For the forced share, for some time to come, will give a leg up to the impressions your content gets.

Let's digress for a moment. Impressions are a one sided metric that most people judge incorrectly. while we are all happy to get 14 million zillion impressions, it doesn't really tell us how many people were compelled to act on our content. See the difference (Thanks Vince!)

So in days of old, a share happened because a person liked your content enough to be compelled to share it. The impressions created under this model were a valuable vote.

In this brave new world an impression will happen because you have a catchy title or tagline. What a user does with that impression is less likely to be understood and calculated. The value of an already one sided metric has gone down immensely. anyways, hopefully you are following other metrics to make sure a potential follows through the funnel to the intended goal.

Now I'm sounding the alarm and it may not all go down this way, but seems to me that for a while anyways we'll have a whole lot of meaningless "Going Viral" going on!

Labels: facebook, like button, share, social media marketing, viral, zuckerberg

posted by Adam Signore @ 8:21 AM