1. The ticker, which shares activity on the network with more emphasis on how recently it was published.
2. The news feed which appears to be relatively unchanged from before in that marketers need to get their users to share updates that can easily attract likes and comments for higher rank.
3. The Timeline — is probably the most difficult to break into. A third-party app would have to produce a news feed story that attracts enough engagement that it might count as the best update from a given month or year of a user’s life.

Looking strategically at the changes Facebook has made in the past few days, including the announcement of “GraphRank” at the Facebook F8 Conference today, there’re at least three practical implications for marketers trying to engage with users on Facebook moving forward:

Ticker – Low barriers to access

- but likely a lower clickthrough rate. Ticker was introduced last week and shows a live feed of user activity from across the web. Facebook vice president Mike Schroepfer said during a press question-and-answer session at the developer conference today that the company will continually to tweak the ticker for more engaging activity. So there is some filtering for engagement, but less than what would be seen on the news feed.

News Feed – High barriers to access

An item would need to have high EdgeRank (e.g. a user would see an item if the update itself attracted many likes or comments or if it was from a friend they often interact with on Facebook).>

Timeline – High barriers to access

Timeline is a new profile view that lets people see a visual history of a user’s life. To see something in Timeline, the news feed story would have to be the most engaging from a given month or year in a user’s life or they’d have to intentionally curate it into their Timeline.Or a user could add an application to their timeline, akin to what “Boxes” used to do in letting users feature applications on their profile page until it was removed last year.

Source: Inside Facebook

Update: Also be sure to read Will Timeline, Ticker, GraphRank Break Facebook Marketing? over on All Facebook.com

Facebook Timeline Introduction Video:

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Related posts:

• How Facebook’s EdgeRank Works
• Facebook Facts & Figures June 2010

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• Google Instant Unveiled

What’s changing?

Currently, Google Analytics ends a session when:

• More than 30 minutes have elapsed between pageviews for a single visitor.
• At the end of a day.
• When a visitor closes their browser.

If any of these events occur, then the next pageview from the visitor will start a new session.

In the new model, Google Analytics will end a session when:

• More than 30 minutes have elapsed between pageviews for a single visitor.
• At the end of a day.
• When any traffic source value for the user changes. Traffic source information includes: utm_source, utm_medium, utm_term, utm_content, utm_id, utm_campaign, and gclid.

As before, if any of these events occur, then the next pageview from the user will be the start of a new session.

Add annotation for this update in Google Analytics

This change only applies for visits going forward from today, and your historical data will not change.

Google is bringing the definition of session in line with the common definition of a visit. If a visitor leaves your site and returns soon after with a different traffic source value, each visit will be measured with its own session.

Since Google Analytics will start new sessions for all new campaign information, sessions will now have the more accurate attribution information.

Additionally, by continuing a session when the user closes their browser for only a very short time, sessions will more accurately model a user’s engagement with the website.

Overall, this change may slightly increase the number of visits. According to Google, based on their research, most users will see less than a 1% change.

Even so, you’d do well to add an annotation in Google Analytics for this change today.

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Facebook’s EdgeRank Formula

Σ u_e w_e d_e

• u_e – affinity score between viewing user and edge creator
• w_e – weight for this edge type (create, comment, like, tag, etc)
• d_e – time decay factor based on how long ago the edge was created

As the formula notes, Sigma, or EdgeRank, is composed of three primary components:

• Affinity
• Weight
• Time

What’s an “Edge”?

In order to provide a balanced equation, Facebook views all input as “objects.” Meaning, Status Updates, Pictures, Videos, Links, etc., these are all objects for Facebook to consider. For the purpose of defining what can be edged, these objects are all the same. Now that’s not to say that some objects won’t have a higher likelihood of becoming edged, but more on that in a minute.

Affinity

The more often you like, view, comment, click on a friend’s object, the higher your Affinity score towards this person rises. Likewise for brands, the more often you check in with Red Bull, either via commenting, liking a photo or two, etc., the more Red Bull-centric your News Feed will become.

It should be noted that according to The Daily Beast’s research, Affinity score is a one-way street only. Affinity is from one user towards another, and not vice versa. Meaning, even an army of Acme Toilet Cleaner Facebook marketers can not command more attention on the platform simply by clicking incessantly on fans’ items in order to gain more exposure.

Weight

When it comes to edges, Facebook places a great deal of importance on weight: The longer an end user engages or interacts with content, the better it is for Facebook. Thus, Facebook applies a Weight to each object to help determine the object’s overall EdgeRank.

While no clear-cut scientific data can support this claim, it would appear as though the hierarchy of Facebook EdgeRank importance is as follows:

1. Photo/Video
2. Links
3. Status updates

But it’s not just the posted content that factors into EdgeRank. Remember the Affinity score above? How many photos did you “Like” today? And how many images did you leave a comment on? And there we have it – the comments. Comments are the single most valuable factor in an object’s EdgeRank. The Facebook reasoning here is user engagement. Meaning, it takes much more effort on the end users’ part to type out a comment than to click a “Like” button.

Time

In order to remain up-to-the-minute relevant, Facebook employs a “freshness” factor to all edged objects. It’s this “freshness” factor that helps determine what and when you see it.

For example, major world news events always bring a massive spike of activity to Facebook, readjusting a wide variety of Affinity and Weight scores and receiving a large number of comments, likes, interaction, et cetera. But that doesn’t mean that this news should still remain at the top of your News feed weeks later. Again, Facebook’s Time factor ensures that Top News really is Top, and not “last weeks.”

Sources: TheNextWeb, TechCrunch

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Related posts:

• Facebook Facts & Figures June 2010

This new interface applies to both search results and related ads.

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People on Facebook:

• More than 500 million active Facebook users
• 50% of active users log on to Facebook in any given day
• Average Facebook user has 130 friends
• People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook

Activity on Facebook:

• There are over 900 million objects that people interact with via Facebook (pages, groups, events and community pages)
• Average user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events on Facebook
• Average Facebook user creates 90 pieces of content each month
• More than 30 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each month on Facebook.

Global Reach Facebook:

• More than 70 translations available on Facebook.com
• About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States
• Over 300,000 Facebook users helped translate the site through the translations application

Facebook Platform:

• Entrepreneurs and developers from more than 190 countries build with Facebook Platform
• People on Facebook install 20 million applications every day
• Every month, more than 250 million people engage with Facebook on external websites
• Since social plugins launched in April 2010, an average of 10,000 new websites integrate with Facebook every day
• More than 2.5 million websites have integrated with Facebook, including over 80 of comScore’s U.S. Top 100 websites and over half of comScore’s Global Top 100 websites

Facebook Mobile:

• There are more than 250 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
• People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice as active on Facebook than non-mobile users.
• There are more than 200 mobile operators in 60 countries working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products

Source: Facebook.com

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