More new Facebook data, continuing this series.

The next Facebook sharing data point I analyzed is the presence of numbers (in digit form, 1 through 9) in titles. In a wide range of marketing arenas digits have been shown to perform very well. They tend to help conversion rates in the form of prices and on social news sites like Digg “Top 10″ style posts have always done well.

The difference isn’t huge but according to my data, articles with digits in their titles tend to be shared more on Facebook than stories without digits. I found that most articles in my data set didn’t use numbers in their titles, and you can see the scale of difference in volumes in the gray bars…

When I started posting my new series of Facebook data points, one of the most requested graphs was the days of the week (and times of day, which is coming soon) that are best to publish on to get lots of Facebook shares. What I found when I looked at days of the week is at first a little unexpected, but upon further thought fairly logical.

While I found less articles posted on the weekends (notice the gray bars at the bottom of the graph which indicate volume of URLs analyzed for each day), those stories that were published on the weekends tended to be shared on Facebook more, on average, than stories that were published during the week. The reasons for…

Continuing my series of Facebook sharing data (if you’re curious about my methodology, read the first post), I looked at articles that had the word “video” in their titles.

It turns out that those stories that indicated they contained videos were shared more than the average story on Facebook, while they were actually shared less than the average story on Twitter. This is likely because the Facebook platform makes it easy to embed multimedia content into updates while Twitter does not.

The takeaway here? Facebook may be a better platform for your videos to go viral than Twitter.

And again, if you have any other datapoints you’d like to see, please let me know. I’m really excited about my new Facebook analysis capabilities…

A couple of weeks ago, I started collecting a new dataset and I’m really excited about it because it’s the first time I’m collecting data from the mother-of-all social media sites: Facebook.

I’ve begun by capturing links posted to social media sites from 10 extremely popular news outlets. Some of the top blogs, both mainstream and geeky, as well as a handful of the most web-enabled newspapers of record. Then I’m counting the number of times those links are shared on Facebook (in three different ways) and on Twitter (through good old ReTweets). I then find the average number of “shares” for links posted to each site and compare the individual stories to the average in percent form and then combine…

If you’ve read about social media or been to social media conferences, you’ve probably heard tons of advice like “love your customers,” “engage in the conversation,” “be yourself” and “make friends.”

I like to call this kind of stuff “unicorns and rainbows.” Sure, it sounds good and makes you feel all warm and fuzzy, but it’s not actually based on anything other than “truthiness” and guesswork.

It’s the modern day equivalent of the witchdoctor or snake oil salesman. A couple of time-honored adages repeated ad nauseum, coupled with the unquestioning awe of an unaware audience, and pretty soon you’ve got an entire industry made of easy-to-agree with smoke and mirrors.

Problem is, bleeding with leeches and magical tonics don’t actually work. In fact,…

Us vs them is one of the oldest, and most powerful marketing ideas. Apple is a quintessential example: from their beginnings they’ve portrayed themselves as the small guy against the big powerful bully. In 1983 it was IBM and more recently its been Microsoft. The company turns customers into evangelists who are more than happy to spread the word about the good fight, but how exactly does it work?

In a 1983 article titled “On Viral Sentences and Self-Replicating Structures” the author, Douglas R. Hofstadter recounts a letter he was sent in response to a previous peice. This letter describes self replicating (viral) sentences, beginning with the rudimentary:

It is your duty to convince others that this is true.

The letter writer notes the…

Most marketers know that to get someone to do what you want, you have to ask them to do it, you have to have a call-to-action (CTA) that persuades them to buy your product. With social media marketing, the action we’re aiming for is to get our readers to share our content with their friends and networks, so our CTAs must entice them to do just that. Here’s the 5 most important concepts to think about when you’re constructing your viral calls to action.

Subtly

People like to think that everything they do comes from some logical, un-manipulateable part of their own brain. Doing what you’re told doesn’t feel as good as doing what you want to do, and nobody really wants…