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littlemissmartypants

(22,418 posts)
Thu Nov 22, 2012, 04:26 AM Nov 2012

FACEBOOK’S SNEAKY TROJAN HORSE: YOU WON’T ‘LIKE’ THIS!

http://dangerousminds.net/comments/facebooks_sneaky_trojan_horse_you_wont_like_this#



The writing is clearly on the wall: The Internet is up in arms against Facebook.

The biggest grouse being the way Facebook is scuttling the reach of status updates in the news feed. Enough has been written already about the topic and the voice of dissent is only growing by the day. The recent furor has served to confirm what everyone already suspected about the way Facebook’s notorious EdgeRank algorithm was hiding status updates.

In a smart move to counter this backlash, Facebook has launched a special news feed dedicated only to Pages. This should act as a soothing balm to the bruised egos and angry voices, but the reality is something else. This new Pages only feed is but a glorified version of the main news feed with the censoring of content still more or less intact! To call it a minor improvement would be overstating the case, but it does show, to a certain extent, that Facebook is listening. Maybe.

While reach of status updates is a major concern there are other problems that ail Facebook, some of which I discussed in detail in an older blog post of mine ‘Meet the Enemy of the Internet!’ This was a post that I published six months ago and luckily for me it came alive once again because of it being featured here on Dangerous Minds.

Needless to say, traffic from Dangerous Minds to my site was fantastic and this in turn gave me a lot of additional data to substantiate what I had discussed in my earlier blog post.

The main issue of contention, apart from the apparent scuttling of status updates, is the battle between the SHARE and the LIKE buttons on our websites. These buttons are the primary marketing tools on every site and are supposed to help our readers share content to Facebook and in return we expect referral traffic coming from Facebook. That is the only reason why these buttons exist in the first place.

As I pointed out in my original blog post, the SHARE button, including the organic shares (links inside status updates) drove 95% of the referral traffic to my site from Facebook as opposed to the LIKE button which drove the remaining paltry 5% of the traffic. In a curious twist, Facebook decided to get rid of the SHARE button. Why did Facebook do that? The detailed reasons I gave in my previous exhaustive blog post about this, but to cut things short: Facebook hates it when you bring content from the outside, it tries its best to hide stuff that originates from outside the gated community of Facebook. (Photos, however, they, uh, “like” because you don’t have to leave Facebook to view them. This is why Facebook purchased Instagram).

I have gone through the traffic statistics of my blog for the last week since the moment that Dangerous Minds shared my post and below are the findings, taken from Facebook Insights, for my blog during that period. Mind you, during this period my site did not have the SHARE button on it, just the LIKE button. See for yourself what happened.

Organic Shares:
There were 159 people who shared my post “organically” on Facebook. That is, they posted the links to my blog in the status update box manually without the aid of any SHARE button residing on my site. These updates resulted in 32,496 impressions on Facebook and 452 people clicked those links on Facebook and landed back on my site. Somehow 32,496 impressions sounds very small considering that some pages that shared this post had followers in the thousands including Dangerous Minds which counts over 61,000 people who have “liked” its Facebook Page.


More at link: http://dangerousminds.net/comments/facebooks_sneaky_trojan_horse_you_wont_like_this#

This is a Dangerous Minds guest post by New Delhi-based social media consultant, Kartik Dayanand.
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FACEBOOK’S SNEAKY TROJAN HORSE: YOU WON’T ‘LIKE’ THIS! (Original Post) littlemissmartypants Nov 2012 OP
Wow, that's a great article. Thanks for SHAREing it here. Major Hogwash Nov 2012 #1
Can I take it that "Trojan Horse" in the title is misleading? muriel_volestrangler Nov 2012 #2
No, you took it the wrong way entirely. Major Hogwash Nov 2012 #4
"I have an idea - let's find a way to use people's vanity and egos against them" Edweird Nov 2012 #3
+1 nt ProudProgressiveNow Nov 2012 #5

Major Hogwash

(17,656 posts)
1. Wow, that's a great article. Thanks for SHAREing it here.
Thu Nov 22, 2012, 07:13 AM
Nov 2012

I'm not sure people realized that Facebook was intended to be a datamining company from the outset.
They will sell any bit of data they can to make a buck.
And have.

muriel_volestrangler

(101,161 posts)
2. Can I take it that "Trojan Horse" in the title is misleading?
Thu Nov 22, 2012, 07:41 AM
Nov 2012

The excerpt seems to have nothing at all to do with Trojan Horses, and instead seems to be someone whining about not getting as much traffic to his site from Facebook as he wants. In other words, it's all insider stuff for people trying to make money out of Facebook.

I don't see why I should give him traffic when he appears to be misleading us about his gripes.

Major Hogwash

(17,656 posts)
4. No, you took it the wrong way entirely.
Fri Nov 23, 2012, 02:39 PM
Nov 2012

The article is describing how Facebook censors news from websites and American newsfeeds from being read over at Facebook.
Some American newsfeeds and opinion-editorials, from outside sources other than the ones that have been approved by the Board of Directors at Facebook, are being censored outright.

Since the average new member to Facebook is from India, one of the smaller countries in the Middle East, or China, those newsfeeds and opinions are important to keep the discussions flowing without being censored to find out what is going on in those countries.

Outside sources even include some blogs written by writers in Europe, as well as in the U.S.
Only "approved newsfeeds and blogs" are allowed to be shared globally at Facebook without prohibitive controls.

 

Edweird

(8,570 posts)
3. "I have an idea - let's find a way to use people's vanity and egos against them"
Thu Nov 22, 2012, 07:55 AM
Nov 2012

"We can sell their info while we're at it"
"We call it 'Facebook' "

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