I think his overall point is valid.

I am not a Facebook user, or a heavy user of any social networks or sites, but several days ago I joined a 2nd level discussion on Reddit with a one sentence post, and wiki url, about a shipwreck that was slightly relevant to the discussion. I received about a dozen up-votes for this post.

After reading this article I went to Wikipedia to check their article view stats. I was slightly surprised to see that on the day I posted, the page view stats for the wiki article went from a usual 300 page views, to 1500 for that day only.

So even though I did not create any new content, I did perhaps influence 1200 or so people to spend a little time thinking about a shipwreck that I was thinking about, with a single sentence.

http://stats.grok.se/en/latest/Batavia_%28ship%29

edit: spelling

One thing you might not be accounting for is whether or not bit.ly is tracking Facebook's crawlers as clicks, since Facebook will follow the bit.ly link, and while bit.ly tries to exclude bots, who knows how successful it is.

You could test by posting a status with a bit.ly link where you're the only one who has permission to view the status, and see if you get any clicks on that link.

You could probably just past the link into the update textarea and never post. They actually crawl those links before you submit so they can do their fancy formatting stuff while you're posting.

presumably, each link would be crawled an equal number of times.

this seems like a constant rather than a variable.

Maybe, but that's an untested assumption. AFAIK, Facebook's crawler behavior is a black box. Who knows how often it recrawls? Or if there's even a constant behavior?

Either way, from an experimental design perspective, leaving that assumption untested is unwise.

Clicks and views do not equate to influence; there's simply no meaningful correspondence at all. You find this out pretty quickly if you're in the business of advocacy for a cause, since there are metrics like donations, membership, attendance, and other material contributions that you can look over.

There are three responses: (a) find a way to make it look like clicks and views are relevant (and there's a whole set of evangelists who are into that form of self- and other forms of deception, and I believe they're all doing the world a grave disfavor), or (b) look for other metrics, or (c) don't worry about it and stick to the common wisdom regarding how to go about persuasion and networking while being essentially decent about it.

Yes, 'influence' is perhaps a questionable term. If we rewrite it as 'attention' or 'judging you', then it becomes true and something worth knowing: OP did not realize that ~80 people were clicking through to the articles he was recommending (to grab one random number), and that could well make him realize he was risking his reputation or angering people to an extent he didn't appreciate before and that he should be more careful.

It's almost an obvious application of the '1% rule', but the nature of this sort of thing is that it's hard to appreciate at a gut level until you generate some data yourself. The imbalances between actual audience and intuitively-observed audience is just too extreme.

Yeah, influence is not about generating interest or gathering clicks. You measure influence by tangible actions coming from what you created. All in all, clicking on a Facebook link is not much different than checking out a newspaper and forgetting about it a couple of minutes later.

Talking regionally, I can say that Brazilians are heavy Facebook users, but it is becoming more and more common that people just loose it and over-share, or just totally forget the sense of usefulness. An increasing movement is people leaving Facebook (or threatening to).

Interesting. I thought that Orkut was the dominant social network in Brazil?

The numbers can be even greater if you allow friends of friends to view your posts.

I for one read this on HN and then saw it on one of my friend's Facebook immediately after (you and I have 27 mutual friends apparently).

Yesterday HN told me I was less beautiful than I think I am. Is this an attempt to soothe my wounded vanity?

Edit: Pity if so, since I'm not on Facebook.

LOL. This guy has 1,176 Facebook 'Friends'. I have 24, and that is mainly family. And I actually have logged in to Facebook a few times, although I generally avoid it.

So yeah, no, I am not influential on Facebook.

Can anyone who actually has logged in to Facebook in the last year beat that? 24?

I haven't read the article since I honestly don't care about trying to manipulate my "influence", but I've seen friends with 1000+ facebook friends who don't care in the slightest about personal branding and influence and whatnot, so we certainly shouldn't equate "many Fb friends" as an indicator of "slimeball" either (though I've seen those too)

As a matter of fact, I'm not purporting that the OP has done so either. :)

I use facebook daily and have around 50, normally when it goes over 50 I know I have to do some pruning. I use facebook to communicate with close personal friends. mostly it's kind of an extra email, I rarely use the feed, and post at most one status update per week.

I have 137, but I use it almost daily. Maybe it's 6 times more, but I guess I use Facebook more than 6 times your time.