It’s simple.

1. What’s good for them (how can they monetize our info)
2. What’s good for your friends (i.e. using you to please your friends)
3. What’s good for you (after #1 & #2 are satisfied, whatever you’re left with)

The fundamental atomic unit for Facebook is still the SHARE. You Share, and they play with & monetize WHATEVER you share. They cut it, dice it, aggregate it, mix it, filter it, re-filter it, rate it, rank it, re-purpose it, etc…

Yes, they are very much like Google in their information analysis. Everything we do makes them smarter about the whole thing. They give back a % of that, and use the other % to develop products.

We call exceeding this benchmark “social validation” i.e. to be interesting at least to that portion of a pages fan base that see the post as earned media; Only then when or if it breaches a threshold of engagement that is well above the average do we convert it into paid media.

So there is a curated by the crowd nature to the promoted content. You can learn more on http://propelad.com if interested.

You don’t know what is really happening inside the box so you start feeding things in and comparing what you get out. Feed it enough information and you can get a fairly decent idea of how it will respond the majority of the time, but you still really don’t know what is going on inside the black box. All that you know is what you feed in and what you get out and you get out.

1.) Facebook has increased the amount of promoted posts that can appear in a persons news feed. As such, there is a rise in the amount of “air-time” paid posts get which in turn leads to higher engagement totals for these posts.

2.) I think the comparisons between Facebook and Google need to stop. To compare the Google’s algorithm for page rank and Facebook’s distribution of posts is apples and oranges. Sure, both platforms have best practices, but Google offers TONS of resources on SEO and companies and sites implement these every day with positive results. The playing field with Google is far clearer and the rules more apparent. With Facebook, this is simply not the case.

Just out of interest, I scraped all of your gigaom stories and made API calls on them, measuring total FB interaction. This is the trend from 08 to now (excluding outliers… roughly-ish).

http://i.imgur.com/Vf6YkbN.png

Granted, that’s total interaction for each article, not interaction from posts on a specific page. You can’t draw a lot of conclusions from that graph, but it provides some context at the bare minimum. Your boost from FB is rising, and I suspect Bilton’s is too. That is more important than interaction on specific posts on specific pages.

In terms of the newsfeed algorithm in particular, I’m on FB’s side here. Yes you can pay to spam people’s feed’s, but if you’re not paying and get lower exposure it’s not ‘unfair’, it’s just normal.

bleh

–Andrew Duffy