Consumed => “Anatomy of a Shared Link on Facebook” by Matt Sullivan on Social Media Today.

http://socialmediatoday.com/mattsullivan/284714/anatomy-shared-link-facebook

Value add (i.e., left a comment)…

Hey Matt. Good stuff. Thanks for sharing. I have a couple of things for you…

Question #1 – “Compared to previous Distributed Stores that had default shared images and messages…” What were those? Previously, where they repeatedly the same over and over? For example, the default that FB might show by being pointed to a particular page. In other words, is the improvement due to setting the image/message, or the fact that people are no longer being lulled into SOS submission? I’m not questioning the effectiveness of your work, I’m just trying to get some sense for the context (read: benchmark.)

Question #2 – Those CTRs are nice but what are the stats on conversions? Did these visitor return more often? Visit longer? Where these status updates shared more often? Was the traffic coming from the original post, or the share? (I’m not so sure there’s a way to analytics that but I’m still curious.)

Question #3 – How big was your sample? Over how many weeks? From 75% to 100% is a pretty big range, is there any pattern in the cause for that gap? For example, time of day of the update? Or the nature of the update? It’s honestly a pet peeve of mine to see a biz post something worth sharing but there’s no image or no link. That means no Share link in my News feeds. That’s literally a social media oxymoron. “Please Share this” but we’re going to make it impossible to do so. The other next big faux pas is to link to the home page no matter what the message/update it. That’s pretty silly too. And I won’t even mention the widely exercised mistake of not tagging links and then using a shortner.

Bottom line…there’s a big difference between simply messaging and actually marketing, eh? (For the record, this statement isn’t directed at you or this article. I’m just soap boxin’ a bit.)