Measuring “Going Viral” on Facebook

We, like a lot of agencies, get asked to help clients create online content with the objective of “going viral.”

The problem(s) being:

What does going viral actually mean?
How can you objectively measure whether or not something has gone viral.

Now I’m not going to lie. There are proprietary analytics systems out there, we’ve evaluated some and others not, that will tell you if something has gone viral or not. These systems often carry a pretty hefty price tag, and what we evaluated just didn’t seem like it was worth the investment.

Moving on, last week Facebook rolled out a new Insights feature that I’m about to argue allows you to very easily measure whether or not your content has gone viral [on Facebook] and just how viral it has gone. The feature is called “Per-Post Insights” and what it does is display the number of impressions a post generates and what percentage of feedback based upon the size of your fan base it garnered (see screenshot). Here’s some finer details straight from our Facebook rep:

Impressions can come from a users News Feed, a visit to the Page, or through the Fan Box widget.

If the post is served to a user below the fold, yes, it counts as an impression. We are measuring the number of times the post in rendered in a users browser.

Feedback % measures comments and likes. The formula is: (Comments+Likes)/Impressions.

So here’s my proposed formula to determine whether or not your content has gone viral:

Let’s say you have a modest size fan page with 15,000 fans and you post a video that ends up generating 17,500 impressions. If you divide fans by the total number of impressions you’ll find that your fans you’ll find that fans only accounted for ~86% of the impressions for that post.

This means that 14% of you impressions were viral- or the post had a viral score of 14.

A few considerations:

I realize that it is a bit of a stretch to assume that each of your fans is an impression.
Furthermore, 1 person (fan or non-fan) might generate multiple impressions.
For this to be a controlled value, you always have to refer to what your fan base was at the time you posted…because if it is a really good post, your fan base will increase as impressions do.

So this is far from perfect, but until Facebook arms us with more data, I’d say that it is a serviceable model.

Thoughts?

Impressions can come from a users News Feed, a visit to the Page, or through the Fan Box widget.

If the post is served to a user below the fold, yes, it counts as an impression. We are measuring the number of times the post in rendered in a users browser.

Feedback % measures comments and likes. The formula is: (Comments+Likes)/Impressions.

posted by Dakota Brown on January 23rd, 2010 at 4:33 pm Permanent link to this post