Oh Myyy! (19 page)

All kidding aside, Scoble does miss a basic point. His wife and other fans actively have decided that they want to see my content. They want to hear my noise — and probably don’t consider it “noise” at all. They clicked “like” on my page with the expectation that they would see my posts, or at least most of them. Many are surprised to learn that they receive only a fraction of them. If Scoble prefers not to have me take up space on his newsfeed from his wife’s shares, he should speak to her and tell her to screen him, rather than call on me to self-censor.

I do occasionally look at the “insights” for interactivity provided by Facebook. If I’ve understood them correctly, my “reach” (meaning, the number of people who have seen a given post) averages between 1 and 2 million. Because at the time I’m typing this I’ve got about three million fans, that means a reach of between 33 and 66 percent per post, versus the standard 15-16 percent.

I have also noticed that more pages than ever have started including a “call to action” with their posts that asks users to click “like” and “share.” This is online marketing 101. Traditional wisdom dictates that getting people to take any kind of action is important (after all, it increases the
EdgeRank your future posts have with them). A simple “ask” often does the trick. When I’ve put a call to action in my posts, the response rate often doubles or triples.

But I caution that asks should be used sparingly. People don’t like to be treated as mere clicks or numbers, or bluntly told what to do. My own fan base sometimes tsk-tsks me for such posts, and I admit it does feel somehow forced if it happens too frequently. The act of liking or sharing should feel like a voluntary gesture, not a favor or compelled response. And as more pages figure out the short-term advantage of asks, Facebook has started to feel overburdened with these types of demands. Click “like” if you want this sick dog to find a happy home, keep scrolling if you don’t care! Click “share” if you feel the love of Jesus!

Lately I’ve been trying not too often to add to the “ask” pollution, and I’d prefer it if I only had to include a call to action when it makes sense. But because of the way EdgeRank works, it’s nearly impossible to ignore the power of the “ask.” So to make things more palatable, I often enjoy presenting games, such as a popular song with lyrics in “Spockese” with instructions to “like” and “share” when you “get it.”

WE ONLY ARE RECENTLY ACQUAINTED, AND THIS MAY SEEM HIGHLY ILLOGICAL, BUT HERE IS A NUMERICAL SEQUENCE BY WHICH YOU MAY CONTACT ME VIA YOUR COMMUNICATION DEVICE, PERHAPS YOU WILL MAKE USE OF IT.

I also like to post puzzles to see if we can collectively solve them. This was one famous one:

I asked the fans to post how many squares they could count and to share this with their friends. It turns out there are 40 — though I could only get up to 34 on my first attempt. When some fans began to post comments that they could count 40 squares, it encouraged the rest of us to go back and try harder.

I also enjoy caption contests. In the early days, I would simply post an image, invite captions, and attempt to read through the comments. But this soon proved impossible. For one caption contest, with an infamous image of my friend Nichelle Nichols (
Star Trek
’s Uhura) toying sexily with me on the bridge of the
Enterprise
, we received something like 13,000 comments with proposed captions. I had to divide the work among myself, Brad and our intern, and it took days to go through it all. The winning entry was Uhura declaring, “The captain kisses like a girl” and me as Sulu responding, “I know.”

I’ve come to learn that, on Facebook, an image appears to get more traction than mere text. This is largely because an image takes up more space and is more attractive to the eye than text or a link. When scrolling through wall posts by fans, my own eye is drawn to images. I simply don’t have enough time or patience to read all of the text-based posts others leave.

My own experiences led me to a strong preference for images over text. After months of posting plain status updates and links to articles, I happened to share a funny image that had a caption built into it. I don’t remember what the image was exactly, but I do recall being surprised that it received many more likes and shares than my other posts did.

It dawned on me that this probably was the way to go if I wanted to engage more successfully with fans. From that point forward, I focused nearly exclusively on sharing funny, inspiring, or just plain random images. As a consequence, my Facebook page was one of the first to adopt a practice of “meme” sharing. As a rule these images also contained text; this way, whenever fans shared the photo with their friends, the humor associated with the original image would survive no matter what else the sharer added. Because, by accident and not by design, I always uploaded the meme myself rather than shared it from another page, this wound up inadvertently creating in each meme a viral advertisement for my page.

Images also have the plain advantage of being much more likely to be “shared” than mere text posts. Consider your own Facebooking: how often do you “share” the “status updates” of your friends? If you’re feeling charitable, you may click “like” on them, and sometimes leave a comment. But when they post an image that has some general appeal, you are more likely to share that image and comment on it in your own way. Because sharing appears to have more weight in Facebook’s ranking system than mere liking, images again appear to be a better bet.

On the other hand, when I have tried to promote something else on my Facebook page by creating a link out, Facebook appears to penalize that post with a lower EdgeRank. I noticed this particularly during my efforts to publicize the Hurricane Sandy relief effort, which was hosted on another site called indiegogo.com. I could see that every time I reposted the link to the fundraiser, the number of people who actually saw the post went down. This leads me to speculate that Facebook somehow tracks whether a post contains a link to another site outside of Facebook, and reduces the EdgeRank of any post that contains that link again. I don’t have any hard facts to back that suspicion up, but I can’t think of any other reason why my posts received comparatively fewer views with each successive attempt.

A third lesson about EdgeRank that I learned was that, to stay engaged with your fans, you have to post with some frequency. On average, I’ll post four or fives times during the day, usually when I’ve got downtime during a shoot, rehearsals, or a show. That means I need to find (or if I’m too busy, more likely Brad or one of our interns needs to find) at least that many funny or interesting things to post about daily. It can be a tall order, but I have the advantage of having an amazing fan base that makes this job fairly easy and straightforward. Many fans send mail to my website with funny images attached, but more often than not I need only look at my own wall to see what others have shared. There will be dozens and dozens of hilarious posts from all over the world on all manner of topics. Often I’ll receive many copies of the same image. If it’s been a few hours since I last posted, I’ll pick something that tickles my fancy. When I get a few hours of free time, I can even line up several posts to go out over the course of a day, spaced out using a social media organizer like Hootsuite or the Facebook “Pages” application on my iPhone.

I don’t know if EdgeRank takes into account how often you post. But I’ve found that something posted more than an hour back is far less likely to appear in a friend’s newsfeed than something posted seconds ago. I draw this conclusion empirically, because the numbers of likes and shares that occur with the first 15 minutes or so of a post vastly outweigh what happens later. So if a fan isn’t logged on at the time of one of my posts, the chance that it lands in his or her newsfeed diminishes quickly over time.

Some pages try to solve this problem by posting more frequently. This presents the very real risk of overposting. We all know friends who seem to post every half hour or more, and our eyes become trained to largely ignore the chatter. If we interacted with each post, it would eat up our whole day. I like to think of each of us as having a limited amount of interactive Facebook goodwill, which can be taxed if drawn upon with too much frequency.

There is also a phenomenon I call update cannibalism. By this I mean that posts made too close together literally will eat from each other’s likes, comments and shares. Fans already may have interacted with something I posted an hour earlier, and thus are likely less willing to interact with my next post, even if it is funny or worthy in its own right. Fans also generally understand that everyone else can see much of their activity on Facebook, and no one wants to appear obsessed with a page like some kind of crazy virtual cheerleader.

Finally, it’s important to consider the time of day you are posting, and to understand where your fans are and how they get their Facebook fixes. Although I have fans all over the world, many are largely concentrated on the two coasts of the U.S. I work in all kinds of different locations and hold down a very odd schedule, so I often begin posting as early as 6:30 a.m. in California, three hours behind the East Coast where folks are already at work. It turns out, many of my fans tend to check Facebook while at work on break (or even not on break), and in the evenings while at home on their computers or in front of the TV. Mid-week posts are some of my most viewed, while weekends are less busy. In fact, on weekends I suspect many fans may check Facebook using their phones while they are out running errands or enjoying the day. This used to result in fewer “shares” because the Facebook application on mobile devices didn’t have a share option yet. This always baffled me, so I was pleased as punch to learn that Facebook at last had rolled out a “share” button on the mobile site. I expect this will help a great deal with engagement from my more mobile-phone obsessed fans.

Keep in mind that during certain peak hours, a lot of other people and pages are also posting on Facebook. This means more competition for the same number of spots, and thus a lower likelihood that a post will make it onto a friend’s or fan’s newsfeed. Indeed, if you have a lower interaction rate than other friends or pages that are posting at the same time, your post won’t get seen — it will be edged out.

“But, George!” you might wonder. “Aren’t you worried that giving away these secrets will give other pages the same edge you’ve had?” Not really, and it doesn’t matter much to me anyway. I’m not out to have tens of millions of fans like Lady Gaga or President Obama; I’d rather have fans who truly interact with my page. It pleases me more that, as I write this, over three million people on my page are “talking about this” — meaning that many people joined, clicked like, shared or commented on something on my page in the past week. The three principles I’ve employed — past interactivity, a preference for images, and frequency of posting — have operated to propel my page forward and will probably keep it vibrant and growing, so long as fans continue actively to engage my posts, and so long as I keep putting shareable content out there. I don’t intend to stop any time soon.

George Fakei

At some point in my Internet life, I had sufficient clout (or Klout, as it were) to merit impostors. One in particular has continued to dog me throughout my time on Facebook. His screen name is George Takie, or sometimes George Tekai. I call him George Fakei. He uses my likeness and posts in my comment streams to appear as me, offering “free iPads” to anyone who clicks “like” on his page. I’m sure it’s some kind of phishing scam or identity theft racket, and I’ve warned the users about it many times. In fact, I’ve had to say outright that I do not use <3 <3 <3 symbols to get anyone’s attention, and I never type in ALL CAPS. But no matter how frequently I warn people, some still fall for the ruse.