Facebook to rank applications by Interaction –not Engagement

Facebook announced that it will be ranking it’s applications not by total number of users, but by engagement. Certainly an evolutionary step forward. Early on, I was trying to define the formula of engagement, so I’ve got a pretty good sense of what it is and what it’s not. Venture Beat covered the story, but I think they got the attributes mixed up between attention and interaction.

Facebook isn’t really measuring Engagement, they’re measuring Interaction.
The four attributes they mentioned are elements of a user interacting with the site:

These touch points are:
- Canvas Page Views
- Link Clicks in FBML
- Mock-Ajax Form Submission
- Click-to-Play Flash

Facebook measurement, an incomplete formula
There’s a few other attributes that Facebook is missing in it’s measurement, this is NOT an Engagement measurement. They’re missing Attention (how much time was spent on a particular widget app, Alex agrees) and Velocity (did the application get shared and spread among a network, and Influence, who share it with who? For example, if Scoble shared with his 5000ish friends, it’s certainly a higher weight than someone with 20.

As an industry, it’s really important that we start to come to agreement on terms and attributes. For what it’s worth, I predict they will release an engagement index, that will help them be the industry standard when it comes to defining a successful application. More thoughts on this topic from the Web Analytics Guru, or check out all my posts tagged Social Media Measurement.

Once I move into my new role, I may have the reach to standardize terms, give me time.

Update: Judah at Web Analytics Demystified (an authority) agrees.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 31st, 2007 at 3:09 am and is filed under Social Media Measurement, Social Networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.