Oops! Forgot the closing tag for italics in my original comment - apologies!

Hi Dan, 
 
So what? 
 
Let me be clear. You say "More Facebook Conversation Does Not Lead to More Views." From there you apparently jump to the absurd conclusion that conversation does not (cannot? will never?)lead to "better reach-building and marketing effects." 
 
My "so what" question comes from wondering why you think "more" likes or even comments equals more conversation. Unless you're willing to do the hard work of examining the content and quality of the comments - especially looking for two-way and multi-party exchanges that involve the page owner - you aren't really looking for conversation. 
 
Aside from building your nifty chart on a sampling of just TWO "large pages" on Facebook, your blind faith in counting things that are poor analogs for conversation continues to amaze me. You measure data you can find a yardstick for and pretend that's the data that matters. 
 
Valuable "marketing effects" can flow from a single two-way exchange, but that's lost in your obsession with large data sets.  
 
At this point in our "science" of measuring social media, I'm skeptical that we have any reliable way for you to do what you say you want to do: "understand the effects of 'engaging in the conversation' in social media." 
 
There are enough spectacular success stories (anecdotal though they are) that I think the Nike rule applies to social media for business: Just do it. 
 
Tom 

@ Tom can you provide examples of that "Anecdotal" success.. what drove them... free offers, Extremely well known brands... I'm finding the same results... and also that most of the conversion comes from off topic/niche content! we also get more conversion from teaser text that lead to the site! (if enough of the info is posted they just won't click through! But I've been hesitant to adopt, not sure how that will work fro visibility

Interesting data, but, at least for business pages, wouldn't a more useful metric be to measure how likely a person engaged in conversation is to buy from you in the near future (say <10 days)? Granted, this seems to show that engagement is not going to lead to chain reaction of "likes" or new fans, but I think engagement has to be a valuable way to ramp up brand loyalty among existing fans.

@Bonnie - I could, but don't take my word for it! There are whole books full of case studies and examples.  
 
If you like history (or chronological order), start with Groundswell, by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, and Personality Not Included, by Rohit Bhargava, both from way back in 2008. 
 
Move on to Trust Agents, by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, and Tactical Transparency, by Shel Holtz and John Havens, from 2009. Disclosure: Shel and John are clients. 
 
Then, The New Rules of Marketing and PR (Second Edition), by David Meerman Scott, and The Hyper-Social Organization, by Francois Gossieaux and Ed Moran, in 2010. Disclosure: Francois is a long-time social media friend and will be the closing keynote at our BlogPaws 2011 conference. 
 
And for both how-to and some great examples, the just-released Content Rules, by Ann Handley and C.C. Chapman, from 2011. I love their title for Part Three of the book, "Content that Converts: Success Stories (With Ideas You Can Steal" - a concept that likewise gets lost in the obsession with numbers. 
 
Notably, the examples in Content Rules range from a newly-opened golf academy to major corporations, even including HubSpot itself. 
 
Enjoy! 
 
Tom

I agree that SocialMedia isn't the best method for those looking for pure lead generation. But for consumer engagement and branding purposes, I think it achieves that objective. For those reading this and thinking the sky is falling, take it with a grain of salt. Dan is great at what he does but remember that we all knew social media wasn't necessarily the direct marketing tool traditional marketers are used to.

Without the calcs, I see the same thing...lots of 'fans', no leads, no comments, no converstions...well, not 0 but pretty close. Just a bunch of high school kids adding more 'likes' to their Interests list. Facebook is a fun place for friends and family communication - not worth the cost of FB ads for business.

I'll add that the opposite is also true. I see a lot of views on my page w/o conversation and I used to be concerned. It's not always obvious or immediately known who will take action, or if I'm adding value based on a facebook post alone. I get hundreds of impressions on subjectively awesome offers/giveaways with zero comments and/or little participation and other "decent" offers get tons of comments (e.g. Free Fandango movie passes (decent) versus sold out concert and/ or sports events tickets, visa gift cards, (awesome) etc...). It's strange behavior to me, but it is what it is. I try not to over-think it. What's even more interesting to me is I get a ton of emails stating they found me on twitter and facebook wanting to know more about what I do. This curiosity had turned into more business for us. My point is that although I'd like more participation on facebook, mostly because of perception, I don't necessarily mind for now as long as the business is rolling in.  
 
All in all, data can help you adjust the sails, but it's often just a mild form of entertainment for the geek squad. If I relied solely on the data I've found so far, I'd probably quit doing what I'm doing. In the immortal words of Han Solo, "Never tell me the odds", or in this case, the data.

Piece is spelled piece. Not peice.  
 
:-)

Your method might be flawed here. By dividing impression by likes, you will find that articles with a lot of likes will have low ratios (higher denominator). Why not just look at the correlation between total volume of feedback and total impressions?

Agree with Adam, for every impression you get, your feedback ration goes down. Data is (purposely?) misleading. Throwing out a "spectacular" headline along the lines of this blog post is a short term win(say something crazy, get a reaction), and I would expect more for a post from a Hubspot employee.

Hello Dan, 
I think it's important to mention I do enjoy your work, and have followed most of it as I have progressed. This post has brought forth a question sitting with me for some time. The question is “Of the data you examine, how many of those have you qualified as having an interest in what you are using as bait to collect your data from?” In other words, if you post an article about wine making, then how many of the readers have an interest (they follow) in wine making? 
 
Having a degree in psychology with experimental research, subjects and data are qualified first before conducting the experiment. There are too many variables left open for misinterpretation if the qualification process is not executed. Such as; how many visitors received an impression who were simply passing through and had no interest, how many visitors know of your work but have seen it before, or how many visitors are not Type-A personality and think their words don't matter (not joining the conversation)? 
 
I think qualifying subjects before collecting data is extremely important. Being an Internet marketer, and on the HubSpot platform, the majority of individuals floating around reading HubSpot and other Internet related material are in the same industry. Personally, I pass-by a dozen or so regurgitated articles each day, all of the same subject and written by those who are trying to impress their audience. 
 
I know that what I suggest is a complicated task, and the fact that the subjects are qualified changes the experiment. But can we continue to follow human behavior blindly knowing that behavior rests upon the shoulders of a giant created from needs, wants, and desires?

Wait - this "analysis" is based on just two Pages? Isn't that kinda - read, very - inconclusive? Pretty sure there are more than two pages on Facebook...

How about studying RenRen? Unlike facebook, they're more open with their social graph and so I think you can have a more comprehensive data to analyze. A study was done at UCSB to analyze relationships/activities.

Dan -  
 
 
 
Perhaps it’s the audience type, or the metrics we’re comparing but working with b2c pages I've seen quite the opposite on multiple pages, especially over time.  
 
 
 
In my experience, it seems that the more interactions wall a post gets, the higher it ranks for both friends o the people who have engaged as well as fans of the page in general. Taking this to extreme posts that “fall off” the top news come back from time to time based on interactions. 
 
 
 
Over time this becomes critical as EdgeRank erodes impression counts as pages grow in following and those with more engagement in previous posts see their baseline impressions increase before the first comment is made. It’s not just about you seeing it more, it seems to be a network wide effect, possibly with different weighting for your friends versus general followers but certainly more than just you. 
 
 
 
Every time I've worked on a brand's page that had low impression count our first "trick" has been to change up posting to get more responses and too and from there impressions seem to start to creep back adding tens of thousands between posts. 
 

is there a correlation between the types of posts in terms of theme or call to action? were some more 'likable' than others?  
 

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