Mike Teasdale's blog

OK, so let’s imagine that you or your client have a Facebook brand page with a healthy 50,000 likes. 

You’re posting an entertaining mix of links back to your site, photos and the occasional piece of video.

So the question is, what kind of interaction levels should you expect to be getting?

To get to an answer, I’m mashing together a couple of recent pieces of research.  The first, from an article by Robin Grant in Techcrunch looks at EdgeRank – which is the algorithm Facebook uses to work out which updates make it into your news feed. It’s pretty clear that distribution of content by brands has dropped by some 40% in just three months – and that the drop is fairly uniform across even the most popular Facebook pages. 

Not many people know this, but for twelve months in the early 90s, I was Neil Kinnock.

I was working as a copywriter for an agency that held the Labour Party account and it was my job to write all the long direct mail fundraising appeals on behalf of Mr Kinnock.

Our strategy was to build up the supporter base during the run up to the election and then send an unprecedented four mailings during the three weeks or so of run up to the election itself.

And actually, if I say it myself, the fundraising bit was fairly successful… the other bits of the campaign not so much.

In the boring old real ‘analogue’ world, ideas of authorship and authority naturally sit together. Over time we work out who is talking sense and who is full of hot air.

While I can work on simple hypotheses like ‘if this is written by Melanie Phillips it is almost certainly ghastly rubbish’, a search engine like Google has to calculate authority through a dense mix of keyword density, social cues, link quality, time on page, speed of hitting the back button, etc, etc.

That’s hard work - which is why Google is now starting to account for authorship in its algorithm. It is identifying content by author, and is starting to calculate the authority of different authors. So all things being equal, if Delia Smith and Jamie Oliver are both writing about breakfast, the author with the highest authority will rank higher and (cue drumroll) bring home the bacon.

Nate Elliott at Forrester published an interesting post last year about the Interactive Brand Ecosystem. Essentially he is asking whether it is time that we abandoned a TV-centric planning model and worked instead on the premise that the website sits at the heart of the marketing process.