Facebook Experiment Conclusion

The experiment didn't exactly go as planned, and I think the fact that I conceived, planned, and executed it within two hours could have contributed to its demise. The entire point of my exercise was to see how far and how quickly something can spread on Facebook. There is no other way (that I know of) to measure the note-sharing than to do what I did.

I like data and wanted to see the numbers grow. I expected more than 30 to respond, from all of Facebook. Turns out that my idea wasn't so well received as I'd hoped it would be.

Anyway, here are the final numbers, as the experiment is finished today with dwindling results:

30 Absolute Unique Visitors
All sourced from Facebook except for my own direct entry
Every visitor was from US or Canada (only one Canadian)

Overall result:



And by the way - if you want to shoot those numbers up, tell all your friends to go to http://fb.49times.com. There they can read all about it and continue the experiment, though I won't be watching or reporting on it unless it blows up as I had expected it to the first time.

9 Unique August 25

Sorry - I was reading it wrong. Google Analytics (hereafter GA) says the FB page has had 9 absolutely unique visitors yesterday. Again, more tomorrow.

12 Visits

Google Analytics shows 12 visits yesterday, and I guess that could be considered good since I sent it out at 1700 EST and not everyone uses Facebook every day.

We'll have to wait until tomorrow to see the results of today's visits. The counter was just at 36 page loads so I expect more than 24 unique visits as of today. We'll see.

Until then,

The Facebook Experiment Starts Now

I just thought of this today and will now begin the experiment. I've tagged 30 people in a note on Facebook that asks them to copy the note, paste it in a note of their own, and tag 30 people with it. Then they should follow the link in the note that goes to a single page I created.

I won't give the page away because I want every reference to come from Facebook itself. What I want to happen is to see 100,000 or more hits to that page over the next week. I expect this because social networking is viral (if people cooperate) and word can spread very quickly. I want to see just how quickly that is.

I will publish the results here and under the label "Facebook Experiment" as the project progresses.