Last Summer, Feedburner began counting Friendfeed stats in their statistics, and the follower count for many Feedburner users shot up as suddenly as their Twitter followers and other Friendfeed “subscribers” began to count. According to chicklets across the web, thousands of instant Social Media rockstars were born. Or so it seemed. But this is truly misleading. Lately, the Feedburner counts have been fluctuating widely as Friendfeed stats come and go, like has happened before.
To accumulate FriendFeed subscribers, and therefore your Feedburner count, you simply need to boost your following… which can be Astroturfed with little effort. Even though the audience-size-as-influence-factor has been debunked (google doc), services have cropped up to help you build that “audience”….”I CAN GET U 10,000 FOLLOWERS FOR $150″ type ads are all over networks such as MySpace and Google’s ad network. Retweet bots can also increase the appearance of influence even further (without actually increasing it, like you would if you followed these tips. Even if you don’t “buy” followers, there are plenty of “select-all” tools on the web that use the Twitter API to follow large groups of people (and bots) with very few mouse clicks, and most users don’t know how to spot a fake follower count. Just friendfeed everyone who follows you on Twitter and voila… Friendfeed numbers galore… without anyone ever looking at your blog.
For example this ad was on the first page of Google (misspellings left in.)
TweetterStar offers you the opporunity to buy targeted Twitter followers delivered straight to your Twitter account. Are you ready to take your Tweets to the next level? Visit our services page and choose to buy 1000, 2000, 5000 or 10000 Twitter followers!
I am not trying to say that all Feedburner/Friendfeed users have set out to deceive… and many with high follower counts have earned such through old-fashioned sweat equity. The problem is that the chicklets do not differentiate. If you’ve busted your ass to create great content and gain those 80k readers, it sucks to see someone fake an 80k chicklet with a thousand bucks of bot buys.
Misplaced Confidence
So when hurried conference organizers or blog readers glance at the blog of individuals using the feedburner/friendfeed combination, they may mistakenly assume the person has great influence. Without being experts in the tools needed to truly measure engagement at hand, they take it on faith – possibly lavishing praise, speaking engagements or blogroll positions that are not deserved. Some of these individuals may “rise to the occasion” – making the mistake into an accidental discovery of a latent superstar. But I would guess that most of the time, the mistaken judgment comes back to haunt someone. Others agree:
In my opinion this is an incredibly bad move from FeedBurner. It is incredibly easy to get people to subscribe to an RSS feed through FriendFeed. Just like Twitter, many people follow anyone who follows them. This means that the feedburner count can be very easily manipulated to show a higher count than it actually has. - Kevin Muldoon @ http://www.blogthemesclub.com
If I tweet every article, I don’t think it would be accurate to say all twitter followers are subscribers. If I submitted every blog post to reddit, that doesn’t mean I could say all reddit users are blog subscribers. Twitter and reddit don’t show the same level of intent as an RSS subscription… and neither does friendfeed, really – Denton Gentry
Google: Step up and get rid of this problem.
To me, it’s Google’s responsibility to intervene. The company that expresses algorithmic prowess on so many complex patterns should have no trouble in doing so with blog engagement. The raw numbers displayed in feedburner chicklets are no more reliable than the 1990s hit counters which allowed unscrupulous webmasters to “start off” with high numbers in order to mislead the readers that a site was popular. Perhaps we need a pagerank for Twitter/Friendfeed followers.
For Google to stand back and allow Feedburner to display this bogus data, with it’s brand name “Feedburner” attached, and will back to bite the company in the long run. There are no checks and balances to this system. To attach a number to the word “readers” in their own code (the chicklet) is to endorse potentially bogus and misleading information.
The Real Way To Measure Engagement
So how do you truly measure engagement of your blog? One good first step is to turn off the Feedburner/Friendfeed connection, and use Feedburner’s decent “reach” stats… also you can:
- Trackbacks / Pingbacks - how many linked to your post from their own post. Not just any link, but links from other high quality blogs.
- PostRank - this ranks your blog from 1 to 10 based on various engagement scores, creating, critiquing, chatting, collecting and clicking. It is one of the most interesting blog engagement measures and Google would do well to buy/duplicate the function – tying the outcome to the feedburner chicklet.
- Reader Satisfaction with your content – measured by tracking the unique visitor trends from Google and seeking an increase over time. Also important are unique visitors, return visitors, page views and RSS subscribers. This information is rarely made public, but Google claims that their search ranking ranking algorithm takes these things into account.
- Exit Rates - how fast are people exiting from your posts? How many exit versus how many read? This is never public, but again, Google claims it is an influence in rank.
- Comments - If your blog is set up for comments, the number of comments per post is a great measure of how much people engaged. I consider this a high quality indicator of engagement, especially if the comments are thoughtful. Take for example, the extensive commenting that occurs in my mother-in-law Rachel Laudan’s blog. This blog has clearly engaged the public – and I need no other tools – just a glance at the comments tells the tale.
- Retweets from actual people - if your blog is retweeted a lot on Twitter, it’s a good sign. This is a tenuous engagement measure at best – there are many “retweet bots” on Twitter, and there are plenty of people who retweet things without reading htem.
- Facebook Shares - how many shared your post on Facebook – and how many commented on the shared item? Likes are good, but comments and shares are golden.
I hope that Google will start taking the Feedburner analytics seriously soon – and start by nixing Friendfeed from the count. Until then, use other methods to measure your reach and influence.
photo by Lisa Brewster used under CC license
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I agree with what your saying, but the truth is people can boost their subscription numbers in a variety of other ways that do not necessarily prove they have loyal readers, such as RSS subscription exchanges, subscribing to their own site using their own emails and various services, etc. Those methods take longer, but do pretty much the same thing.
FriendFeed is importing your RSS feed which is then displayed to your FriendFeed subscribers, so technically FriendFeed subscribers are just as exposed to your feed as a subscriber in Google Reader, who can just as easily have so many feeds that they are missing your posts anyway.
Your real engagement measurement is certainly more accurate, and should be more important to serious bloggers. But in truth, anyone who is looking to make money off of their website from advertising needs to have those other stats – subscribers, hits, followers, etc. It really depends on the blogger’s goals as to what is going to be more important.
I wouldn’t be holding my breath waiting for any changes soon. Before they sold out, I was a very regular user of FriendFeed and subscribers there are more likely to read your latest content (and any older content you choose to share or that still receives comments) than your RSS readers are!
I still choose to use FriendFeed when I want to read the latest content written by bloggers I am particularly interested in. I do this because you can filter your RSS subscriptions at FriendFeed using lists.
In other words, you could have one list of all your must-read blogs and others for each niche you are involved in. If you have several blogs or a business plus outside interests this lets you focus on finding only what you want to read in that moment.
You can also click on the RSS feed buttons in each FriendFeed user’s profile to read the content from each specific feed. We all know bloggers with multiple blogs where we always read one of them, sometimes read another and never read the rest. FriendFeed makes it easy to do that quickly.
I agree that trackbacks / pingbacks, RTs, comments and blogger interaction are much better measurements of a blogger’s influence. I really like PostRank and expect it to continue to be very important; however, sometimes the posts with high numbers are less deserving than others with lower ratings.
@kristi Great point on the subscription exchanges – I had forgotten those exist.
@gail – Agreed on those filtering options – too bad that RSS readers like Google Reader don’t just build in “modes” that let you flip between different feed banks. Interesting idea.
@kristi and @gail – here’s the thing. There is nothing wrong with FriendFeed numbers TAKEN FOR WHAT THEY ARE. But as soon as Google imports the feed counts and displays them as “Readers” in a blog chicklet with the “feedburner” brand attached, I get all grumpy about it.
I appreciate your comments a lot.
@Scott I don’t really understand why you don’t think reading a blog at FriendFeed instead of in an RSS reader “counts”. I read a lot more blogs there regularly than I ever did in my reader. As Kristi mentions, many people either have far too many subscriptions (or in my case are just plain too busy with higher priorities) to actually read the blogs to which we subscribe.
Louis Gray is probably the only one I know who (last I heard) definitely reads everything in his reader. Some of us rely more on CommentLuv these days to make sure we don’t miss anything important than we use our custom AllTop page, readers or FriendFeed. Why is explained in the post I’ve linked to this comment.
As someone who regularly uses Feedburner it is interesting to see these criticisms of the technology, as it is something I haven’t really given much through to previously.
Having used Feedburner in conjunction with Google Analytics it is quite worrying to see that whilst Analytics provides an accurate reflection of site usage, Feedburner can be manipulated in such a way.
I will be interested to see other users comments regarding this and how they feel Google will progress with its development. Clearly there is a serious issue here that needs to be addressed, as having the raw data manipulated in such ways leads to a variety of serious implications.
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