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A comment on You Are More Influential Than You Think You Are.

Re:You Are More Influential Than You Think You Are by yahelc on Wednesday May 22, 2013 @06:36PM (#5754223)
One thing you might not be accounting for is whether or not bit.ly is tracking Facebook's crawlers as clicks, since Facebook will follow the bit.ly link, and while bit.ly tries to exclude bots, who knows how successful it is.

You could test by posting a status with a bit.ly link where you're the only one who has permission to view the status, and see if you get any clicks on that link.

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Re:You Are More Influential Than You Think You Are by kevincennis on Wednesday May 22, 2013 @06:56PM (#5754319)
You could probably just past the link into the update textarea and never post. They actually crawl those links before you submit so they can do their fancy formatting stuff while you're posting.
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Re:You Are More Influential Than You Think You Are by hayksaakian on Wednesday May 22, 2013 @11:54PM (#5755264)
presumably, each link would be crawled an equal number of times.

this seems like a constant rather than a variable.

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Re:You Are More Influential Than You Think You Are by yahelc on Thursday May 23, 2013 @08:47AM (#5756499)
Maybe, but that's an untested assumption. AFAIK, Facebook's crawler behavior is a black box. Who knows how often it recrawls? Or if there's even a constant behavior?

Either way, from an experimental design perspective, leaving that assumption untested is unwise.

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