I was going through some interesting Facebook Like data, collected and analyzed by Yury Lifshits (45 sites, 100K+ articles, 40M+ reactions). The data and analysis provides some really actionable recommendations on a number of items – and if you are a publisher in the midst of analyzing your social media endeavors, this is certainly a report for you.

What really caught my eye though, was this specific conclusion and accompanying recommendation:

“Improve promotion of your best content. [...]. To get maximum return on your hits, change your Front Page policy. Best stories should be highly visible” – Yury Lifshits, Yahoo!

I completely agree! But I think it is fair to say that it is humanly difficult to a) find your hits and b) making them highly visible. A fair conclusion, even if you consider my positive bias (aka Love) for the capability we have at Visual Revenue to predict hits and assign them appropriate visibility.

Finding a hit is unfortunately not as easy as looking at a most views (or likes) report, due to the possibility of you generating self-fulfilling prophecies (something I talk about in my Boston.com opportunity post).  Also, making something highly visible ask for the front page editor to know the value of every single Article Box on the front page at that specific point in time.

I’ll be speaking at OMMA Metrics in New York later this month, and at eMetrics in Toronto in April (not SF though) – so I’ll have plenty of opportunity to tell my “front page” story these coming months.

Cheers :-)
/ Dennis (@dennismortensen)