Jason Calacanis Crushes My Facebook News Feed
I’ve got 99 friends on Facebook but I hear from Jason Calacanis more than anyone. He has turned Facebook into a marketing platform for his human-powered search engine, Mahalo. And he doesn’t pay Facebook a dime for this primo branding opportunity.
Every morning I log in to Facebook and there is a link is posted through Mahalo with the Mahalo logo right next to it. As you can see by the screenshot of my news feed, yesterday (and most days) he had 5 items all with the Mahalo logo right next to it.
So how does he do it?
Well, the next generation of optimization is taking shape. First it was search engine optimization (SEO), next came social media optimization (SMO), and now we’ve got news feed optimization (NFO).
Dave McClure thinks “its effin’ brilliant.” and I’m sure other marketers are taking note. Inside Facebook has a very comprehensive post on how you too can optimize your submissions for Facebook’s news feed. Some of their tips:
The most important thing you can do as a Facebook application marketer is to publish engaging, authentic Feed items.
Be sure you optimize your Feed items for all of the Feed item elements made available to you by Facebook: title, body, and images.
Now here’s an amazing tidbit from Inside Facebook “News Feed publishes just a little more than 0.2% of the stories it considers.” Meaning Calacanis must truly be the master of NFO.
Now interestingly, Calacanis has taken on the search engine optimization industry before.
The SEO folks got really pissed off at me for saying “SEO is bulls@#t.” last year, but the truth is that 90% of the SEO market is made up of snake oil salesman.
Do you consider having your Facebook newsfeed dominated by headlines posted to Mahalo (and using the Mahalo logo as the image rather than an image related to the story) to be Facebook SPAM? At the very least, is the rationale behind posting it “optimizing” links for Facebook, hence marketing those links (Mahalo)?
(Now I know I could unfriend Calacanis or block him from my feed, but thats not the point. How is he getting so much content in there in the first place?)
The point is, is it OK to use what others are using for conversation and updates for marketing. And don’t tell me he’s not, because that is exactly what those 5 Mahalo logos every day are doing there. What do you think?