Facebook seems like the perfect (or, at least, best) environment for turning ideas and products into something viral.  It has three big things going for it — your messages go to many people, the people who receive the messages are people you actually know to some degree (setting aside Pages for now), and they can re-share the item in the same environment.

So I’ve always assumed that items shared on Facebook were like kindling to a bonfire, able to spark the sharing of content in ways which most content producers only dream.

But some recent data I stumbled across suggests that either (a) my data is bad or (b) it doesn’t refer nearly as much as you’d think.

On Thanksgiving, I re-published a story from Now I Know’s archives titled “How Turkey Got Its Name.”  It hit the front page of reddit, which is always a good thing for a publisher, and demonstrates to some degree that it’s good content. 

I was also able to see that it had a healthy number of shares on Facebook — over 800, as seen below.  (To get this data, I think a friend needs to share it, and then you just type the title of the article in the Facebook search box, and this appears as an auto-complete item.  I’m sure there’s a better way to do this.)

See? 803 shares.

How many visits will that result in?   

In my case, only about 800.  Here’s all the referring traffic from Facebook over the last two days:

It adds up to 888, but if you dig a bit deeper, only 833 of those visits went to the turkey story.  That’s 1.038 visits per share — which means that it’s simply not being clicked on enough in order to “go viral,” so to speak.  (I guess, technically, it is, if everyone who clicked then shared, but practically speaking, no way.)

Perhaps that’s a reflection on my content — I really don’t know (but I hope not!).  Regardless, I just don’t think people click those links often enough for the content behind them to take off, at least not at the volume of ~1000 shares.