09 Apr 12 Birthday!

My birthday was this past weekend on 4/7 (woot!). I am always appreciative of those who wish me a happy bday and nowadays there are a number of ways to do this:

1. In-person wishes
2. Phone call/physical card
3. Text/email
4. Facebook/Twitter

What is interesting to me is how the Facebook experience in particular has for so long been rooted around birthdays. That and the poke. As a result, I’ve graphed the number of Wall posts I’ve received on my birthday (plus a day or two buffer) to wish me a happy bday.

’07-’08 are above the mean — the red horizontal line — and ’10-’12 are below it. In fact, the first two years of data (’07-’08) are overall nearly 20% higher than the last two years (’11-’12). Less love for me or did Facebook do something to de-emphasize the engagement on birthdays from a design or EdgeRank perspective? 

Add to this the fact that my total number of Facebook friends has grown by  56% from ’07-’12 so the percentage of friends posting is actually 50% lower.

Here you see the same dip in 2009 when viewed as a percentage of friends and then the slight “recovery” which still puts it at well less than the pre-’09 era.

This is just my data but I would love to see what others think about this. It’s very possible that it’s due to my decreased engagement with Facebook and therefore the site favoring me less, or friends posting less often since I do not engage back as much as I used to.

 

Tags: birthday, edgerank, engagement, Facebook, poke, wall posts