Viral Lift Calculation from Addthis

I'm unimpressed, or at least confused, by Addthis' analytics. I'm new to Addthis.com and generally, I like the breakdo2wn by service, some of the ability to look at timeframe (why not allow people to pick a specific time period so they can compare March vs February), and the overall presentation.

But the table about effectiveness should, in this user's humble opinion, provide this: 

I would think that the columns information that I'd like to get are:
- page impressions of the addthis.com gadget
- number of shares - total or by service
- the percent of shares
- number of click throughs from the shares by other users
- the percent

Instead, there's this viral lift concept which I think is just the last point. I think.
I'll go ask this question on their forum and see what they say....
I've posted it but, I'm not sure that I did the signature right. Probably, I'll be banned now...sigh.
http://www.addthis.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=2

Add this.com viral lift

I've started using addthis.com on VSC and I'mconfused by the concept of viral lift. And i quote:

Viral lift is the percentage increase in traffic due to shares and clicks. Essentially, viral lift shows you how viral your content is – if your shares are getting a lot of clicks, your viral lift percentage will be high.

The AddThis Analytic’s viral lift feature is a valuable tool in making editorial decisions and tailoring future content.  It allows you, as a publisher, to see what shares are sending the most traffic back to your site. If you head into your analytics dashboard, you will see that we flag a page as viral if it’s generating more clicks than shares. Then head into the Content tab, sort by clicks and you can easily see what content is really resonating.

End quote. I'm confused in that I feel that if content has a high share to visit ratio, it's already worth flagging it as having some viral potential. In fact, if people are sharing it, its a GREAT thing. A second question is whether the shares generate cliks. This could be driven by the quality of your page title, image , and meta description which is what shows up on a Facebook share.

Add this!

When you run a website, there's so much to do.  Actually, if you run a website, you can do as little or as much as you want. Let me tell you about my experience running websites. First of all, I don't run them by myself. We are no up to 30 people working on these sites.

There's also so much to do. Our priorities:
1. Customer service. Answer the phones. Well! And find out what issues our users are having and resolve them.
2.  Build great new content and services.
3.  Maintain our advertising and SEO efforts.
4.  Try to be current with all the cool new stuff like social media, social bookmarking etc etc. You'll notice that this blog still pops up some outdated icons at the bottom of each post (I often delete them). I see a blank form, technorati, delicious.  We finally, on one of our major sites; VocabularySpellingCity.com, put up an Addthis.com on every page on the site. Addthis give some pretty cool stats and should be easy to update in case Twitter and Facebook don't remain the big dogs. Hard to imagine but then, they just arrived in the last three to four years so we'll see.

So pop over to some of our pages on VocabularySpellingCity and share or tweet the pages, would you? thanks.

Word Lists

Capitonyms - New!
Compound Words
Contractions
Dolch - Sight Words
Geography Lists
Homophones, Homonyms, etc.
Literature Based Word Lists
Math Vocabulary - New!
Monthly Holiday Lists
Phonics & Sight Word Curriculum 
Possessive Nouns 

Sequential Spelling Program

Sound Alike Words
del.icio.us

Facebook like this page, FB like your FB page, Facebook Share

I think I finally understand this. The icons here are from a typical page on the Time4Learning website: http://www.time4learning.com/education/third_grade.shtml .

The F icon there is a "share this page" icon. It will place on the user's Facebook home page some info about this page from our website. Specifically, it'll put up a user comment, the page meta title, the page metadescription, and an image from the page. This is different than the following two cases:

Facebook Like this page. Many websites have FB likes that have the user "liking" that specific page of the website.   If you click on them, you've liked the specific page (or post in this case since we're in a forum).

Facebook Like set up to Like their Facebook Page.  This is how the likes are set up on the home page of the Time4Learning website. A person who likes any of the Facebook Like icons on these page becomes a friend of ours on Facebook. It's very different than liking the page. For instance, they get updates on their Facebook page from our Facebook page.  Visually, I don't think there's a way to know the different between the two.

Facebook Sharing - What content gets chosen?

I've just been running some tests about how the Facebook share icon works in terms of what image, title, and message it picks up. I'm pretty sure that when you put a share icon on a webpage, as we've done on so many of the T4L webpages, here's one for example:
http://www.time4learning.com/secular/index.shtml
the share icon picks up the page title, the meta description and the first image on the page. Here's a test: 

 
However, I've been trying to figure out how Facebook picks the image. In this case, it gives the user a choice of 12, all of which can be found on the page. The first one is an odd choice, it's not the first image on the page. It might be the largest. It's not the one that's closest to the top in the center either.