Seems that Facebook’s velocity has slowed down since the launch of the new site last week. Velocity is defined by Compete.com as:
Velocity is an effective way to measure the impact of planned (or unplanned) events, such as new advertising campaigns, product/service launches or general site growth. Simply choose an event date as the starting point to see how it has affected a site’s Attention over time.
Since this metric is derived from time spent on a site, it can be used to assess the quality of traffic generated by the event/campaign.
For instance, Site X could drive up its Unique Visitors by buying a lot of pop-up ads across the Internet. However, most of these people may leave the site immediately. Use Velocity to understand how much more or less time people spent on the site, or their level of engagement. If a site can garner and sustain more of an individual’s time it should generally be considered a good thing
As an engagement metric, the slow down is a problem for Facebook. The latest updates were meant to increase sharing, which should be reflected in the velocity. Even worse for Facebook, Twitter’s velocity has increased since the new Facebook launch. In theory, Twitter’s velocity should be even greater considering the fact that many of it’s users access the site via third-party applications which would not even be included in these numbers.
