Most of the social media metrics that we crawl day to day come in as totals. This means that we need to have a consistent convention for establishing whether the difference (new fans, plays, or views) between the totals on day 1 and day 2 should be displayed on day 1 or day 2.  

For instance, Facebook fans come into the system as the total number of likes that a fan page has on any given day. So if on day 1, a page has 300 likes, and on day 2, the same page has 350, the Next Big Sound convention is to display the difference, or “delta” as happening on day 1. So on the graphs you’d see that as day 1: 50 new fans. We choose to do it this way because the cumulative values tend to be pulled in the mornings of each day.

There was previously a bug in the graphs causing that convention to instead display the day to day changes as happening on the later day, instead of on the earlier. We have since corrected the problem and apologize for any inconvenience the discrepancy may have caused.

Posted February 23, 2011