Facebook Scorecard

Consider Facebook to be a school which grades all its pupils in a big relative grading system called "SOCIAL STANDING". There are marks assigned for everything from attendance to time spent in school (On Facebook). Like most schools it gives its pupils a constant chance to work hard towards improving their social standing. Though it does favour the best and the brightest of the lot as according to the grading system the more you score the more chance you will get to shine on others walls to score further. (PS: Score refers to scoring points)

Likes:
Likes on pics and posts are basic points which keep getting added to your report. This is also the most common base of comparison between students to do a self evaluation of their social standing

Comments:
Comments go a level higher and work as point boosters, can range from +5pts to +100pts depending upon the social standing of the person who commented (Somebody actually took out time to type all that, even though they might have just copy pasted and tweaked a previous comment). Considering average attention span of individuals when online is just 2secs unless its porn, comments are considered to be high value by both the users and Facebook.

Share:
Share is a Multiplier. Every time somebody shares your content all the basic points that you accumulated via likes and comments gets multiplied by the no of pupils who shared your post.

Friends:
The total no of friends on Facebook for an individual can in some cases be more than the no of people the individual has actually physically interacted with in his entire lifespan. Its just a way to get more points. Adding people who you don't know is cheating for getting a higher social standing but Facebook promotes it by showing you common friends (In some cases you might not even remember the common friends but still add them because 5 common friends means you might just know them)

Messeges:
That has no relevance in the score card its a means for FB to ensure students don't shift to other schools of social standing like Google+ with its enticing Gmail and Gchat masters programmes.

Facebook's Social standing calculator is a much more complex algorithm whose components i have tried to explain in this post. Watch this space for more such tit bits on the different schools of social standing.