New Analytics Might Spoil Facebook's Pull with Marketers
Facebook is getting even more attention in the form of companies trying to measure the site's marketing effectiveness. And that may not be a good thing for the social network.
As my BNET colleague Jim Edwards has noted, Facebook is often not that effective a marketing platform, particularly when it comes to ads. The types of metrics hitting the market could convince companies that there are better ways to spend their money, especially if they find that the reach of commercial Facebook is much lower than many realize.
One set of tools comes from comScore, known for its combination of online panel research and site-reported data to estimate the number of unique visitors to Web pages:
The service focuses on measuring the impact of how big companies use Facebook's fan pages and the "like" button as well as what individuals say on their own pages about specific products and services. On Facebook, an advertiser can grab and republish an individual's comments about, say, Southwest Airlines or Starbucks, a marketing format that the site calls "Sponsored Stories."While smart marketers already pay attention to the conversations on their Facebook pages, as well as other social media, this would be a deeper level of analysis. With data, assumptions about the benefits of marketing campaigns can start to go out the windows.
For example, PageLever gets to a level of detail that can detonate preconceptions. Most fan pages on Facebook reach only a tiny portion of the fans they have, as this table from PageLever shows (click to enlarge):
It may be that the numbers are due to poor strategy and operations on the parts of the companies. Still, it's hard to get enthusiastic about a medium that doesn't seem to be performing. The people in a large corporation pulling for Facebook as a marketing medium now have more work to show why it deserves attention and resources.
At the same time, for companies that pursue a strategy that shows results, the tools might be just what the marketers need to show effectiveness and argue for more budget to pump into Facebook.
Related:
- Technology Has Become the Marketing Snoop's Scapegoat
- 8 Things You Didn't Know about Facebook and Zynga
- The Social-Media Race: It's Down to Facebook, Google and Microsoft
- Facebook's Ad Business Enters Its Awkward Adolescence
- How Facebook's Ad Revenues Pose a Threat to Google
- 8 Unanswered Questions About Facebook's Finances
Erik Sherman is a widely published writer and editor who also does select ghosting and corporate work. The views expressed in this column belong to Sherman and do not represent the views of CBS Interactive. Follow him on Twitter at @ErikSherman or on Facebook.
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