For the fast dwindling number of people not yet on Facebook and other social media sites, the amount of time those channels can chew up represents one deterrent for those not signing on.
For businesses digesting the impact of Facebook, they have access to a lot more data today on just how much time social media users are spending on their sites.
That could be profitable information not just for companies considering whether to devote additional resources to social media marketing campaigns ”“ whether in the form of man-hours or money ”“ but also for the burgeoning number of marketing agencies promising big returns from social media.
Facebook Inc. has been bolstering its Insights analytics platform the past few years.
For several years, Facebook has kept developers in the loop on ways to create application-programming interfaces to exploit data generated by traffic on member sites. Many small businesses, however, are not yet realizing those tools are fast proliferating and easy to access, according to David Parmet of Nurenu Brand Marketing L.L.C., which has offices in New Canaan and Topsfield, Mass.
“They used to have bland analytics,” Parmet said. “There”™s a lot more now, including great ones for local companies in terms of where are your ”˜likes”™ coming from.”
In August, Facebook launched an Insights for Credits tool to help businesses view snapshots of the Facebook Credits transactions in their apps. The feature allows a visual overview of spending by users, refunds and other information. That frees people from having to look at hundreds of lines of transactions from a daily Facebook Credits report.
Other Facebook Insights tools include one that shows whether a page visitor clicks on a photo to enlarge it ”“ a clear sign of interest ”“ as well as other click-through behavior such as the people who have “liked” a business”™ page and those who have commented or linked to it for others to see.
Even as Facebook launched Insights for Credits, Gartner Inc. published its annual “hype cycle” study, which assesses nearly 2,000 different emerging technologies for the ones that appear to be generating the most enthusiasm.
Social media analytics was near the top on the Stamford-based company”™s chart, edged out only by a small number of new items, including Internet TV, smartphone payment systems and private cloud computing.
Google Inc., which already offers sophisticated analytics for its standard web applications, is also offering analytics for its new Google+ social media platform. Then there is the small army of independent analytics companies such as Buddy Media, HootSuite and Vitrue, among others.
It”™s a lot for any one company to absorb and keep up with ”“ whether a small business or a big corporation. For its part, Stamford-based World Wrestling Entertainment Inc. recently filled a full-time director of digital analytics position to pin down data coming in from social media sites and the wider Web.
“We always look at how we are trending in social media, primarily Facebook and Twitter,” said George Barrios, CFO of Stamford-based WWE in a December conference call. “Google Trends and Google Analytics also gives us a sense of how the brand is trending from a search perspective. We look at our own unique and page views on our own site as well as the streams that we do. We do about 75 million video streams on YouTube every month, so we track that.”
While numerical analytic data is useful, it only augments the most useful data coming in over the social media transom, according to B.J. Flagg, director of account services for Nurenu ”“ direct feedback from visitors.
“It”™s a space for companies and customers to interact,” she said. “There are some people up and down (Fairfield County) who are doing this stuff really well ”“ who are knocking it out of the park.”
Here are a couple of quick question for you: if you have a site without an e-commerce platform what sort of KPIs would you suggest focusing on? Should there be a clear ROI for these types of sites? Can the Facebook analytics deal with this?