Drupal Design & Development
Facebook - Undeniably Clever
Submitted by Dream on Mon, 10/05/2010
Just a short insight into a clever piece of statistic gathering from Facebook in the UK recently. Unless you've been living under a rock you will have heard that there was a general election in the UK, for politics it's been pretty dire, but for the mighty empire known as Facebook it was a definite win!
Facebook introduced an election vote counter to track users who had voted, the figure they reached was in the millions by the end of the day - what a click happy Facebook userbase they have. Now, on face value you would think that they had just introduced a quick poll to engage users and out of the goodness of their hearts, got people more interested in the election. However if you scratch a little deeper you could see a wide area of data that has been gathered for not only "poll" usage but wider marketing as well.
Recent small changes with Facebook such as the "like" rather than "fan" status, means that they are streamlining their data gathering operations further than previously. It is engrained in the Facebook culture to scan through all your contacts status's, sometimes comment but much easier to just hit the 'like' link. So why is this different? Simply because users are providing Facebook with positive recommendations for targeted advertising with every single click.
Now, increase your 'like' usage to other areas, such as Business, Arts and Facebook pages and just imagine the profile that has been amassed about you. Some people will be of the opinion that Facebook is evil for such practises, I'm not one of them. I think that Facebook is a great tool, provided for free, with the owners trying to generate revenue from advertising.
From the election voting poll, Facebook has added another couple of stats to their profiling. You have now told them if you are interested in the voting System, if you voted, if you want to share that information (courtesy of a handy checkbox), among other normal stats such as your Facebook usage, time of participation etc.
Couple this with the previous poll "who do you want to win the election", and wow, not only are you interested in Politics but you also are voting for a particular person (and I bet you 'liked' their page too eh?).
In summary, Facebook is a testament to would-be marketeers everywhere with lessons for all to master. A quick round-up of Marketing the Facebook way can be summarised as follows:
- Increase your userbase to substantial numbers
- Ensure participation, make it positive so you only gain positive data
- Have an open platform, free is best but is dependant on your business
- Reward people who participate, Facebook does this by displaying a simple message ('you like this')
- Listen to your stats and act on them
Thanks for reading this little expose, it's not groundbreaking information by any means, but hopefully made you think a bit about how you can grow your information gathering and put it to good use.
