For brands it becomes more and more of a commodity to have a Facebook presence. Companies even start giving up their own web presence altogether (so did Grey in Stockholm a while ago) – and who has ever played around with Facebook Insights for a while starts wondering: why would that happen?

Better web statistics surely can’t be the reason. Yet.

For those who don’t happen to be an Administrator on any Facebook “Fan” pages (or whatever these pages may be called these days) may perform a quick image search for screen shots on “facebook insights” with a search engine.
Similarly as with the Flickr profile stats (coming with a “Pro” account) these stats are repeatedly said to be “just awesome”, but if you have ever have taken a closer look at any contemporary Web Analytics solution, the term “superficial” may come to mind when looking at the Flickr stats or an Insights statistic.

Uh – did I really say that? Well: let me put this into perspective.

Your average web analytics solution has a multitude of ways to track conversions. At the same time conversion tracking is the single-most fucked-up item for nearly any web site I was happening to assess so far. Getting conversion tracking right is painful, error-prone, and more often than not some nasty enhancements to the back-end are needed which was done originally by the hairy programmer the company has fired six years ago.
So most companies have to live with the fact that we cannot get data on funnel dropouts between the funnel stages and just need to accept the fact that we know about the 0.26% visit-to-purchase conversion rate – but don’t know about any more details.

Compared to that, conversion tracking on Facebook is super-easy and super-simple. Doesn’t require custom coding and comes right out of the box. Somebody pressed the “Like” button: voilà – a conversion. Somebody posted something to the wall: voilà – another one. One person switched from the custom landing page tab to another tab: voilà… errrm. Wait a minute.

It seems as if the small chance for meaningful interaction is slightly different on Facebook. Any interaction there is possibly meaningful as there only are a few unique ones anyway. Combine that with only a very small amount of pages (and compare that to the document dumps you can create with a proper MOSS system), and add the promise of sociodemographic data as a secret sauce – and here you have very easy, simple to follow metrics: amount of daily likes and unlikes, total lifetime count of likes, pageviews per tab, etc.

The major difference between a company web site and a company (or product) presence on Facebook is that company web sites (and blogs) are not coming with social reach from the start. Gaining (and keeping) traffic on a web site usually is a slow and painful process (unless you are comingthru.com :)).

“Social reach” is the predominant meme for enhancing a company web site with a Facebook presence. The connection between both can be reached by placing a “like” button on relevant elements on your company’s site – these items will then as well appear in the Facebook stats. Though this is – technically spoken – a double tagging, it doesn’t hurt the traffic acquisition strategy for your web site and enhances your Insights stats with higher numbers of feelgood metrics: indeed you may instantly like the “like”.

The implications of this trend are slowly gaining shape: instead of following an increasingly scattered anonymous audience on your web site which prefers multi-tab browsing more and more (a pain for session analysis) and shows no consistent behavioural patterns across visits, it is of course a lot easier to concentrate on small pieces of ad hoc interactions which indicate a sentiment rather than the conclusion of a complex consideration process which may culminate in a newsletter sign-up, a purchase, or a demo download.

Concentrating on increasing audiences and social reach (500 million active users in July 2010, growth rates well above 100 percent per year) makes us “return to the icon” (Marshall McLuhan):
The rapid audience growth in Facebook allows companies to indulge in a constant stream of success stories for their online presence (“22% increase in August, 58% increase in September”).

And consider this: The average amount of friends a Facebook member has is 130. Mostly we look at smaller networks which are linked reciprocally, but you can imagine the reach potential that service provides, if only 30 friends for each user were unique.

And, yes: – the sociodemographic data on Insights is so far a placebo only. All the tiny interaction bits and pieces cannot be sliced and diced into demographic segments.
This means that I currently cannot check whether members of my most favourite target audience (the infamous “over eighty-year old males living in tents in Iceland”) are the ones clicking all the tabs and likes – or whether their grand daughters in Toronto, London, and New York are doing it.
But it’s only a matter of time until we can segment this activity data, I’m sure.