Barry Adams, an online marketing specialist, reported yesterday that “Facebook is taking social media marketing seriously.” Apparently Mr. Adams got an email from Facebook containing useful information on all pages that he serves as an administrator. The email contained information such as:
-number of new fans
-wall posts
-statistics on the pages visited by fans
Obviously, this is an effort on Facebook’s part to get more information to administrators that they can use to quantify the activity on their pages. One of the biggest problems social media sites face after all is the lack of metrics to show online marketers just how well (or bad) their marketing efforts are going. What Facebook is doing is trying to bridge this gap by updating them on their page activity.
The statistics contained in the email is still a far from what marketers need to determine the ROI for putting ads on facebook and creating their own facebook page, however, it is a step in the right direction. Hopefully, eventually they will come up with better tools to keep track of statistics and of course analyze the data. As Mr. Adams points out, is there a Facebook Analytics (ala Google Analytics) looming in the near future? Whether there is or isn’t, in the end it will still be up to the marketers to keep track of conversion rates coming from click from facebook. Aside from that despite all the measurable data it will still be impossible to determine just how many people really will look at an ad on facebook and have their brand awareness increased since not everyone who glances at an ad will click on it. Just shows that there is still a long way to go when it comes to having things quantified for social marketing.
