As you might have noticed lately Facebook began a huge effort to expand their reach outside Facebook with widgets like the share this button, the like this button etc. They also began a huge effort to convince on-line publishers that placing those widgets on their pages increases their reach and attract traffic.
While it is true that Facebook is currently the 2nd traffic source behind search engines, statistics show that users coming from Facebook tend to have very low pageviews/visit* (consistently lower than the site average, in some cases as low as 2 p/v) compared to users coming from search engines (consistently higher than the site average). As it seems the use case is that someone posts a link on Facebook to an article, a friend of that user sees that link, visits the page (maybe even reads the article) and goes back to Facebook to comment,like or ignore the link and move on. It is therefore the case that Facebook traffic brings low quality, drive by, disloyal users which statistics show that it’s very unlikely that will stick around on the site or repeat the visit. Is this a sustainable source of traffic for on-line publishers ?
At a recent event here in Greece a Facebook representative made the case that by embracing Facebook and using Facebook’s marketing tools (Connect, like button, like box, Pages/Groups) brands can have more reach and better engagement with their users. He even gave a very impressive example in the case of the Levi’s Friend Store where the store shows you only what clothes your friends on Facebook “liked”. Impressive stuff which, for off-line brands, are extremely good tools to create an on-line presence and engage users in a more interactive environment than just a branded site. Adidas even goes as far to display their Facebook page on tv ads rather than their actual website or store. Where does online publishers fit in this scenario, though? As demonstrated earlier the usual case is that a user will click on a link on Facebook, visit the site to read/see the content, return to Facebook to comment. Facebook gets the pageviews, the user generated content (comments) and the repeat visits every time someone interacts with that content/comment. The publisher will be happy if he even gets a 2nd pageview and he is the one that is burdened with the cost of producing the content in the first place. That’s a pretty bad deal.
To make matters even worse Facebook is also in the business of selling advertising space on their site, a traditional source of revenue of online publishers. If Facebook succeeds in building a momentum as an advertising platform, online publishers will see their customer’s (advertising agencies) budgets being diverted to a platform that they helped promote and is fueled by their content.
So why do publishers still use Facebook’s tools? It seems that there are numerous reasons. Partly because everyone is doing it, partly because they think that some more traffic never hurt anyone and partly because no one gave it any serious thought when the announcements were made (the privacy debate helped divert the public focus elsewhere).
So the question remains, is there a way to leverage Facebook’s large user base without the drawbacks? I believe there is but that’s a whole new blog post.
*: Based on statistics from several sites with medium to large traffic and big Facebook presence (groups, pages, like buttons etc).