The use of social networking sites such as Facebook has grown dramatically over the last three years. Nielsen reports that the average Facebook user spends 14 minutes a day on the site, dwarfing others like Google and Amazon. Facebook has essentially become its own Internet, where people communicate, watch videos, share photos and play games. Most interestingly, all of the members have rich personas attached to the site. They visit as themselves, not as a credit card number or esoteric username. The combination of rich personal details and frequent activity has the potential to create exciting new opportunities, but businesses are still in the early days of figuring out how to leverage Facebook and similar social channels.
Marketers are still struggling to create highly personalized experiences that serve the specific needs and behaviours of each individual visitor to a traditional style website. This vision is still difficult to achieve, in large part because websites still do not have direct access to the needs and off-site behaviours of the visitor. Web analytics and visitor pro-filing have enabled a limited level of personalization, but the available data for each visitor is often limited to the demographics associated with an IP address or search terms. This does not distinguish an actual visitor; it only knows coarse statistical data related to that visitor.

With 1.6 million users spending a considerable portion of their online time onsite, Facebook and other social networks would appear to be a marketer’s dream. The sites themselves attract millions of views per day and each viewer, being a member of the site, has a higher degree of personal data associated with him or her than a typical visitor to Google or other vendor sites. Facebook exploits this information by letting advertisers choose targets based on gender, political views and education level.

Despite this level of personalization, many advertisers are less than satisfied with the results of these campaigns. There might be several reasons for this, but one should examine the intentions of the average Facebook visitor. When people visit Facebook, they do so to interact with friends, see what is new and consume content that was created or curated by their network. In short, they are socializing, not consuming in the traditional sense.
So, advertising on the social networks themselves can be of limited value. However, that does not mean that social networking sites are of limited value to advertisers and retailers. One of the most important characteristics of social networks is that they serve as a centralized identity management service for their users. For example, because of its role as a social enabler, Facebook profile information is generally accurate. Our accounts on Facebook contain a wealth of data about us, whereas an online merchant’s account contains only a credit card number, address and buying history. Social networks have leveraged this information for years, but recently, networks like Facebook have started to make that data available to other sites if the member allows. This is a major change, as members now have the ability to transfer their personal data to a site where they are in fact behaving as customers.

In December 2008, Facebook released Facebook Connect, a mechanism that websites can use to allow visitors to login using their Facebook credentials. For Facebook, this development is a win because it extends its influence beyond facebook.com. For users, it can be seen as a way to eliminate the hassle of inputting the same information time and again. For retailers and brand sites, this represents a significant opportunity to harvest detailed customer data. Because Facebook shares a user’s entire profile with any site that the user has chosen to connect with, the available data is very rich, ranging from personal attributes to hobbies to the visitor’s entire network of friends and acquaintances. To put this into perspective, consider the “detailed” visitor data typically available from website analytics tools. This data provides the visitor’s Internet service provider, the city and several properties of the Internet browser. Using information such as location, the website can often derive attributes such as average income or degree of sophistication, but these attributes are very approximate. Buying behaviour, navigation and inbound search terms all help to further define the user, but the majority of the data is contextual rather than personal. Based on this information, the site knows where the visitor is coming from, but not who he or she is.

Compare this to what Facebook knows about many of its members: age, gender, marital status, hobbies and more. The entire range of data also includes the visitor’s list of friends (and many of their attributes), all of their photos and videos. This tells us much more about the visitor, through both explicit and implicit information. This degree of information, combined with inbound search terms and previous site history, gives us a much better view of the visitor’s intentions.
These changes show that social networks are becoming storehouses of rich personal data. However, there is another important phenomenon to consider: the fact that social networks are becoming storehouses of rich personal media. Currently, millions of photos are shared on Facebook every day, making it a larger photosharing site than most dedicated sites, such as Flickr. Increasingly, users also upload video and other forms of media.
A person is defined, in part, by who he knows and associates with. Marketers must take that into account—something they can do by using the data available from a visitor’s social network profile. In addition to personal attributes, the profile contains a list of friends and a list of groups that each person belongs to. These represent social links that can be used to learn more about the visitor and to serve him better.

A first-order connection is between friends. Once a website has access to a visitor’s social-networking profile, it gains information about a visitor’s friends. That information can be used to make inferences about the visitor. For example, a first-time visitor might be a complete mystery to the site in terms of buying habits, but the site can use the buying patterns of the visitor’s friends to begin inferring behaviour. A “friend” can represent a highly valued or trusted connection. This relationship can be exploited to show trusted reviews and ratings to the visitor, thereby relying on relationships to increase interest and awareness of a given product.

A second-order connection is between the visitor and his groups. In some cases, the title of the group may be enough to understand the social affinities of the visitor. In other cases, the site may need to collect information about each visitor, relate that information to the visitor’s groups, and begin to profile the group over time.

Each of these classes of connections represents an approach to learning more about the user. In addition to analysis and profiling, these connections can be used to create more valuable experiences for the user. The exact form of these experiences will be highly dependent on the site.
These connections represent conduits through which people communicate, share status and influence each other’s behavior. Influence is perhaps the most interesting aspect for marketers, and is worth examining separately.

Traditional forms of online marketing focus on the ability for a banner ad or other online advertising to draw the user to the site. In other words, this approach relies on the influence exerted by various mechanisms rather than people. This is largely due to the fact that click-throughs are easy to capture, measure and analyze in a way that casual conversations are not. That began to change with the advent of Web 2.0. New forms of social media gave rise to a number of methods for measuring the influence of “buzz.” Marketers were now in a position to try to understand and direct the influence of the crowd, but person-to-person influence was difficult to capture.

The development and growth of social networks then opened up new possibilities for marketers. These networks give users an easy way to share product reviews and other media with their friends in a more casual way than via e-mail or other communication channels. They also provide a mechanism for viral effects, as information shared with one group of friends could spread when they share it with their friends. Analyzing the spread of these shared messages could provide a better understanding of the likelihood of a product inspiring a person to share it with friends, the reach of that share, the rate of conversion from share to visit, and finally the rate of conversion from visit to buy.

On a product level, this type of analysis can help marketers understand how new products and marketing messages are spread through the digital space. For example, How quickly does the message or product information spread to a population of people, How many people have seen or shared the message, How diverse is the group of people that has seen the message?
On a personal level, such information allows marketers to understand the influence of individuals or groups. By looking at the way individuals respond to information, marketers can develop campaigns that target individuals and also ultimately aim to increase the buying behaviours of a larger population. By looking at influence trends through a given group, the marketers can learn how to cater to self-identified clusters of customers.
Visitors entering a site using their social networking credentials share a great deal about themselves, their network and their ability to influence that network. Each of these aspects, when used separately or in combination, provide marketers with new options for both engaging and understanding their customers.

It is however critical to understand that users of Facebook personal data should only use it in compliance with all applicable laws ensuring that all required permissions are requested.

By Philip Macartney – Social Media Lead at eightytwenty/interactive™