Did you know that if you paste your Facebook fan page url into your status bar, it not only allows you to choose what thumbnail picture to include, but also shows how many fans the page has?  While we don’t have concrete evidence here, I’d have to think that a page with 2,000 fans will have more credibility than one with only 20 fans– and I’ll bet that fan count is a major factor in determining whether someone clicks through to read the posting.  Anyone have data to show this to be true or not?

Oh, and if you also happen to hit “like” on your own posts, I believe that increases your Post Quality Score, too– even though some people think it may be in poor taste to like your own stuff.  The score of 20.1 is above the average we see of most pages, which is about 10.  What is yours?

Interestingly, Keith has a 71% female audience, though he is a daddy blogger.  See Insights below:

Yesterday afternoon, developers all over began complaining that they couldn’t create FBML pages, the necessary elements of custom landing pages.  The new rule was that you had to either have 10,000 fans or have an account rep, which means that you’re spending money on advertising.  We have some clients that spend $200k on Facebook ads, so it’s not clear what the threshold is to qualify to have a rep– I believe it’s around $5k a day, but that changes and Facebook will not comment on the issue.

In short, you are either a major brand or you are willing to pony up money like a major brand.  If you’re not, then tough.  The catch-22 is that to have a fighting chance to grow to 10,000 fans, you need a custom landing page tab to allow you to ask users to fan you, insert videos, and perform e-commerce.  Overnight, Facebook has instantly zapped a number of businesses that were reliant upon their Facebook presence to promote themselves.  

At the same time, a number of agencies and software shops such as BlitzLocal that specialized in Facebook pages are also in trouble. Even those firms that specialize in Facebook ads will be massively hurt, since without custom landing pages, their conversion rates will suffer.  Those pages that were fortunate enough to have already made custom tabs– their default setting reverts back to the wall.

WHAT THIS MEANS

If you want to play, you have to pay.  That’s pretty clear— unless you’re spending money, and a LOT of money, you’re not important. For our big brand clients, not that big a deal. For local businesses, this just underscores the risk of building your business on someone else’s website. You’re at the whim of their policy changes.  Keep your regular website by all means as an insurance policy.

If you’re a household name, you have far less competition for traffic now– consider yourself lucky, but also know that privacy is a major hurdle that Facebook is struggling with– and the timing of this decision is quite poor.

Advertising can still save the day.  When Allah giveth, Allah also taketh away. Sure, we lost the best part of Facebook pages, but we do still have some insanely good targeting on Facebook ads, where you can target down to the individual person.  As a test, I ran an ad targeting folks who live in Alabama, work at BlitzLocal, and are of an certain age.  Only one person in the world meets that criteria– and I bombarded him with ads that have his name in all caps.  You can still run your ads to your regular website and get fans using global like.

WHAT YOU SHOULD DO

Make sure you are running multiple sources of traffic and maintaining at least your Facebook page and regular (WordPress) site.  You never know when one company stumbles and another arises. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.  Facebook may reduce their 10,000 fan requirement– in the past, they had high minimums to choose a vanity url.  Who’s to say that they may change this rule once they realize how badly it hurts the local businesses who just can’t get to 10,000 fans.

Try out MySpace and Google Content to hedge your bets on Facebook.  The traffic is not as cheap, but these folks have been pouncing at Facebook’s missteps.  I’d say that this recent change is the most FRUSTRATING thing that I’ve seen from Facebook so far– far more than Beacon or even the recent privacy issues.  Facebook is a young company– some of the brighter folks there are probably lobbying to get this changed– and youngsters when they fall down, can often get right back up and learn from their mistakes.

Meanwhile, BlitzLocal is halting the small business page development efforts on Facebook and moving to other platforms such as WordPress.  Jason Calcanis and others are making a stink about Facebook’s recent moves and now deleting their profiles, gathering the masses to leave.  While normal for Jason to gather attention as such, he does have a valid point that when Facebook shifts their policies on pages and apps, as we have witnessed in the last 3 years, then your investment in Facebook is unstable.

How has this change affected you?

UPDATED NEWS:

Facebook has reversed their policy here, as we predicted.  The outcry was enormous.  One source told us that the move was to shut down spammers who were using landing pages to do malicious things. Thus, Facebook hadn’t considered who else would be impacted by that action.

Had Facebook not woken up, our plan of action would have been to continue making automated pages, just focusing on the profile pic for customization. As for advertising, this would have hurt us a bit, since sending users to just the wall versus the landing page tab would have decreased conversion rates. This disaster narrowly avoided points to the risk to sitting on only one platform. In our role as an agency, we have to be wherever the traffic is, so we have to consider organic search, maps, and other ways to get traffic for our clients. Some folks in the Facebook forum have called me ignorant and incorrect in what I’m saying.

If they read the notes carefully and understand the impact, even if we are allowed to still create a landing page tab but NOT specify the default tab, the effect is almost the same. Specifying your homepage tab is just like specifying what is the homepage of your regular site. You know how you can have many tabs on your page, including ones not in the first six that are in the >> on the right? Those are effectively invisible– and that’s the point here. Your default tab setting is critical, as your homepage get most of your traffic.

Facebook’s ad tool gives you demographic counts.  Here are the number of people 18+ in Singapore– 1.8 million:

We’ve left the setting on both genders and all relationship statuses.

Now we look at just the females.  There are 903,840 of them, which is about half the population.

Now let’s look at females who are seeking males– there are only 53,300 of them.

Now what one might erroneously conclude is that the difference (903,840 minus 53,300) are women seeking women.  Thus, 850,540 of these 903,840 are lesbians.

However, not everyone states their sexual preference.  So here are the females seeking females.  There are 102,980 of them, which is nearly double the number of females seeking males!

I ran the stats twice to make sure– and sure enough, these numbers check out.  By the way, if you add up the number of women who prefer either males or females, then you have a total of 156,280, which is only a sixth of the female population of about 900,000.  Thus, 5/6ths of people aren’t declaring their sexual preference. 

Why?  I believe that the gay people don’t want to be obstracized in certain countries, while the heterosexual folks are perhaps tired of being bombarded by dating ads. But there could be also a fraction of people who are bisexual, asexual or have other preferences.

Reminds of a friend who was filling out a form– and in the section marked sex, he said, “Yes, please!”

I set up Google Alerts to monitor a number of keywords– and increasingly I’ve noticed how updates to Facebook pages are now showing up.  Part of this is the fact that Google is increasingly using social signals to determine rankings, since what might have gotten hundreds of links a few years ago will today get a ton of “likes”.  And the concept of links between pages is now morphing into connections between people.  It’s not just PageRank, but FriendRank– or whatever term you prefer to measure influence.

A Facebook executive recently shared with me how getting more fans to your page was actually a great SEO strategy.  Think about that.  You’re generating more inbound links to your page (and yes, it’s accumulating juice) and with frequent/relevant postings, you’re generating more EdgeRank, too. Sometimes that’s enough juice to outrank your regular website, if it’s weak enough. They are probably top 3 for your name, if not already #1.  Here’s mine.

So I predict Facebook showing up in SERPS not just for people’s names, but increasingly for any type of entity.  Have you seen yourself show up more in Google News, Facebook’s own search, and just in general?  BlitzLocal believes that Facebook ads actually help your organic rankings, as you can drive more fans to your pages.

Is this just me or are you also seeing 3 ads on the Facebook homepage? This reminds me of the days when Yahoo! and Google would insert more ads on pages to increase revenue.  Could imagine what Facebook would look like if they inserted ads all over– leaderboards on the top and bottom, and regular ads on the side?  Then they’d collect a 30% fee on payments, plus sell you virtual gifts. Could be a money-making machine, especially if they help advertisers properly capitalize on social targeting options, enhanced by all the new data being made available via the Open Graph and the global like.

Are you scared, excited, disgusted, or indifferent? Seems silly to be spending so many dollars sending traffic to Facebook’s own page– yet there’s no denying the traffic and ROI that stems from doing that, versus sending to your own page.  But if someday your Facebook business page or applications are taken over with ads, then your investment may be less attractive– whether you’re Zynga or not.

A couple weeks ago, Facebook released community pages– an attempt to auto-tag the web and build a rival to Wikipedia.  Great SEO strategy, as these are in-text links coming from people’s profiles, allowing Facebook to extend their rankings from not just people’s names to businesses, but now to organizations, concepts, favorite foods, common complaints, or nearly entity on the web.  Executed right, it’s the most powerful SEO strategy the world has seen– to leverage links, trust, and real content– superior to the Demand Media strategy of farmed content placed under high PR sites.  This is real content by real users on existing powerful pages all at zero cost to Facebook.

But the downside is that some users might not like the content on their profile pages getting hijacked, parsed into chunks and linked to other pages without their permission.  Users complain that they are linked to schools they didn’t attend, products they don’t endorse, or concepts that they are not interested in, since the bot that is auto-generating these tags isn’t well refined yet.

Case in point– do a search on “blitzlocal” and you’ll see that instead of 2 pages, you’ll now find 24 pages– nearly all of them auto-generated Facebook Community Pages taken from profile tags.  Do the same on SEOmoz and you’ll see 21 pages, also with the same types of tags.  SEOmoz is treated separately from SeoMoz or seomoz– hence the confusion. Do a search on your company name and let us know how many copies you find, especially if the name is hard to spell.

We made a demo page for ClickEquations, one of the top PPC management software firms out there– and the algorithm re-categorized it from being a business to being a community page.  I filed a complaint and the Facebook rep said that after careful review, they’ve decided that Craig’s entity is not a business, but should be a community page– in the same vein as community pages such as “I hate people who talk on their cell phones while driving” or other such non-branded items.

Overall, I think Facebook Community Pages are a great concept– but as with any company that is a fierce innovator, they have to balance speed versus accuracy.

We get this question all the time, so I’m going to answer it here and then point people back to this post.

Alexa is the most well-known of the traffic measurement services, but also the least accurate. Let me explain why. Alexa rankings are based on the behavior of the folks who have downloaded the toolbar. No wonder that tech-heavy and venture capitalist sites have fantastic Alexa ratings– the tech people are disproportionately represented as Alexa users. The Alexa on this blog fluctuates between 50,000 and 250,000, which is better than the 30 million plus sites being tracked. Though my blog gets only a few hundred folks a day, it has an Alexa rank better than many sites that get 10,000 uniques a day, such as some of our clients.

What you need to know about Alexa is this:

• If the Alexa rank of a site you’re looking at is not under 100,000, then the odds are the traffic is low.  And if your traffic is low, then the activity of just a few users can make your number bounce from 2 million to 20 million– it’s just noise.  Remember, Alexa estimates your popularity by extrapolating the behavior of a few users up to the entire web. But the Alexa userbase (those who use the toolbar) is highly skewed.  
• You can game the Alexa toolbar by having your friends visit your site or employing a bot service– seems silly to go to that effort just to better your rank.  I suppose geeks can have their boob jobs, too.
• You CAN compare Alexa figures between sites in the same category– so one daddy blogger versus another daddy blogger is fine, since they’re likely to have the same mix of Alexa users.  But a tech blogger versus a kids’ site?  Nope.

Compete and Quantcast are usually far more accurate.  Quantcast allows you to be “quantified” by placing a tracking pixel, so it’s the most accurate.  Yet I don’t see benefit in sharing your stats with the world– but then again, I don’t understand why some people share some of their most personal details in public forums.  When we do analysis, we use multiple third party traffic sources– and typically, Compete and Quantcast go together, while Alexa deviates.  Some thoughts about these two services:

• Compete is great if you want to compare multiple sites at the same time– hence, the name “compete”.  I haven’t personally paid the cash to use the Pro service, but can’t imagine that any paid service is really worthwhile, given how many free tools are available.
• Quantcast is great for individual site demographics and to tell you what other sites are in the same category.  I’d ignore the education and income measures– no way they can accurately determine that.  A neat trick is to take the related sites spit out by Quantcast (your competitors, I’m assuming) and then paste those domains into a spyfu.com or other keyword research tool to get their keywords.

ComScore is for big companies that have a lot of money to spend on reporting, although the unwritten rule is that if you pay ComScore for their reporting, you might somehow rank better in their various reports.  ComScore doesn’t matter to you unless you’re VC funded or a big company that is depending upon who ComScore says is top in a particular category for your valuation or ad rates.  There is a minor conflict of interest here, but not much more so than the fact that automobile review magazines accept ads from car dealerships, or that Yelp takes ads from restaurants that have reviews in their directory.

But the most important tool to use in grading your site is your own analytics– and you should be using Google Analytics here unless you are an enterprise client that can afford a custom clickstream tool to do click level attribution, or are perhaps doing some crazy form of lead generation.

The question is what your goal is with these 3rd party traffic tools. And there are different tools for different jobs depending on whether your aim is keyword research on competitors, exploring new demographics for a product you want to launch, researching the other players to demonstrate where you’ve kicked ass over the last year (to get a raise), or perhaps it’s just a nice stat to consistently track each month over time.

So what tools do you prefer to use for assessing popularity on the web?  My favorite is still Alexa because it’s easy to use and commonly understood.