If you’ve a web site, then definitely you should be interested in having certain metrics measured that will tell you how well your website is faring. You would be interested in knowing the navigation patterns your visitor display on your site, where there are coming from, what they do on your site, what software they use, how they leave your site, their click patterns etc. You have a varied number of such indices that helps in measuring the level of success a site is having. You get to know your sites strong points, where it is broken and what to do to fix it. Well, it could be very possible for you to have your website and careless about collecting these data, if you are unserious about the role your website is playing towards achieving its sets goals, then you are right on course, definitely that is the road to take. But if otherwise, web analytics should be an important strategy for you.
So now I have got this Facebook account, and am finding myself wanting to bring this web analytics way of life on board. I want to measure cause and effects. Just as you might be interested in knowing which pages on your site holds your readers attention the most, am also interested in knowing which of my actions on facebook gets noticed the most. So am in need of a facebook analytics...Maybe I am taking this analytics thingy a little bit too far…or maybe not.
I want to know, which will lead to a higher rate of click through in the long run; hyperlink in my status messages or hyperlink in my notes. Ok, I write a note about a service I am pushing; can I quantify the number of people that gets to read the notes? Or maybe I should even stop posting items, since nobody in reality gets to click on them and instead, move my links to my status messages where they apparently enjoy a larger rate of click through.
Or is there a period of the day that enjoys increase congregation on Facebook? Lunch hour? Maybe it’s a better strategy to leave notes on Friday; lot of people gets to play on Facebook over the weekend?
Maybe if I've got a facebook analytics, i would be able to tell...
What if I have a company, and I send a message to a lot of my friends and acquaintances on facebook, since it’s a thread, every recipient Included in the address gets to be notified when someone else replies to the initial mail, I want to know, are people finding this annoying? This idea of getting notified about a mail thread that they weren’t even interested in, in the first place, is it bad branding for my company?
I want to know, how effective is mentioning people in my facebook notes; does it make for an increase in readership? What about this thing of tagging people in pictures they don’t even appear in? How many people even snoop around my profile? If I know, maybe I should spend more time customizing the things I leave on my profile pages instead of wasting my energy in creating a public page for myself. And ha! There are those groups you join!
Well, ever since I started viewing facebook as more than just a time waster, but as a platform for networking and personal branding, the project manager in me, has ever since then, wanted to find ways of quantifying actions on facebook, to measure level of success and to use these data thus collected in coming up with strategies and ways to customize my actions for an increase impact.
But it seems at the moment, since there is no facebook analytics anywhere in sight, I have only my intuition to rely on for guidance.