What’s your Facebook strategy ?

Well the numbers are in. We’ve crossed a crucial milestone - AdAge is reporting that Facebook is now shoving more traffic than Google to the Internet’s top destinations. PerezHilton.com, Dlisted, CafeMom, Evite, Tagged.com, and Twitter are all seeing the game change right in front of them.

This comes to us via Hitwise who use a three-way blended methodology for traffic estimates (panel/client, server logs, ISP monitoring). Probably safe to believe this claim.

Two things come to mind about this:

Where they came from: the whole context of site visitation is changing. Web publishers need to think in terms of their content blending in more seamlessly with other content streams that visitors are involved in when they hit a new site. Apparently this now means Facebook. People aren’t searching to find you, they are pivoting to quickly scrape through your content and work their way back to Facebook. A highly chunked, low friction presentation model is worth considering. The internet as iPhone?

How you reach them: this is a good news / bad news situation. When Google ruled most of your traffic, there were well understood pathways to reach your audience: keyword affinity, CPM rates, auctions, search advertising, etc. But how do you garner Facebook traffic? Bad news: you can’t really do it shotgun style (run-of-site, takeovers, remnant buys). The good news: Facebook seems on their game about opening things up and allowing low friction attention flows between your content and their platform. More good news: they seem to have really good customer segmentation abilities which presumably means more impactful messaging when users finally see your content.

Unclear how this will effect bottom lines in the advertising economy if at all. It certainly complicates how we calculate the net value of display advertising. My hunch is that crossing this threshold is moving us into a “next phase” of increased optimization - one that hopefully spews more cash into the system.

Wednesday, March 11th, 2009 Technology