There has been a lot of press lately that Facebook is catching up with Google when it comes to the volume of unique visitors. Indeed, Facebook has been closing the gap quickly over the past year. The thing that I realized though is that Unique Visitor is not telling the whole story. It just tells you how many people are coming to the site.
When it gets down to it, the story about Facebook isn’t that it’s new. In July 2009, it was matching Google for the number of visits per person. It is pretty startling to think how often people use Google products in a day. That’s right, the comparison charts include over 400 Google subdomains in their counts.
As of August, Facebook starting pulling away and hasn’t looked back. Did you ever wonder why so many big brands have been rapidly migrating to Facebook? They have the consumers’ attention, and have decided to get in on the action.
In the online marketing and techno world, there is a lot of buzz about Twitter and Foursquare. It is true, theses tools have a good audience, and growing, but when you look at the overall volume, it makes you think how important are these tools in the mix of your online marketing?
The most amazing factor in considering the Facebook factor is the overall attention they have gotten. Even a year ago, more people have been paying attention to Facebook than to Google or other social media outlets.
Attention considers all the time a user spends online as total and then determines what percentage of that time was spent on each website. When you think about how little attention other popular social media tools are getting, it is almost embarrassing. Yes, I have written a dozen or so blog posts about Twitter and Twitter tools, but virtually nothing about Facebook.
It seems like Facebook has shown that it has captured the users’ attention, and the ability to see the results of the competition tell a compelling story about the powerful opportunities that Facebook holds for marketers to engage with consumers.