Are you wondering how your content is performing? Now? How about now? Facebook announced on Tuesday that the social network has turned its static ‘Like’ buttons into real-time analytics machines for publishers — whether you, the publisher, like it or not.
For the most part, it seems as if the changes will be a good thing. Insights will be able to give you real-time demographics, with more dimensions, centralizing unique visitors and page views for specific pieces of content. It puts Facebook in contention for standardization and insight into content sharing — and represents another whack at Google’s notoriously slow-to-crunch, Analytics platform.
In the short-term, faster Insights should lead to growth for individual websites and brands using the service while attracting bigger audiences to popular content. After all, it’s easy enough for publishers to implement.
But the longer-term implications of such dependence on a social network that has an eroding privacy track record may be something worth thinking about.
What happens to you, the publisher, if Facebook leaks all of your demographic data to your competitors or to the public at large? It’s unlikely but it’s not impossible. The more likely scenario: Facebook makes you pay for the buttons or the sharing or the Insights — indeed, for access to the audience you’ve built. And that you’re now dependent on.
If you’ve sold ads, or received grants, based on the number of Facebook interactions you purport to have and that source is cut off, where will your website be?
Here at Poynter, for example, our 2011 referrals traffic from Facebook is up an average of about 50 percent over the first two months of 2010, following a site redesign that features a much more prominent Like button. That puts Facebook in the No. 2 spot for site referrals. How could we replace the traffic?
Not easily. And not cheaply, either. The top-down structure of this relationship with Facebook should be forcing publishers to think beyond social integration — beyond the simple, if ubiquitous, tools provided by a third party — to a new solution. But instead, we’re constantly revamping the way we deploy existing tool kits and rebuilding with the tools we have in order to access an audience we so desperately need.
This leaves us, and all other Facebook-using publishers, vulnerable and exposed to the whims of Facebook’s engineering teams. If there’s anything the ‘Like Log’ shows publishers, it’s how vulnerable all media publishers have made themselves to this relatively new juggernaut.
Legacy media was similarly complacent in the past, circumstances that lead to debt loads that buckled the backs of even the most successful brands. Media has a history of betting all its chips on a few, short-sighted plays, and we are doing so again with Facebook and with Google. This over-dependence will limit our long-term survival.
Real-time statistics, and any other easy, free analytical tools, seem useful. If properly analyzed and integrated into our editorial planning, they can be, but they’re something we should only be excited about today. What we should be thinking about is how to plan for tomorrow and well into the future.
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