A Tale Of Two FBs

The first FB in my life is FeedBurner. I started using the service in early 2004 right around the time it launched.

The second FB in my life is Facebook. I started using the service about a year ago.

I've learned a ton using FeedBurner. I am trying to learn a ton using Facebook.

When I started using FeedBurner, I put the "chicklet" on my sidebar and started watching how many people were subscribing to my blog. It's still there, down on the lower left. It says 33,461 people are subscribed to my blog. I used to watch that number and then I realized it was basically meaningless.

One day FeedBurner started reporting a new number called reach. Reach is the number of subscribers who actually view my feed in any given day. The reach number for my feed yesterday was 2,889. So less than 10% of the number of people who subscribe to my feed actually viewed it yesterday. That percentage has gone down as the number of subs has gone up. At one point, my daily reach was 50% of my subs. Then it was 25%. Now its less than 10%.

I am sure my monthly reach is much larger, but I also bet it's not more than ~60% of my sub number. I can't figure out how to calculate monthly reach with FeedBurner so I'll leave it at a guess.

So how does this relate to Facebook? Well it seems that many entrepreneurs I meet are obsessed with their user numbers. Like many of them, I have installed the appsaholic app on Facebook. Appsaholic tells you what the most popular apps are on Facebook, which ones are gaining users most quickly, and gives you graphs and let's you compare apps. Think of it as the Alexa or FeedBurner of Facebook apps.

But Appsaholic needs more data to be truly useful. Like FeedBurner did, Appsaholic needs to get beyond the "subscriber/user" number and get into what is actually getting used.

I have installed about 20 Facebook apps so far and have deleted about six, and currently have 14 on my profile. The only two I use everyday are Appsaholic and Twitter. There are three others, iMeem, last.fm, and Flickr that are keepers. I use them on occasion. The rest are likely to go away at some point but there's no reason for me to remove them.

It's the same with my 33,461 subs to my feed. A large number of them put my feed into a reader at some point but never read it. There's no reason to remove it and so it gets counted every day by FeedBurner.

The bottom line is the subs number in feeds and the users number in FB apps is useful at the very start of a new blog or Facebook app. But after a short while it becomes meaningless. I hope that Appsaholic will start offering a page counting mechanism to Facebook app developers and start counting usage. Then we'll have some interesting numbers to look at.

Comments

[Rick]

I posted this on a different comment, but it is more relevant, here.

My 18 year old cousin is possibly the heaviest user of Facebook.

I asked her about Facebook applications. She observed that only the newer Facebook members are adding apps. The 'veterans' of Facebook don't bother to add applications.

[P-Air]

I find myself adding apps, but it almost doesn't make sense that they end up on my profile since I rarely go look at my profile. 90% of the time I'm simply on the "home" page which shows the Newsfeed. It actually occurred to me yesterday that I don't even remember which apps I'm subscribed to beyond the moment I subscribe to them...hmmm.

[andy moeck]

RE: "I am sure my monthly reach is much larger", I use NetVibes to read your Blog and NetVibes shows me your entire post (I.E. I rarely have to click over to your actual Blog) ... I would think that FB doesn't report all of the Ajax views/etc. - Same problem Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail are seeing less page views with their new Ajax mail interfaces.

Just my 2c.

Andy.

[MrBradshaw]

I have an idea for a way to measure the success of Facebook apps... it's called revenue.

The recent excitement behind these apps means absolutely nothing because more than half of them have no idea how they are truly going to make money. To me that's all that matters.

[Hugh Lang]

I just took a quick look at appsaholic to see what data it provides. Pretty cool stuff.

Interestingly, the Facebook markup language has a new google analytics tag that lets you add your own analytics ID. From there, you should be able to see some very granular data about your visitors.

http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Fb:google-analytics

But then, that's just for the Analytics account holder to see, isn't it? That's something I need to look into.

[Peter C]

I totally agree that Reach is more important than # of installs. In time this will become more apparent.

I also agree that the profile page is what others see, while most users typically look at their News Feed when they login. I wonder if there will be a shift around this. As I'm installing more apps, I find myself going more and more to my own profile page to see the widgets.

Lastly, I'm curious to see which apps will last the distance. I found myself uninstalling apps in phases. Typically it happened when I added a set of new apps and found my profile page to be a complete mess. That's when I'd typically uninstall a few of them.

[James Cherkoff]

I have 1100 subs on my FB account for the Modern Marketing blog I write as part of my consultancy work. I figure that if 5 per cent of the total figure are clients or prospects that's 55 very valuable people - a healthy audience for my little business.

[dave mcclure]

absolutely fred.

here's my rough take on Startup Metrics from talk i gave at Supernova a few weeks back.

basic 5-stage framework for evaluating progress:
* A: Acquisition
* A: Activation
* R: Retention
* R: Referral
* R: Revenue

see links to mock dashboard & brief powerpoint.

would love to know what you think,

- dave mcclure

[Nate]

Fred: Although you focus on different data points, your thinking seems in line with a post by Jeff Jarvis on Wednesday: http://www.buzzmachine.com/2007/07/11/the-problem-with-measurement/

Andy: My understanding is that FeedBurner statistics include views from all the major aggregators, including NetVibes.

[fred wilson]

This comment was written by Seth Goldstein and posted by me (Fred) because Seth couldn't get TypePad to take the comment.
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Appsaholic is a killer app.

(Then again we created it so I am biased.)

Your point about us counting page views and engagement levels is spot-on and is high in our queue.

We have an opportunity as developers of Social Media to establish metrics that are consistent with the business objectives of marketers looking to reach users through these applications.

It's not about page views or even clicks, it is about loyalty, frequency, engagement, retention and intimacy. I like Dave McClure's breakdown.

There has been chatter for a while in the blogosphere about "conversational marketing" and "word of mouth marketing" in advance of getting to scale with platforms that actually made these experiences available to enough users.

Facebook has now made that possible and it is exciting to be at the forefront.

[Erik]

There is also Appaholic (note the lack of an 's', what an unfortunate naming decision) at http://appaholic.com which doesn't require you to be using Facebook. The feature sets of the two are almost orthogonal, though.

I like that Appaholic lets you embed their graphs easily, though.

[Lee Lorenzen]

Altura Ventures just acquired Appaholic and we have also retained its creator, Jesse Farmer as CEO of Appaholic which we will be run as an Altura Ventures portfolio company.

The product feature set of Appaholic.com is focused 100% of facebook analytics and we will shortly add the more granular data about application usage (e.g., Canvas Page Views, Unique Users per Week, time spent on each page, etc.) This data will be gathered with the opt-in support of the facebook app developers who wish to participate in supporting this new functionality.

Our belief is that developers will want this information to be public because it will allow them to prove to potential advertising clients that their usage numbers are real. Since we believe that active Facebook users are worth between $1.00 and $10.00 per year for advertisers to reach, it is critical that application developers know how active their users are in terms of accessing their app's canvas page on a regular (at least weekly) basis.

That being said, if individual developers want to keep their canvas page usage data secret until a given advertiser inquires then we will support that as well because these usage stats will require the cooperation of the app developers to be complete. Our goal for Appaholic is that both the developers and advertisers trust us as an independent provider of the data necessary to establish the value of individual Facebook app properties.

WRT the similarity between:

1. Appaholic -- an Altura Ventures portfolio company focused on independently obtained and audited Facebook analytics

and

2. Appsaholic -- a Social Media service focused on selling advertisements on a Cost Per Click basis

I agree that developers and advertisers need to realize that there are two products/serveicees from two different companies. To support this, Appaholic will do its best to include in its Logo and Branding the phrase: "An Altura Ventures Portfolio Company" and the tagline "The Official Source for Facebook Analytics." We are also happy to put a link on our about page that will describe and refer people to Appsaholic -- A SocialMedia Service along with whatever tag line they wish to use.

My own feeling is that every developer and advertiser interested in Facebook should have both Appaholic and Appsaholic.

Thanks,
Lee Lorenzen
CEO, Altura Ventures
[email protected]