unique visits to a brand’s website were taken from Compete.com for Aug
and Nov 2010. The difference between these two data points gave the
increase/decrease in the number of unique visitors to a website over a
three month period. Since publicly available data for Facebook statistics is
very limited, fan count was used as a proxy for unique visits. The number
of fans for a brand’s page was noted in Aug 2010 and Jan 2011. The
difference between these two numbers is the number of newly added
fans in a five month period. This number represented only a fraction of
the unique visitors because it did not account for: old fans would have
visited again; or visitors who would have left without becoming a fan,
etc. Thus, the number of newly added fans represented the minimum
increase in unique visitors that can be assumed for a Facebook page – a
lowball figure. In this respect our analysis grossly underestimates the
potential of Facebook. even though the period of data collection is in
favor of Facebook (five months compared to three months for websites),
we feel it does not skew the results as it is well compensated by the lower
estimates used as proxies. Finally, companies were grouped into two
categories: ‘e-Commerce’ and ‘Non e-Commerce’ based on whether their
websites supported e-Commerce transactions. A sample of 22 companies
was selected in each of the two categories bringing the test sample up to
44.
Key Findings :
1) Among the 44 companies, 18 companies (about 40%) exhibited
extremely high traffic to their Facebook page compared to their websites.
Not only were their websites accounting for fewer unique visits than Facebook, but many were also showing a decline in visits over the three
month period
2) Of the 22 categorized as ‘Non-ecommerce’, 13 companies (about
65%) received more unique visits to their Facebook page compared to
their website
3) Two companies that exhibited extremely high Facebook traffic
were Coca-Cola and Walt Disney
4) Of the 22 companies having e-Commerce transactions, only
five exhibited promising Facebook trends, while the rest (about 77%)
portrayed very consistent traffic to their websites. even though
these websites fare better than Facebook currently, their future growth is
questionable since many have started to experience significant drops in
unique visits compared to last year
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