Social Media Risk

Contrary to recent reports in the news, Facebook cares about user privacy. In regard to web analytics, proof of this comes in the form of two major safeguards. The first safeguard is the disconnect between demographic and behavior data regarding ad targeting. The second is the “Allow Access” screen which appears whenever a third party application wants to access user data (see the image below for an example of one such screen). With those two privacy safeguards in mind, it’s difficult to gather useful Facebook analytics data.

To help businesses get a richer understanding of their fan page visitors and ad success, Facebook provides Insights and Ads Manager, respectively. However, these two tools are still limited by Facebook’s privacy safeguards; i.e. you can’t see who clicked what. In addition to these tools, Facebook is also beta testing tracking code called, “Conversion Tracking.” The strategy behind this code is that businesses will install it on their own web pages and then be able to track conversions from Facebook users. However, this solution does not track conversions happening on Facebook fan pages.

To remedy the above shortcoming of “who clicked what,” three web analytics companies, Omniture, CoreMetrics, and Webtrends, have recently announced solutions that work within Facebook’s privacy framework. Of these new Facebook analytics solutions, Webtrends has perhaps taken the most novel approach to gathering behavior data despite Facebook’s privacy safeguards.

Basically, the Webtrends solution is this; direct Facebook visitors to custom, default landing tabs that have tracking code written in a language allowed by the Facebook framework. If a Facebook page is implemented accordingly, businesses can track behavior without knowing a user’s identity or circumventing Facebook’s privacy safeguards. It’s a clever compromise. With the Webtrends solution, companies can now more fully track the success of marketing tactics and users don’t have to give up any of their private information.

In order for Facebook to maintain the level of trust it has earned with its users, it must keep user privacy as a central concern of its business. However, in order to grow, it must also develop its ability to generate revenue. Clearly, this revenue will come from paid advertisements. With the recent advancements in Facebook analytics, user privacy will be maintained while businesses will be able to more clearly track the investments they’re making in Facebook advertising.