Image Credit: Brett (Broadview)

So you know what Facebook is, and you've probably used Google Analytics, but have you ever considered Facebook Analytics? In a world where Facebook is often more popular with users than the 'all powerful' (sic) Google, it's your best best to tune in and capitalize on this social networking giant.

FaceBook Me Already!

Ever heard that term from your teenage son or daughter, while he or she's on the phone with their best buddy? Socializing on the net has truly evolved over the last three to four years, and 'facebooking' has become akin to 'googling' as a verb in our daily rhetoric. Darn, that's a lot of people spending oodles of time on this one interface isn't it? Wouldn't it just be great if I could find a way to send them targeted messages in way that would be relevant and also a value-add? Hmm…. That got me thinking…hmm

A FaceBook Baazaar

There's something inherently cool about small niche markets popping up as a result of a bigger movement. Just like our well beloved 'paid links' and 'paid reviews' industry popping up as a result Google's great PageRank idea (sic), it was inevitable that a marketplace for Facebook related ventures would emerge as well.

Image Credit : Davemchats500

Facebook Business Solutions

Facebook's recent launch of an advertising platform catered towards the opportunity of sending targeted, relevant messages to an audience that can sliced by any demographic or psychographic. But while social ads, customized fan pages, and user insights based on who's clicking on your social ads are all great inroads into understanding the average Facebook user's behaviour, nothing hits the sweet spot like a well designed Facebook app.

And yes, there's a marketplace for Facebook apps too!

Nice eh? Studying the value proposition behind these Top 10 Facebook apps can yield some unique insight into what works and what doesn't on a community such as FaceBook. One can only imagine the potential in such applications, especially when you add in the mix of a sticky concept, a large user base, and frequently updated fresh content.

I wish I'd made up the table above (it'd be great linkbait), but a well deserved mention goes to Adonomics, the company responsible for tracking metrics around new and emerging Facebook apps. Adonomics seems to have done all the right things, in capitalizing on the Facebook apps market as a very lucrative middleman.

Here's a rundown of the services they provide:

• Application Promotion
• Application Monetization Services
• An Application Marketplace
• Buying/Sponsoring an Application

Quite a bit of information to chew on eh? There's many ways to leverage Facebook for your business, it's a just a matter to work with the right people to figure out what that optimal strategy would be…

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7 smart comments

Hi Dev, great article.

I would like to invite you to my blog, I will write about my tactics to monetize your facebook account without using facebook applications and without spamming and without clicking Ads.

Lara Saad  ^#

Hi Lara,

I'm definitely looking forward to reading about your facebook monetization strategies. Much like previous efforts with MySpace marketing, I can definitely see potential in Facebook as well

Thanks for reading our SEP blog Lara!

Dev

Dev Basu  ^#

Dev, Thanks for posting a comment in my blog. You are right there is a big potential in Myspace too, the only one reason that I write about facebook and not about Myspace is that I know nothing about Myspace and I didn't try to implement my tactics in Myspace. I have made a success in facebook and therefore I want to write about it.

You are so welcome in my blog, very soon you will start read some real posts about how to make money on facebook… keep in touch.

Thanks,
Lara,

Lara Saad  ^#

Nice post on using Facebook statistics and business opportunities on the site. Have you read this yet?

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/30/technology/30face.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

People Finder  ^#

Dev,

I am researching how to natively track FB Apps from within FB. I am the Product Director for Clearspring's Analytics platform for tracking widgets…trying to understand how FB tracks this on their own. We can see widgets moving around within FB and what domains they came from and are going to. I am curious as to how the FB Insights product works. Interesting stuff. Can you tell me where you got your graph that ranks the apps from 1-10?

Cheers!

Jodi

Jodi McDermott  ^#

Hi Jodi – I sourced all the images from http://adonomics.com/. I believe the variables used to calculate the popularity of such apps include the growth rate, adoption rate, viral spread, and total number of active app users.

Thank you for commenting on my post, and do keep in touch.

Cheers

Dev

Dev Basu  ^#

Great article Dev – harnessing your facebook traffic is a great way to learn more about how to be relevant and what kind of people gravitate towards your site/app. We here at Sometrics try to provide developers these very tools to get better insight to their userbase so they can 1) build better apps 2) make their apps more relelvant to their users. It'll be interesting how social media/analytics will help shape the marketers and product developers of the near future.

Joseph  ^#