Buddy Media released some great data today focused on how social media can influence consumer behavior. The research was put together in concert with Comscore and focuses on Facebook.
There were some great insights in the report and I highly recommend you check it out in full here.
One of the big standouts for me was the pie chart below, breaking down where Facebook users actually spend their time on the site.
This breakdown was surprising in a few ways.
These numbers are important because where Facebook users spend their time determines where the opportunities are for marketers. And as Buddy Media points out in the report, one in every seven minutes spent online is on Facebook. If you are marketing online, knowing how those minutes break down is very insightful.
Newsfeed Is Just A Piece Of The Puzzle
I expected almost a majority of the time would be in the Newsfeed, reading and commenting on our friends videos, photos and links. But it turns out that Facebook users only spend 27% of our time in the newsfeed.
So if your entire Facebook strategy is focused just on your Fan Page status updates, you are missing a lot of opportunity.
Profiles, Photos, Apps and more
Photos take up 17% of our time on Facebook. This is no surprise, we talk a lot on Social Fresh about how Facebook is a photo economy.
Facebook users spend another 21% on profiles. No hints as to whether these are just mainly our own personal profiles we are staking out. And we do not know how much brand pages account for this number if at all. But this does give us a little more insight into the fact that Facebook has paid so much attention to personal profiles and the new Facebook Timeline. Facebook users are indeed spending a lot of time on these pages.
Apps and tools make 10% of our time spent. If games fall into this category, this is actually good news. I love games and all, but game players on Facebook do nothing for marketers. They are notorious for clicking on ads and never converting.
And then we have the remaining 25% of Facebook time spent as other. I suspect the big players in this category are Facebook groups, private messages, videos, and admin activities.
What Can We Learn?
There are a few key takeaways I would focus on from this graph alone.
- If you are focusing on the newsfeed and using photos, you are reaching a fairly large portion of the Facebook audience.
- Facebook ads are still important, considering they can still reach Facebook users close to 100% of the time they are on the site while status updates can only find Facebook users less than 50% of the time they spend on site.
- Apps and tools are still effective, drawing a lot of time, but not as sticky as the newsfeed and photos.