How Sticky is Facebook?

Facebook is the 5th most trafficked site in the United States. Over 179,000 nonprofits utilize Facebook Causes but just how sticky is Facebook? You may be surprised to see some recent stats that question how successful Facebook is as an engagement tool.

According to a recent BusinessWeek article, Cameron A. Marlow, a research scientist at Facebook, conducted a study to find out how close Facebook users are to their friends online. Marlow looked at how often people clicked on their friends' news or photos, how often they communicated, etc. Guess what the results were? “Facebook users with 500 friends actively follow the news on only 40 of them, communicate with 20, and keep in close touch with about 10. Those with smaller networks follow even fewer,” the article stated.

What does this mean? Well, in a nutshell Facebook users don't pay much attention to most of their online friends. Marlow’s study sheds even more light on the Washington Post article that said Facebook Causes are not raising much money for nonprofits. Take a look at the stats below.

• Only a small fraction of the 179,000 nonprofits that use Facebook Causes have brought in $1,000.

• Less then 1 percent of Facebook members who have joined a Cause have actually donated money through the Causes App.

• The median donation is $25 as compared to average online donations from email fundraising appeals, which is about $71.

• Less than 50 of the 179,000 groups on Causes have raised $10,000, and just two –

• The Nature Conservancy and Students for a Free Tibet -- have raised more then $100,000.

The BusinessWeek article goes onto say that “by focusing campaigns on people who interact with each other (aka behavioral targeting), they'll likely get better results.” Agreed!

A few months ago, I reported on Frogloop that the “boomer” generation was the fastest growing population on Facebook. Those trends maybe slowing down. According to Facebook’s own data, the 55-to-65-year-old age group's activity has declined over the past couple months, some 651,080 of those users have quit Facebook. Yikes! Some experts say that the reason for this decline is that these new users haven’t figured out how to use the real-time updates that were implemented in Facebook’s new redesign. Others say it’s due to the security issues Facebook has endured with phishing scams.

The trends aren’t all bad though. The 18-to-25-year olds are spending more time on Facebook and nearly 2 million new members have signed up from that age group.

Do you think Facebook is sticky? How’s it working for your nonprofit?