Facebook recently surpassed the 400 million active user mark on the eve of its 6th birthday. With such a huge number of users it wont be a surprise to know that more than 50% of the users, who buy goods online are now on Facebook. Furthermore, amongst the shoppers who participate in social media, 81% use Facebook.

With such a wealth of online shoppers using Facebook every day, one would be compelled to think that Facebook would be the number one choice for online retailers to market their goods and services. However, a recent study by ForeSee Results, show that only 25% of the top 100 online retailers have a formal facebook presence, where as another 25% have less than 10,000 fans on Facebook.

According to Kevin Ertell, vice president of retail strategy at ForeSee, this is an gross mistake, since most of the users who interact with retailers on Social media do so to either learn about special offers (49%) or get product details (45%).

With such bleak figures, there exists examples of some extremely social media savvy retailers. Starbucks, amongst others, has used timely and localized deals, such as “Become a fan to get a free coffee at your local Starbucks”, to aggressively promote its fan page on Facebook. As of today, Starbucks fanpage on Facebook has more than 5.7 million fans and is ranked amongst the top ten fanpages on Facebook.

The study recommends brands to “Get a Facebook Page!”, and ensure that the page is monitored and continuously updated with relevant deals and information.

Facebook on its part, should also try to better promote its offerings to brands. There is a serious need for a dedicated marketing team at Facebook that should target brands and advertisers to have a professional presence on Facebook.

Fuente: AllFacebook

Tim Trefren is one of the founders of Mixpanel, Inc.a real-time analytics service that helps companies understand how users behave with web applications.

When most people think of web analytics, they think about pageview tracking; basically, measuring which pages on a website are being viewed. Pageview tracking is a well-established technology, but it’s no longer meeting the needs of many of the most well-known companies in social media. Companies like Facebook, Zynga, Slide, and RockYou are spending tons of resources building their own internal analytics tools.

There’s a reason for this: Social media is highly competitive, and the biggest advantage you can have is data. To improve and grow, these companies need to gather as much information as they can, and they need more than simple pageview tracking.

In the following sections I will cover three of the most important things to measure for social applications.

1. Funnel Analysis: Measuring Conversion Rates

2. Engagement Tracking: Measuring What People Do

3. Visitor Retention: How Many People Come Back?

Fuente: MASHABLE.COM