Update 1 of 6 Using Facebook with your website
Greetings friends,
This is the first of 6 updates in connection to my training tutorial that I developed a month ago.
What I love about experiments is that they are never wrong, they only prove or disprove something. Let’s do a quick recap of what the experiment is.
How effective is Facebook when being used in conjunction with your website?
The idea is that you spend as much time as you can on your own website (about 95%) and use Facebook as a tool for the other 5% to keep your visitors informed of any changes, updates and future postings.
There are many ways to get people to follow you on Facebook but I am trying out the use of a dedicated webpage to get visitors to ‘Follow Me’ so that I can keep them up to date with what I am doing on my Boot Camp website "My Right To Wealth.
External Effects
First I need to say something about life. When I started this project I knew there was going to be an external issue that could effect this first month's experiment. That problem was me moving house which took about two weeks to do in total. Therefore, I only had two weeks of dedicated time creating new articles and updates for my website, which meant that there wasn’t as much Facebook activity as there normally would be.
Having said that, I am now settled in and in top gear for the start of this second month!
The results.
Remember:
- I am focusing on returning visitors
- visitor engagement (do they visit the new page, how long do they stay, do they leave a comment, do they click on any links on that page).
- I will be comparing each new month with the July stats only (so it doesn’t get complicated and bogged down with lots of numbers).
- Experiments don’t fail – they prove or disprove something.
- I will spend minimum time on Facebook and maximum time on my website to increase its.page ranking.
July stats
Compared to August stats
Analysis
So what is happening?
Sessions: a decrease of 473 (-54%)
Users: a decrease of 439 (-55%)
Page Views: a decrease of 911 (-62%)
Pages per session: a decrease of 0.29 (-18%)
Average session duration: a decrease of 00:0.31 (21%)
Bounce Rate: a decrease of 1.54% (which is good)
New Sessions: a decrease of 1.74%
Visitors
July:- New visitors was 92.4% and Returning visitors was 07.6%
Aug:- New visitors was 95% and Returning visitors was 05.0%
What does all this mean?
It means less people came to the site, visited fewer pages and stayed for a shorter amount of time.
As for the actual Facebook site, I posted 5 items of news, had no likes and no comments during the month of August.
The verdict for August: Facebook was completely ineffective.
The experiment is to see if Facebook can be used effectively without stealing away my valuable time from my website. I know there are other ways to use Facebook, however, the object is to use Facebook as an updating site only and not to increase time spent on it promoting, paying for add boosting gimiks, creating groups, etc.
It is still early days, so let’s see what next month brings.
Happy blogging!
Recent Comments
6
Thanks for sharing your experience with Facebook Dillon.
I'm looking forward to future installments!
Dennis
Facebook, like Google, is constantly changing their algorithm. A typical Facebook user would be subject to 10 or 20 pages of content on their timeline if everything every one of their friends posted was displayed. So the algorithm chooses what it thinks is the most relevant for the user experience. Of course posts that paid for promotion are considered very relevant.
As a result anything that is even a little different, such as a business page, is so far down in the list that most Facebook friends will never see it. It will gain a higher position if people hit the like or share buttons, but that will never happen since none of them ever saw it to begin with.
There are some that believe, and I'm leaning in that direction, that both Facebook and Google deliberately ignore these types of posts unless you use paid positioning. Facebook really really wants you to pay them to promote your posts.
I can certainly understand what you are saying and I think that my little experiment will prove it one way or another. They are looking out for 'their' product at the end of the day and as I have always thought: If the tool doesn't work for what you want, don't use it."
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Thank you Dilon for doing posting your findings, looking forward for next one. thank you.
Sure, that's cool. I have posted a few new articles on that website if you want to check them out. I am also in the process of writing another article that I believe will revolutionize the dieting industry with a discovery that I have made.