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?

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Comments

[Jeff Patrick]

Excellent stats Allyson. Thanks for sharing. Interestingly we are definitely seeing real participation from 40+ year olds on Facebook with our clients. This is, of course, only anecdotal, but we're seeing some of our advocacy clients like Equality California get real value from the FB communities. So I'm surprised by the reversal in adoption by boomers.

[operagal]

Great article ! I actually just recommended to a client that I had heard the BBoomers were growing on FB and Twitter, I guess I will have to rescind my earlier statement.

Thats a rough one for me, since many of my listeners/donors are BBoomer and older.

[JessD]

Maybe I'm misunderstanding this, but is it a bit rash to assume users aren't interested in their friends' news because they don't click on them. Why would you click a status update? Doesn't mean you're not interested to see it.

[DaniCamps]

Thank you for the article, there are a couple of areas that I wanted to expand on. One thing that is not mentioned is that raising money on Facebook is not always the number one goal of many of these nonprofits. Having a presence on Facebook, or any other social networking site, will hopefully draw those more interested in your cause to your actual website. I think that in today's society of completely shortened attention spans, it would be unrealistic to expect someone to keep up with 500 people - or even 50 people. But, at least the option is there if they want to take the step forward and reach out to one of their 500 friends. The same goes with how nonprofits can look at having a profile on Facebook or Twitter; that they may be catching someone at exactly the right moment of when they want to be involved. Things come and go in the social media world, and no one laments over past campaigns - these platforms allow you to keep people engaged without them getting bored. It is not like you are having to pay thousands of dollars to be on these social networking sites, so if you don't raise a ton of money on them, no biggie - BUT, if you increase the number of participants in an event or your volunteer base, haven't you reached at least one goal in the nonprofit world?

[Lee]

Allyson,

I too have had good success raising money via Facebook and also have seen it to be much stickier than you report. I am on the Board of Directors of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and I effectively used Facebook to mobilize my facebook "friends" around raising money for the "No on Prop 8/Marriage Equality" campaign. In less than 10 days, I was able to recruit 20 hosts from my 500+ "friends," many of which I had never met, and asked them to get 10 of their friends to come to a live event at my home in Suburban Washington, DC. We ended up with 80 attendees and raised over $14,000! The attendees ranged in age from folks in their early 20's to folks in their 60's, with the bulk of attendees in their 40s. From what I am seeing, Facebook is very sticky within LGBT Community and I have not seen it decreasing. I would point out that I did not use the passive "Causes" function but instead used facebook in a more active, more real world networking activity that really paid off for me.

Lee

[Christy]

Allyson,
I don't know what "phishing scams" are; I wish I did. But I can tell you what has made me want to close my Face book account. Facebook just trolls around in cyberspace and pretends that a certain person is inviting another person to be a "friend", when that is not the case. That is what got me into Facebook originally. For me it was no problem. But recently Facebook invited people that I have had email contact with, but did not invite to Facebook, and unfortunately invited my next door neighbor, who is EXTREMELY paranoid about things like this, and very unkind and has made me miserable with her anger and negative energy. Just last night I took a goofy test that was on the screen and before my eyes 2 people were "invited" by me to take the test. Fortunately they were friends. But on another occasion, some professional contacts that I did NOT want invited were sent invitations. Even though I enjoy Facebook I honestly think a class action suit would not be unreasonable. Anyway those are my thoughts. We should be able to control who is invited and Facebook should not be able to randomly send messages to people.

[Andi]

I agree with the statements regarding Facebook as more of a social networking tool than an actual fundraising tool. It is more useful to organizations in "branding" and strengthening the community surrounding them and with this comes the donations. If you are present and active then your donors and potential donors will be more closely drawn to forming a true relationship with your organization. In today's society, people need to feel connected.