I don’t question the count, I question the messaging. It’s always been made to sound as if those 600-whatever million people are unique users. They’re absolutely not all unique and I’ll explain why.

The Effects of Social Gaming

One of the causes for duplicate account creations is social gaming. Facebook is free and the majority of the games is free, so there’s effectively no barrier for people to create multiple accounts to play social games. To illustrate what I mean, I’ve taken screenshots of people playing the game “Madden NFL Superstars”. Take a look and don’t tell me they’re dedicated personal accounts.

These probably aren't the real Pittsburgh Steelers.

Clearly, this is Cory's "gaming account".

This one's clever. Use some chick's beach photo and boom: 3,500+ friends!

Yes, we get it, Shawn plays Madden.

Facebook and Social Gaming

I don’t know how many duplicate or fake accounts there are and it’s impossible to determine that anyway. It’s far more interesting to understand why it matters. Social gaming on Facebook is huge:

• Over half of all Facebook accounts are used to play social games.
• There are over 50 million daily player accounts and close to 300 million monthly player accounts.
• Fifty percent of all log-in sessions on Facebook are for gaming purposes.
• Twenty percent of social gamers have paid money for in-game benefits. The most conservative projection I’ve found has the worldwide social gaming market exceeding $1 billion this year.
• The top 8 games on Facebook average at least one million daily players and 10 million monthly players.
• Facebook dominates social gaming with a market share of 28%. There is still potential for the social gaming market to grow within and beyond Facebook.

The Marketing Challenge

The way I see it, the rising popularity of social gaming presents a double-edged marketing challenge:

• On the one hand, the growing interest and activity in social gaming provides new monetization opportunities. With the addictive nature and time commitment involved, branded games and/or virtual goods also offer opportunities for frequent and intense brand engagement.
• On the other hand, the low barrier for playing social games renders a portion of the player base unmarketable. Demographic profile information is often incomplete or incorrect and this makes it difficult to understand the player population accurately. Moreover, underage children are also part of the player base and that makes monetization more difficult.

The Bottom Line

Don’t fall in love with the sheer volume or the absolute numbers. Get an understanding of the make-up of these numbers and how they apply to your business and your customers.

Let’s take a closer look at Facebook advertisements, how well they perform, what you should be doing and what you definitely shouldn’t be doing.

Three Forms of Exposure

As a brand, you can achieve three forms of exposure on Facebook:

• Advertisements These are ads with a link to either a landing page or a Facebook Page.
• Social Impressions These are ads with a link to either a landing page or a Facebook Page, but with the addition of the names of friends who like the ad.
• News Items These are items from a brand that appear in a person’s News Feed.

Facebook Advertising Effectiveness

According to data from Nielsen, having only an ad doesn’t result in very high recall, awareness or purchase intent. In fact, the numbers are awful for only “paid media”. Social Impressions and News Items can be considered “earned media”, because your friends have liked the ad or you have liked the brand’s Page to receive news updates. The addition of Social Impressions and News Items boosts recall, awareness and purchase intent of ads.

It is also important that Social Impressions and News Items appear frequently. Recall, awareness and purchase intent of the ad increase with the frequency of Social Impressions and News Items. This is encouraging, because it infers that active engagement with fans results in higher ad effectiveness.

However, caution should also be exercised. Recall, awareness and purchase intent say nothing about someone actually performing an action. Data from Webtrends and Chitika reveals that Facebook ads have horrible click-through rates.

There are multiple theories as to why Facebook ads suck in performance. In talking to people, their thoughts included “advertising simply doesn’t work”, “people don’t notice the ads”, and “brands don’t take the right approach to advertising on social networks”. Personally, I think the ads’ performance sucks because the ads themselves suck.

What Should You Not Do

With a growing number of advertisers and advertisements, there’s also increasing competition in the “war for eyeballs”. If you choose to advertise on Facebook, the ads need to be conspicuous, relevant, valuable… and correctly spelled.

Thanks to Rich Harris for letting me use some of his screenshots!

Getting the Most out of Facebook

Here are 5 steps to help you gain more effective exposure on Facebook:

1. Gain Organic Impressions Get people to like your brand’s Page. Whether you employ offline methods, online methods or Facebook ads to get people to like your Page, having those Fans will increase your exposure through News Items.
2. Engage Frequently Post at least once or twice each day on your Page to gain frequent exposure. Buddy Media conducted research on Facebook Wall engagement by businesses, but your mileage will value. Evaluate the feedback you get to understand the effect of frequency on your brand’s exposure. Remember that people can still hide your updates if they’re annoyed by them.
3. Drive Engagement Use Page updates to acquire feedback on your products/services as well as your social offerings. Engage actively to understand how Facebook makes the most business sense to you.
4. Relate Ads to Behavior The limited space and attention span of an ad makes it difficult to be compelling. Unlike Google AdWords that target users who are actively searching for something in particular, Facebook ads are often displayed based on a person’s profile information. The lack of immediate relevance is an important cause of lower click-through rates. Instead of targeting people based on demographic information, focus on an action someone is performing inside Facebook. For example, if they’re playing a game that’s similar to your game, you can increase your click-through rates by advertising when people are playing that game. Another example is to advertise your shop when people are visiting the Page of a brand you sell products of.
5. Create Natural Transitions When possible, create natural transitions from an ad to the eventually desired action. One way to do this is to have the ad direct to a specific landing tab on your Facebook Page. From there, you have more space and time to drive action, e.g. signing up for your newsletter or going to a landing page on your website.

Peugeot had a disappointing 24 Hours of Le Mans last weekend with all four cars retiring due to engine problems.

Their Facebook ad wasn’t much better either… “The Mans”? Seriously? The marketer that put that ad on auto-translate should be shot.

A few weeks back, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg claimed that “sharing is the [new] social norm” these days following changes to Facebook’s privacy settings. This is partly true and—as I alluded to in The Social Impact Of Social Media—social media has allowed people to be more open and connect with the people and topics that matter to them.

However, whatever matters to person A might not matter to person B. Sharing information doesn’t imply sharing relevance. Privacy is a matter of context, something that is judged on a semantic scale. Facebook doesn’t control the social norm. We do.

Making privacy something binary results in a decrease of value in privacy and an increase of value in publicity. What if people manipulated these new privacy dynamics to convey only the information that they want people to see? Is that who they really are? Not necessarily. Do other people care? Not necessarily. Does it make them look cooler? Heck yea. As a result, it can spoil authenticity. And that’s not the kind of data that marketers, advertisers and investors are looking for, is it?

An article from last week revealed that only roughly a third of Facebook members changed their privacy settings. If you’re looking for helpful pointers on changing privacy settings, check out this post by AllFacebook.

I welcome your thoughts if you’re willing to share :o)