How much of social media icon Facebook's traffic is real, and how much is just spam or bots? Here are three studies that provide a quick guess: somewhere between 20 and 91 percent is real.
- Facebook concedes that 8.7 percent of accounts may be not real people (spam, pets, or duplicates).
- Limited Run cancelled their Facebook page recently, based partly on their own research which showed that 80% of the ad clicks they were paying Facebook for were coming from bots.
- Here's an experiment by the BBC that found that nearly all the Likes for an imaginary product were suspect.
OK, these numbers are so rough that they mean very little -- except that a significant amount of Facebook traffic is not real people. Expect to see more data on this in the next future. And see this post by Russ Bradberry on the simplereach blog for an explanation of why there might not be as many bots as some claim. -- Bill Paarlberg, Editor
###
(Thanks to http://declan.web44.net/images.html for the zombie robot image.)
Bill Paarlberg is editor of The Measurement Standard blog and newsletter, and of Katie Paine's book “Measure What Matters.” He is also editor of the book “Measuring the Networked Nonprofit,” by Beth Kanter and Katie Paine, which will be published this year by Wiley.
Follow Bill Paarlberg on Twitter.
The Measurement Standard is a publication of KDPaine & Partners, a company that delivers custom research to measure brand image, public relationships, and engagement. Katie Paine, CEO of KDPaine & Partners, will be glad to talk with you about measurement for your organization.
“Data will become the new soil in which our ideas will grow, and data whisperers will become the new messiahs.” 
Comments