You may be tired of all of the Facebook chatter and stats after the company filed its S-1 paperwork to go public yesterday. Whether you’re FB’d out or not, this might get your attention.

Hitwise has pulled some really powerful stats about Facebook’s first month of 2012, and it’s really impressive stuff.

Ready for this?

• Facebook.com captures one in every eleven Internet visits in the US
• 1 in every 5 page views occurs on Facebook.com
• The average visit time on Facebook.com is 20 minutes
• “Facebook” is the most searched term in the US and Facebook-related terms account for 14% of the top search clicks.
• Facebook.com users are highly loyal to the website; 96% of visitors to Facebook.com were returning visitors in January 2012

These are absolutely astronomical numbers and facts, especially the bit about 1 in every 5 page views occurring on Facebook. What these stats tell us is that the News Feed and Ticker changes the company has introduced at the F8 conference are working and keeping people on the site as they are intended to do.

For example, by sharing what you’re listening to on Spotify with all of your friends without having to click a button means that everyone is interacting more by doing even less. With all of that extra time, you’re now discovering new content and spending more time on Facebook.

The scary part is that as more people start setting up their Timeline on Facebook, the time on site will increase even more. I personally haven’t been going back and filling out life events from the past, but I’ve seen others doing it by ways of posts on my News Feed. If that trend continues, people will literally spend hours of their time just giving Facebook every piece of data they have on themselves.

If you were wondering why the company could be worth upwards of $100B, now you know.

A new tool from Yahoo! gives you a glimpse of what’s being read on its homepage, as well as what’s popular from the last 24 hours. It’s actually a gorgeous display that lets you see different breakdowns of who’s viewing what, when, and why.

The visualization is a part of its C.O.R.E. project, which Yahoo! explains like this:

The Yahoo! Content Optimization and Relevance Engine (C.O.R.E.) data visualization reveals the many factors that influence the display of articles appearing in the Yahoo! Today module. Emulating C.O.R.E.’s ability to learn from visitor behaviors and return relevant and appropriate content, this data visualization allows visitors to quickly adjust several different demographic factors, as well as article criteria, to reveal typical reader habits and patterns.

On the backend, Yahoo! is taking many factors into account before it shows you news in its “Today” module, which you’re probably familiar with if you’ve ever visited the site:

According to Yahoo!, C.O.R.E registers more clicks on the Yahoo! homepage than there are words in the entire English language – every ten minutes. This visualization shows you how it’s doing it and what stories are the most popular:

By changing the time-frame sliders, age demographics, and category of news, you can see what stories are being shown on the Yahoo! homepage and how they’re performing in real-time. Also, you’ll notice that little animated dots spin around on the visualization, and they represent a news story. You can click on any of the dots and you’ll be able to see the story, how many views it has, and a breakdown of who has viewed it:

While there’s a lot of data to digest here, the visualization makes it pretty easy for any user to interact with it. This is a tool that I’d love to see from Facebook or Twitter in regards to the activity in my streams. Sifting through links is difficult, and while Twitter is trying to change that with its “Stories’ feature, I’m more of a fan of this graphical and interactive approach from Yahoo!.

➤ Yahoo! C.O.R.E. Visualization

Natural-language search engine Wolfram|Alpha, which helps power Apple’s Siri, is notorious for allowing you to ask it questions about all types of geeky mathematical topics. With the NFL playoffs going on in full force, it has decided to add 25 years of NFL statistics to its repertoire.

In a blog post today, Wolfram|Alpha shared example searches you can perform with this new information, as well as how it can make you look like a NFL statistician. No more SportsCenter needed:

And now that the NFL playoffs are in full swing, we’re proud to announce that you can now use Wolfram|Alpha to explore statistics for every NFL team, game, and player from the past 25 years.

Which means you can now get immediate, accurate results to all kinds of natural-language queries. You could ask Wolfram|Alpha to compare passing yards for Aaron Rodgers, Drew Brees, and Tom Brady. Or ask about Steelers games with a combined score over 80 or Packers games with more than 400 passing yards. You can delve into player versus team matchups, too—how about Ben Roethlisberger games versus the Broncos or Drew Brees games versus the 49ers with more than 300 passing yards?

That’s a lot to take in, but if you think about your favorite teams or players, you can start performing example searches to get a hang of it.

Yes, I’m an NFL guru

The New England Patriots are playing the Denver Broncos this weekend in a matchup that could break TV records for the playoffs. If you want to compare the two teams, simply ask Wolfram|Alpha to “Compare the Broncos and Patriots” and you’ll see this handy and quite thorough response:

I’m an Eagles fan, and they didn’t have a great season this year. However, I suspect that they had much better luck during away games in 2011. I can check that by entering “Eagles away games in 2011″, and I’ll get a full readout:

This could be a killer resource when you’re trying to put together your fantasy team next year, or a just fun thing to browse if you have hours to kill while you’re waiting for the games to start this weekend.

Along with the addition of NFL statistics, Wolfram|Alpha has published a guide to looking for interesting stats and trends with the data that goes all the way back to 1985, the year that the Bears won the Super Bowl. I knew that without having to search for it.

It’s no secret that every brand under the sun is clamoring for red-hot social media channels packed full of loving fans that are hanging on your every word. After setting up the prerequisite Facebook and Twitter channels, the focus of this social media activity usually turns towards upping the numbers via likes and follows.

All fine and dandy, but what happens next? Can you progress and elevate a social media campaign based on the simple strategy that more is better? Doubtful. If you’re not running or at least developing a parallel campaign of effective user interaction and real value, you’re simply spinning your wheels, something that newfound fans can smell a mile away. And these same fans are just as likely to click that Unlike button if you’re not delivering the goods – 55% of them, in fact.

So what’s a brand to do? Let’s take a step back and pretend that you’ve not even opened your social media channels yet. What should you be doing/thinking about? What compelling reason have you given Joe Average consumer to like your brand? And not just today, but over the long haul? You could go down the insider information route. You could play the exclusive discounts card. There might be some opportunities to let your fans interact on a global scale. All these factors, i.e. consumer behavior and preferences, should be considered carefully before diving into the “Like Us!” pool. If fans aren’t getting what they’re expecting…they’re out of there.

According to “The Evolutions of Facebook Brand Fans” study published by DDB Worldwide and OpinionWay Research, the number one factor driving U.S. fans to unlike a brand’s Facebook page is “the information available was not interesting,” (46%). From a global perspective, the number one reason for unliking a brand was “the brand was no longer of interest to me,” (49%). Oddly enough, this same response only grabbed 39% of the U.S. market opinion.

ExactTarget’s research has revealed many of the same results, adding further proof to the pudding. In their “The Social Breakup” report, the top three factors driving fans away from brands are:

• The company posted too frequently – 44%
• My wall was becoming too crowded with marketing posts – 43%
• The content became repetitive or boring over time – 38%

At the same time, 51% of respondents indicated that they expect brands to present them with marketing based messages, 40% said they do not expect marketing messages, and 9% didn’t know what to expect. Somehow the phrase, “You can’t be all things to all people,” is suddenly ringing a very large bell.

The above examples illustrate that fans are truly a tricky bunch to pin down. So if 49% expect no marketing push, or have no idea what to expect, what exactly are they looking for? Constant Contact and Chadwick Martin Bailey set out to answer that very question. In their study of U.S. consumers and brand interaction, they found that 58% of consumers Like a brand on Facebook because they’re already a customer, or that they expect to receive discounts and promotions (57%).

Now stop and think about your brand’s social media stream for a second. My guess is that you’re regularly sharing content that you believe is relevant to your community, as well as tossing in a healthy dose of marketing messages further promoting your product’s wares. Sound about right? When was the last time you ran a discount or special Facebook Fans only promotion? Tip: want to get a promo up and running in seconds? Have a look at WildFire.

Now that’s not to say that adding some humor to your stream is completely invalid, nor are thought-provoking articles that give your consumers some insight as to the way you and your organization think. The message here is to avoid the danger of becoming siloed in your social media approach. What are your consumers really after? According to Constant Contact and Chadwick Martin Baily, they want discounts on products. But what to do with those other 43%?

Businesses that have already established social media profiles will have an easier time of it from the get-go, but that doesn’t mean that the following principles can’t apply to all. To start delivering on what your consumer community wants:

• Ask them – a dead simple solution, but sometimes it’s all it takes. Never used that “Question” icon all the way to the right? It’s time to start. Find out what your customers want from you.
• Analyze them – Facebook’s been adding more and more features to their Insights tool; Take advantage of it. Similarly, reviewing data from stats packages such as TwentyFeet or Crowdbooster can provide a wealth of information as to what worked, what didn’t, and what was just downright awful.
• Survey them – A continuation of the Ask them proposition, if you’re driving traffic to your website or blog from your Facebook page, inserting a short survey based on incoming traffic from a social media URL can garner quite a bit of information when presented in the right way. Remember, they’re at your site to get to the rest of the content; don’t overwhelm them with a 50-question survey.
• Service them – If your brand page also deals with incoming customer service issues, chances are you’re going to follow-up with an email even if the issue was resolved via social media. Use this open communication channel to find out how a user’s social media experience could be enhanced and thus become more attractive.

Social media’s greatest strength can also be it’s greatest weakness. Consumers hungry to connect with their favorite brands will do just that. However, in an endless stream of brands, brands, and more brands, it’s easy to see why and how the term “Stream Fatigue” has come to prominence.

Brands are constantly battling for user’s attention amongst the many other brands they’re following. Finding your sweet spot amongst not only your current fans, but those that you hope to welcome someday soon, is the delicate balance that all brand managers must find. But by putting a few analytics reviewing sessions in place, studying your existing consumer preferences data, and simply asking users what they want, you’ll be well on your way to a delivering a targeted, relevant social media strategy that can deliver well beyond the Like.

If you are eagerly awaiting the World Cup, check out this fun (and geeky) simulator by Isthmus Partners.

Oh, and if you are really keen, here’s a link to the accompanying “Report”. You can tell this was done by a bored investment banker….

Warning: links are to the direct download.

Via Rubbishcorp®