How Many Facebook Users Will Go Public?

(page 2 of 2)

facebook could analyze the data itself

How large a sales opportunity Facebook's changes offer depends in part on how many of its users become comfortable sharing their updates with the world. Currently the public-status feature is turned on only for the few hundred thousand Facebook users who have manually set their entire profiles to the share-with-everyone setting.

Still, some marketing executives see lots of potential. Comcast (CMCSA) and Dell (DELL) are among the companies that can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on software from Radian6, which lets them monitor a variety of Web commentary about a topic or brand and analyze the tenor of those comments. Radian6 CEO LeBrun says once his customers begin pulling public Facebook updates into the software, the average number of posts Radian6 sees every day for all its clients could increase significantly from about 6 million daily posts now.

Facebook itself could also analyze status data. The company already lets businesses build "pages" around their brands and sign up users who want to receive regular updates on new products. For example, Research In Motion's (RIMM) BlackBerry page has more than a quarter-million Facebook fans. Arming advertisers on the site with tools that spot relevant conversations about their brand across the social network's pages could be a future revenue source for Facebook, says Forrester Research (FORR) analyst Josh Bernoff. "The ability to report on what's happening on their own network may be one of their major selling points," he says.

Andy Monfried, CEO of Lotame Solutions, which places ads on social networks—though not Facebook—says Facebook could use the status updates to show its members ads that better zero in on their interests. "They can know a ton about individuals and use that data to better target and monetize their media," he says.

For many Facebook users, though, that knowledge is a problem. Many of the hundreds of comments users left in response to the company's June 24 blog post were negative. To make the most of its new software changes, Facebook may once again need to mollify swaths of its audience who openly share information about themselves on the site, but protest when it's used for commercial purposes.

Douglas MacMillan is a staff writer for BusinessWeek in New York.

Business Exchange

Track and share business topics across the Web.