With over one billion users and hundreds of millions of active daily users, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to conclude that Facebook can deliver tons of free traffic. Online promotions has always been that shady art of turning gobs of free traffic zipping through portals and social media sites into traffic to affiliate product pages, email signup squeeze pages, and other online devices intended to turn otherwise free online traffic into cold hard cash. Despite Facebook’s many changes to its timeline as reflected by the evolution of its Edgerank content ranking technology, it seemed that Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) page marketers always found a way to siphon traffic off Facebook.
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Now that Facebook’s been under a lot of stress to step up its earnings game, it looks like Facebook’s biggest earnings potential will not come from the usual suspects. Usually, when the phrase ‘boosting earnings’ and the word ‘Facebook’ are mentioned in the same sentence, the usual ‘solutions’ are increased self-service ad targeting, mobile ads, and other usual ad channels on Facebook. In short, when it comes to monetization, analysts often bark up a familiar tree-properly-designated ad sources and locations on Facebook. Well, it looks like FB has finally woken up to the fact that it has a massive traffic hole in its midst.
Facebook pages, when properly promoted and ‘viralized’ on Facebook, can siphon off a huge chunk of traffic from Facebook. This is free traffic that doesn’t benefit Facebook’s bottom line one red cent. To no one’s surprise, FB announced that its January EdgeRank changes will show commercial page updates less. This is a blatant cash grab on Facebook’s part. Sadly for promoters, they can’t do much about it-they are purely at the mercy of Facebook. No wonder, some analysts predict FB’s stock to zoom higher as earnings continue to build up. FB is on to something: by turning the screws on previously unmonetized traffic channels in its network, it is retaining as much traffic and eyeballs as possible in its quest to monetize every single user it has. This is a great strategy. The only question that comes to mind is ‘what took them so long?’
Which other FB components should FB look into plugging traffic leaks? Photo tags, events, and, of course, Facebook groups. Looks like FB still has a long way to go.
With over 20 years experience in the heart of the investment industry, Ben Myers has become one of the most respected commentators in the financial world. Having worked for global institutions such as HSBC and Bank of Ireland, Ben ran his own successful investment company in the UK before becoming a chief analyst at ECMarkets and now YesOption. Ben remains a keen forex, stocks and crypto trader and is a regularly featured analyst for a number of online news portals including bbc.com, investing.com,