Yesterday I launched a little tool called CheckFacebook.com. It’s a site that maps the number of users Facebook estimates an advertiser can reach in each country based on certain criterion using the audience estimator tool at Facebook.com/ads/create. It’s data I was curious about and figured I’d be better off sharing too.
With the intention of keeping this process as open as possible and providing some insight into how a website launch can work, I want to share the results of the first 10-12 hours since the site was launched.
As of roughly 1am PST (5/29), here are the stats on how the site is spreading:
65 Delicious links (still growing)
89 Re-Tweets (more now)
42 followers added (still growing)
108 Tweets of “checkfacebook” (still growing)
5 emails - biggest request is to map the percentage of the country’s population listed on Facebook. Also, “I’d like to see my country’s data”
1 friend request
1 linkedin request
Total Visits: 2,673 - spending an average of 22 seconds on the site.
Top 10 Referrals (5/28)
TechCrunch.com: 1,243
direct: 660
Google Referral: 209
Popurls: 88
Twitter.com: 83
Facebook.com: 63
Webrazzi.com: 60
Delicious.com: 59
WashingtonPost.com: 39
Netvibes.com: 22
While by no means the “fire hose” of traffic created by getting Dugg, TechCrunch brought exactly the audience I wanted to the site. And from experience, this is more traffic than you’d get from any other technology blog out there. I also got some great feedback and the traffic is still rolling in. Within 10 hours, my site was indexed by Google as the top result for “checkfacebook” and built a lot of link love through Delicious and Twitter.
I specifically architected the site so it would be this way. My methodology was:
- Build something that answered a need - repeatedly (People have a natural curiosity about Facebook’s population)
- Make the purpose obvious (The graph shows everything you need to know about the site. People are drawn to play with it)
- Make sharing obvious (I used ShareThis and TweetMeme to help spread the site. A lot of people seem to have just typed in the domain name since it was so obvious too)
The one thing the site missed, was a way to re-engage users. Email still remains one of the best ways to do this, although I would recommend essentially getting users to subscribe to your site through an RSS feed, Facebook, or Friendfeed account. It’s just a hunch, but I feel that the highest signal/noise you get with users comes through their RSS feeds rather than the increasingly noisy social networking activity feeds.
Update (~24 hours later)
Had some real swift growth overnight.
308 Delicious links (still growing)
273 Re-Tweets (more now)
134 followers added (still growing)
333 Tweets of “checkfacebook” (still growing)
5 emails - biggest request is to map the percentage of the country’s population listed on Facebook. Also, “I’d like to see my country’s data”
3 friend request
6 LinkedIn requests
Traffic
(Past 24 hours)
9,866 Total Visits
direct 2,754
techcrunch 2,271
delicious 843
facebook 580
google (referral) 488
presse-citron.net 434
Twitter.com 358
popurls 232
webrazzi 193
gillesparent.com 188
