Are Facebook Analytics “Creepy?

In a word, “yes.” Facebook Analytics are definitely creepy. 

A Facebook group can tell the age of the people that are visiting its site. These groups can tell not only what posts you comment on, but also the posts that you repost or even just the posts that you view. At a first glance, this would sound a little bit creepy to a facebook user. 

However, these analytics can be quite helpful to many of the involved parties. Once a Facebook group gets past the barrier of 30 “likes,” Facebook will start providing the group with free analytics. It calls these “Insights.” Facebook Insights tell the administrators more about the visitors to their pages than most facebook users would imagine. They can see reactions, audience reached, and audience demographics on a post by post basis. 

While some would argue that this is dipping into the realm of breaking personal privacy, I would argue that facebook does a relatively good job of what they call “anonymizing” the data. While “anonymizing” isn’t actually a word, facebook does do a good job of it, to the point where unless a customer “likes” a page, the group administrators cannot actually pick them out as an individual.

Also, these “insights” can do quite a bit to help improve facebook content at large. 

Facebook sees analytics as a good way for their customers to see how engaging different posts are and a tool that will help their customers hone their content to deliver more effective posts. In turn Facebook will benefit because with their feedback, groups start posting more interesting content. This free service is not just to help these groups, it is to improve their overall content and make Facebook more exciting.