But is it quality traffic? News websites won’t want 15 year old kids as returning visitors who are interested in reading about new cool tech gadgets. They won’t provide any value to anyone.

What advertisers need to know is who in the entire population is using Facebook. Not all consumers are eager to log in and use Facebook. According to a recent study by Xyte/SSI, twenty-seven percent of the population has never logged in to Facebook and another 20 percent only log in once or several times a month. That is 57 percent of the population that advertisers can miss out on. However, 38 percent log in daily and 16 percent several times a week. Who are these consumers? What should an advertiser know about these consumers to better engage them?
Not surprisingly, consumers who are more likely to use Facebook are strong with the written word and are the most frequent users of the Internet. They use Facebook mostly to communicate with friends and connect with family. They like to keep their information up-to-date, meet new people, share photos, follow celebrities, share concerns, and solve problems. Most importantly, they like to learn about new products and share experiences about them.
The segment of the population that frequents Facebook the most has the following characteristics:
· Have great compassion for others and desire to be emotionally connected with others
· Have a natural intuition about people and how to relate to them
· Adapt well to change
· Like to work with others
· Are emotional, idealistic and romantic, yet can rationalize through situations
· Enjoy gossip and messages delivered in story form and like to read and write
· Do not require concrete examples in order to comprehend new ideas
These zealous consumers are only about 18 percent of the population and their marketing message is very different from other segments that have the opposite preferences.
Another 32 percent of the population can also be attracted with emotional laden ads that incorporate family and friends, but this segment does not like to read, relate only to messages that show physical movement of people and tangible things, simply physical comedy, and their media preference is television or radio.
That leaves another 59 percent of the population that responses to marketing messages that are very different and those consumers are not regularly logging into Facebook if at all.

Though this may seem surprising at first glance, a closer look at a couple different aspects of either site, I think, reveals why this outcome is natural, if not obvious.
1. Fan Pages & News Feeds: Facebook fan pages are the perfect way for media outlets to consistently reach a targeted, interested audience with their content. Not only is membership opt-in, but new content posted to a given page is streamed into fans’ News Feeds. The only similar offering that Google provides is Buzz, which is a comparatively cluttered, less user-friendly experience in its current form.
2. The Variety of Google News: What makes Google News so appealing to me (and other news junkies, I assume) is that it provides myriad, varied sources that cover the same topic. In other words, there are always a lot of choices on Google News. It’s no wonder, then, that readers are choosing major media outlets less frequently through Google News. In fact, I think it’s testament to the strength of major media outlets’ brands that they attract so many loyal followers through Google News, despite the available choices.
For more of my thoughts on this check out my blog post: http://stevenduque.com/2010/03/2-reasons-why-people-trust-facebooks-news-more-than-googles/