Second Life's official Facebook page just crossed over a quarter million fans, and based on this trendline on Pagedata, will likely surpass 300K fans by the end of 2012. To judge by the user behavior on it, it's a highly active page, with posts getting hundreds of comments and Likes, and clickthroughs (to Flickr pages and SL Destination listings) running from several hundred to a couple thousand. Also interesting:
Second Life's Facebook page likely has about twice as many users as Second Life's official Community site, which according to Google Ad Planner, only gets 120K monthly visitors. (Yes yes, comparing Facebook fans to monthly visitors is a bit like comparing kumquats to carrots, but 50% of all Facebook users log in daily, which translates into strong monthly engagement.) It looks like a fair amount of people participating on the Facebook page do so through profiles named after their SL avatars, which is technically not permitted on Facebook, but then, we're living in an age of fake Facebook girlfriends for hire. Also, by creating a page of your own, you can pseudonymously participate on Facebook through your avatar without running afoul of the social network's terms of service -- Strawberry Singh has detailed instructions on just doing that.
Not all numbers stirred together creates any kind of an interesting soup.
When you 'Like' a page on Facebook you're just subscribing to content regardless of whether you even pay attention to it's feed or log into Facebook again. Why compare something as fickle as that to the amount of visitors the commmunity subdomain of Second Life gets a month? A better comparison would be the amount of Second Life accounts vs. the amount of likes on the Facebook page. Still meaningless numbers to compare, but at least fair in that both can result from 1 time actions that require no further attention paid to Second Life to still stand.
Posted by: Ezra | Wednesday, April 25, 2012 at 01:28 PM