Googling Facebook

For those of you who still don’t believe that Facebook is here to stay, here’s some interesting news: For the first time ever, people have spent more time on the social network than they have using the world’s top search engine.

According to data from comScore Inc., this past August, people spent a total of 41.1 million minutes on Facebook, about 9.9 percent of their Web-surfing minutes for the month. This just passed the 39.8 million minutes, or 9.6 percent, that users spent on all of Google Inc.’s sites combined -- including watching videos on YouTube, reading e-mails on Google’s Gmail and reading Google news.

Here are some other interesting Facebook stats:

• Facebook has 500 million users (The total U.S. population as of Sept. 25 was 310 million).
• Half of Facebook users log on daily and post 25 comments per month about Facebook content.
• The average user has 130 friends -- people they let into their personal network and allow to see their Facebook wall postings.
• There are 1.5 million local companies with Facebook pages.
• There are 150 million mobile Facebook users, who are twice as active as non-mobile users.

Having a Facebook page is great not just for promoting your products and services, but also for getting valuable feedback from your shoppers. Just look at this screenshot from Heinen’s Facebook page. The grocer simply asked its fans what flavor of coffee or tea is their favorite, and received 22 responses.

Keep an eye out for my November FutureTech column, in which I’ll highlight additional benefits of launching your own Facebook page.