SCALE: Developing a project community

Posted Mar 7, 2013 17:39 UTC (Thu) by nye (subscriber, #51576)
Parent article: SCALE: Developing a project community

>Facebook is a "not terrible" way to gauge the reach of your project, he said, and is considerably better than log-based web analytics. The reason is that every Facebook account is bound to a real person. Thus, in addition to calculating your own project's reach, you can compare it to the reach of your competitor projects. It is also a useful outreach tool, since it is one of the default places people unfamiliar with your project start a lot of their searches.

I'm not quite certain I've understood this. Let's say that, like some of the posters here, you've never heard of XBMC and want to find out what it is. Is he saying that a significant number of people will do a Facebook search for it, rather than going to a search engine?

It's never really occurred to me that people would use Facebook like this - is it generally a successful strategy?