FB permissons

So What Exactly Are Facebook Permissions?

Facebook Permissions are a Facebook feature that allows the social network and businesses that use Facebook for marketing purposes to collect information about users.

When a user agrees to “allow” Facebook, or a business, to broadcast a user’s Likes or other information, the user has granted Facebook permission to do so.

Using Facebook to Mine Data

With each data field a business asks for online, the opt-in rate drops by 10% (I heard this from a Facebook product engineer).

That means if gaining access to your app requires customers to tell you anything at all, you could lose 10% of your potential users right off the bat.

Ask for an email address and lose 10%. Ask for a birthday and you lose another 10%. Ask to access their friend list and another 10% are gone.

The quick math here? Ask for five pieces of data and you could lose half of the people (or more) who are at least interested enough in your business or brand to check out your page and your app(s).

Why Marketers Need to Take Note

These facts are not only relevant to developers who are creating the apps: they matter to any business owner who wants to collect information about users via Facebook apps, including contests and promotions.

Data

Collecting data from users is a key reason that businesses run Facebook contests and promotions. Data collected can be used for later marketing outreach. Image source: iStockPhoto.

Today, social media is being used for customer research on a daily basis.

However, with all of the news about privacy, identity theft, hacking and in-boxes being filled with unwanted email, it’s no wonder that Facebook users abandon forms on custom apps when they ask for an exceptional amount of personal information.

Unfortunately, some of the data that the business owners try to collect is marketing-driven and has nothing to do with the app.

So it’s not surprising that none of the discussions are favorable: consumers don’t like it when a brand asks them for personal data, especially when the user can’t see how it will be used.

With that said, marketers and business owners on Facebook are still able to gather information from their users and avoid these abandonment rates.

While researching this topic, I discovered that there’s a lot of information about how consumers can protect their privacy, but next to none about what businesses need to know about this issue. I believe it is a two-way street.

If more marketers were careful about how they collect data, consumers would be more comfortable sharing the information that is the most helpful for businesses.

To collect any data from users, outside of what is available via Facebook Insights, businesses must use a third-party provider to create a custom app. It’s here that Facebook Permissions come into play and businesses can make sure to choose a third-party app that allows them to customize the permissions, turning off access to data that they don’t really need.