• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, July 15, 2010

Putting a price on Facebook Fan pages to monitor return on investments (ROIs) for campaigns takes more than reading a post or monitoring clicks. Networked Insights earlier this week released SocialSenseFB, an application that monitors the chatter from fans on a company's page and how long they spend on the page.

Dan Neely, founder and chief executive officer at Networked Insights, a social media tech company, estimates about 7 million Fan pages on Facebook, from a variety of brands like Starbucks and Research In Motion (RIM). "You don't need to read 100,000 posts weekly, but rather understand the trends and themes, so you know how to talk with your customers," he says. "Understanding what's valuable to them in Facebook, where they engage with you in real time, compared with blogs, where they talk about you, is very different."

Neely calls SocialSenseFB the Google Analytics for unstructured data. The tool not only identifies "hot" trending themes in Facebook, but allows brands to determine the level of engagement instead of counting Fans. Starbucks might have 10 million Fans, but it doesn't mean the same amount come back every month after they retrieve the $1 off for a Latte. It also puts metrics around what they like and don't like about the brand.

Networked Insights, which processes 1.5 billion conversations daily, evaluated Facebook data and found the most valuable comes from Fan pages. "After looking at Twitter we found that only 3% of the data is valuable and the rest is junk," Neely says, defining "junk" as the ability to extract meaning from the conversation.

Neely says SocialSenseFB will build in features that tell brands how Fans connect to others by looking at extended networks and determining the most influential contributors. RIM, a Networked Insights client, has begun to track where conversations go after leaving the Fan page. It's not done per user, because Facebook doesn't allow brand to drop cookies in browsers.

The ability to extract meaningful phrases from Fan pages also lets brands better optimize the content on those pages to make them searchable in Facebook by knowing the key phrases, Neely says. The SocialSenseFB platform builds on Networked Insights' SocialSense product line that give brands a deeper look at online conversations and interactions.

Prior to Facebook opening its Graph API, marketers had little insight into how conversations by members impacted brand loyalty and what, if any, themes needed to improve.