I have been asking, begging, demanding for real USEFUL statistics from Facebook for months and months and now Hubspot steps up with what can only be described as a CIRCUS of statistics that tells us absolutely NOTHING, no let me be polite: look like they were produced by a high school freshman attempting to plump up an essay. Forget being polite. Lets unravel them shall we?

Activity by Age No date range, no trending, no numbers. Essentially meaningless.

All charts about Men v. Women Ditto. And the claim that women “Get Talked To More” by whom? Other women or by men? By businesses? Those are completely different dynamics.

Facebook “Factbook” Facts? Hardly. Over the last six years people have spent 55 minutes a day on Facebook. That tells us nothing. What are they spending RIGHT NOW on Facebook and is it trending upwards or downwards (I strongly suspect the latter). And the only people who care about FB’s valuation are talking heads who want to see who’s in on the IPO. Consider it gossip futures.

As of August 2009 (ancient history in web time) 50% of users were active. How about fresh data and overlaying it with demographics: age, gender, location. And how about trending that data. Anecdotal evidence suggests that there are millions of FB deadbeats who sign on and never come back or comeback infrequently. We all have them on our accounts — no photo, two posts, five friends.

Facebook Users Like Food Pages OK Hubspot are you a site of real value or the cover of 17 Magazine? Where’s the beef?

Facebook Pages & Buzzwords Wow, let’s play Madlibs! How can any marketer with a straight face recite these to a client?

Facts about Facebook Infographic No dates, all hype and judging by the most popular FB pages more ancient history.

Most Liked and Least Liked Facebook Page Types Meaningless data based on averages. See yesterday’s post.

Facebook v. the United States Data so old its useless and again, nothing is trended.

I am a professional marketer who tells the truth, speaks with bell ringing clarity. I fight to give my clients the most clear, fact-based info possible, because their success and ultimately mine depends on it. It’s their money for goodness sake and they are paying me to advise them wisely.

Hubspot you are undermining our profession by purveying this vacuous baloney as gospel.

Years ago, BI (BEFORE the INTERNET) we coined a phrase at Camarès. The phrase is Religious Significance. That was what we achieved when we used the “we-have-to-get this-document-approved-and-no-one-has-the-power-at-the-client-to-approve-it technique”.  (Think global telecommunications company with 25 mid-level managers on the same project).

Here’s what we’d do: First we’d present the document to Joe and say, “Hey Joe, every member of the team has seen the document and likes it, how do you feel about it?” of course Joe would say, “well if everyone else thinks its O.K. I do too”. Then we’d go to Jane and repeat the process. At some point, the document achieved Religious Significance, no one had any more to say about it since no one else had anything to say about it and, well, then it was gospel, and we considered it approved. Amen.

Now here we are AB (AFTER the BUBBLE) and the Internet is providing that same experience on mass scale with a twist, I call it: Crowd Religious Significancing.

There is no better example than a recent Hubspot article: Least Liked Facebook Page Types.

It features a chart based on data from “a proprietary program”. Start worrying. (Who wrote it? What were the parameters? Has the program been tested?) And this program delivered these results: it counted and averaged the number of LIKES on Facebook Pages and organized them by category. Oh dear. There is not much there, there. Watch it unravel:

The first respondent to the article was a Christian group who was rightly up in arms about the results. It showed religious groups as part of the “least liked” pages chart on Facebook.

It all sounds very middle school to me: Who’s the most liked? Who’s the least liked? When in fact the chart simply shows the AVERAGE number of people who “liked” pages in a certain category. It does not show the number of pages in the category so the data is totally unreliable.

One person did note the data was hardly viable and cogently explained why. BUT that was ignored by the majority. Here is a typical response: “Thanks for this information. I am surprised that Religion is the least like facebook page. Anyways thanks Hubspot for this findings.”

Findings???? FINDINGS????  These are more like SCRATCHINGS.  And here is where Crowd Religious Signficancing begins. Tissue thin “findings” are presented by self-proclaimed “experts”, then tweeted and retweeted (160 times at last count in this case) and suddenly it is gospel! And this is all because the folks with the REAL solid data refuse to release it to the people who need it most: their customers. (I’ve written about this “Basic Questions Facebook Must Answer”)

Facebook, Google et. al. are holding their cards so close that all that’s left is a world of sketchy experts scratching away at nothing to fabricate facts.

Well here is one fact for you: No one knows anything.

Start there, test with care and you’ll come to know some of what need to know – for you.