A slew of surveys and studies concerning Facebook's position in the online firmament have emerged ahead of the social networking giant's upcoming initial public offering, but it can be difficult to determine if all the metrics being bandied about clarify matters for potential investors or simply muddy the waters even further.
The latest such study being buzzed about from Greenlight isn't likely to settle that question, but the numbers reported by the digital marketing agency are certainly pretty interesting.
Like a poll from AP-CNBC released earlier this week, the Greenlight survey keys in on some potential pain points for Facebook as it seeks to maintain growth going forward.
The AP-CNBC survey focused on consumers' trust—or lack thereof—in the staying power of Facebook, with a whopping 46 percent of respondents saying they believe that the social network will "fade away as new things come along." Greenlight's report digs deeper into the nitty-gritty of Facebook's position relative to its biggest online rival, Google.
One thing to consider with the Greenlight survey is that it skews heavily to European users' attitudes towards Facebook. Of the 500 people the marketing firm polled, 70 percent are from Europe, 25 percent from North America, and just a few are from Asia and elsewhere.
That said, the poll serves up some interesting figures regarding Web denizens' reliance on Google properties versus their regular use of the Facebook platform.
Google's flagship Internet search engine is far and away the most dependably used service for poll respondents, with about 75 percent saying they use it regularly and a negligible percentage saying they never visit Google.com at all. YouTube, another Google property, also had a high rate of regular use amongst those polled at about 27 percent and the second-lowest rate of respondents saying they never use it at roughly 5 percent.
Facebook fared very well against all Web properties listed by Greenlight—except those two Google ventures. The social network is second only to Google's search service in terms of regular use, with about 40 percent of respondents saying they're frequent visitors. But Facebook also had a relatively large percentage of respondents—almost one-fifth—who said they never use the site, putting it behind not just Google.com but behind YouTube as well.
If you toss in the relatively small but existent user numbers for the Google-operated Google+ and Orkut.com social networking platforms, the Facebook narrative starts to look less like a tale of social media dominance and more like a story of overall online second banana-hood.
But Facebook's value proposition has always centered around the stickiness of its product, not the relative size of its user base as compared with the masses who dart in to use Google's services and then dart out again (though Facebook's user base of nearly a billion is gargantuan, to be sure).
And the Greenlight study serves up some numbers that bolster Facebook's case in that regard. Namely, Facebook's users are loyal enough to the platform that a full 22 percent would switch from Google and Bing to a Facebook-provided search engine if the company offered one, according to the marketing firm.
Further, despite being fairly late to the mobile game, Facebook ranks second behind only Google in use on smartphones and tablets by respondents.
But the survey also indicates that Facebook's big revenue driver, ads, remains a puzzling proposition for potential investors. As other polls have indicated, the company has a tough time getting users to click on its ads and sponsored listings, with 44 percent of respondents saying they never do so, and another 31 percent reporting they click through ads only rarely.
Such uncertainty may have already caused big Facebook sponsors like GM to pull out of the company.
Facebook on Thursday officially announced that its initial public stock offering will happened Friday on the NASDAQ exchange.
For more from Damon, follow him on Twitter @dpoeter.
