This guest post was written by Dr. Augustine Fou who is SVP, Digital Strategy at MRM Worldwide and John Real who is a McKinsey alumnus and the principal of Zephyr Metacap LLC, a strategy and research consulting boutique focused on new technologies.

With over four times the number of pages per visit each month than Google, Facebook is quickly becoming the mainstay of many eyeballs online. Facebook, like many leading social networks, is growing it’s audiences faster than every other destination category online and keeping those eyeballs far longer. So are social networks the best place to spend your ad dollar?

Facebook visitors, like most social networkers, go online to keep in touch with friends: most often to approve new friend requests, confirm events, see what their friends are thinking or doing in the form of status postings on their profiles or even grab a look at the latest mobile phone picture uploads. Activity usually surges during finals week when college students, Facebook’s largest demographic segment and is centered on socializing. So, in the very rare event that your ad has to do with one’s friends, they are at best a distraction or at worst a nuisance. It should be no surprise then that only 1 out of 10,000 visitors click-through ads on social networks. That’s pretty dismal compared to search engines like Google or top destinations like the New York Times where, by comparison, viewers click-through some 10 to 100 times more often.

Online search and destinations are an entirely different story. When searching or browsing, as opposed to socializing, your context is open to results and not specifically to interact with your friends. When “Googling” or even just glancing at the headlines of the New York Times online, one is generally looking for something and is receptive to search results, related links or even ads especially if they are relevant to what you’re looking for. Advertising, in this case, engages during the right context (looking for something) and ideally with the right product or service (targeting) which would tempt a click. This, in part, explains why click-through rates of search engines and destination are better by orders of magnitude compared to social networks.

What you can gain from Social Networks far better than any search engines or destinations is to draw insights about your customers. Search engines, at best, might provide a glance at the forest of top line trends in the form of reports from search requests. Registered destinations bring the trees with more details from demographically matched page view detail. Both approaches merely deduce interests from words and time spent however. On Social networks, friends will outright discuss their interests or share opinions about products and services. So whereas you get the forest with search and the trees with destinations, Social Networks provide step by step directions through the forest and trees and takes you where you need to go.

While we might deduce that wealthier customers with investing capital frequent the Wall Street Journal, we can figure out why a truly active investors signed-up with TD Ameritrade who provides superior software, QuoteTracker, for free in addition to lower commissions, from comments on their Fantasy Stock Exchange game postings on Facebook.

Hold on to those polls and surveys though because drawing customer insights on social network is not as simple as traditional market research. Remember, you don’t want to be a distraction to be opted out of or a nuisance to be blocked. In effect, you want to learn from the recorded interactions among friends. One way to accomplish this is to recruit social network members to help you listen.

To start you’ll need to find the right recruits who are already interested in your product or, even better, your competitors product or service. Be sure your recruit has a lot of friends to begin with for a broad consensus. Once you’ve assembled your team, you can send them off to comb through the relevant posts (comments), interests, groups of their friends or even distribute one or two question polls they think they’re friends will answer. Don’t forget that your listeners can only ask so many questions so many times as they spend their social capital on your behalf.

While a case can be made for the lack of statistical validity, this more qualitative approach can more quickly help you realize that something is wrong with your web form form making it impossible for anyone to register or that some customers won’t sign up because they don’t want to share their age. You might even learn that your competitor got a lot of customers by offering a complimentary Gold American Express card (once provided by Fidelity) at one time.

Bottom line: you’ll learn so much more about your customers on Social Networks. Whereas search engines and destinations bring the crust and maybe one or two pieces of the pie, social networks bring the whole pie, crust and all to generating broader and deeper customer insights. Essentially, you’ll benefit most from social networks by hiring listeners who can tell you how to make your product something they’ll wanna talk about.

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