Showing posts with label Facebook. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Facebook. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Social Communications Patterns Different from Voice

Those of you familiar with the typical voice usage pattern will find this graphic by Dan Zarella interesting. It shows that Facebook sharing ("communications") happens on weekends, in contrast to voice traffic which tends to happen on weekdays. Contagious content


Some would also note that much website "commenting" and reading tends to happen on weekends as well, suggesting that perhaps people engage in digital communications on weekends because that is when they have time to spend on social sites, read, watch and then share.


  facebook sharing by day of week


On the other hand, the data is not completely conclusive. Other studies suggest that the amount of Facebook content creation is fairly even throughout the week, though consumption might be said to peak mid-week, on Wednesday. Facebook shares and reads





But Zarella suggests Twitter "retweet" activity shows yet a third pattern, building during the week and then falling on weekends, suggesting people are reading during the work week, and then cutting back on weekends. People retweet when they actively are reading, in other words, implying that Twitter is getting used less on weekends.


Dan Zarrella on the retweet activity by day - social media monitoring


Friday is the best day to get retweets, Zarella says. The click-through-rate of emails ist best on Monday and Saturday, as well. Less content is published on the weekend, therefore more comments are compiled on Facebook on Saturday, says Zarella. Best days for sharing, consuming







Saturday, December 3, 2011

Facebook Collects Data from any Visits to Pages with "Like" Buttons

Computing guru Richard Stallman, creator of the GNU Project and founder of the Free Software Foundation, points out a feature of Facebook that most of us do not know about.

Facebook does massive surveillance, he argues. If there is a "Like" button on a page, Facebook knows who visited that page and it can get the IP address of the computer visiting the page, even if the person is not a Facebook user.  Privacy issues

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

New Facebook Features Get Mixed Reviews from Teens


Teens have mixed reviews about the recent changes on Facebook, according to a survey by GrownUpThinking.

Overwhelmingly, teens are openly and seriously considering spending less time on Facebook as a direct result of the recent changes. Only four percent of teens plan to spend more time on Facebook. According to the  research, 47 percent will maintain the same level of usage, electing to “put up with the annoyances” in order to access the features that made the platform valuable to them in the first place: visiting friend pages, commenting on walls and engaging in chats.

The survey of 2,000 (14-17 year old) teens suggests many find the changes “confusing, annoying, disappointing and useless,” (among comments made repeatedly in our discussion forums).

Teens mention Facebook’s biggest strength is its simplicity and ease of use. Only 19 percent of teens felt that the interface was easier to navigate, with 45 percent saying the page feels cluttered by all of the new features.

Social media fatigue may become a bigger problem, with an onslaught of updates streaming through the newly-added ticker, causing 35 percent of teens to feel “uncomfortable” with the new level of sharing.

But “Timeline” gets a big thumbs up. Timeline received the most praise from teens in our study (27 percent said it was their favorite above all Facebook features). Securing a position on a teen’s Timeline will have meant that your brand achieved a defining connection in the life of a teen. In contrast, apps that are currently auto-posting their way on to Timelines of unsuspecting teens will need to quickly adapt in order to maintain long-term relevance and placement.

Since most teens have between 100 and 500 friends, the ticker scrolls too-fast to provide meaningful updates. The ticker is seen as a distraction, over-communicating their activities without providing any real value. Only 17 percent see any value in viewing friend activity this way, with 31 percent of teens trying to ignore its very existence on the page. They worry that a ticker provides information that “is not theirs to see” in the first place, with the word “stalker” being mentioned on several occasions.

Teens have mixed reviews about the recent changes on Facebook, according to a survey by GrownUpThinking.

Overwhelmingly, teens are openly and seriously considering spending less time on Facebook as a direct result of the recent changes. Only four percent of teens plan to spend more time on Facebook. According to the  research, 47 percent will maintain the same level of usage, electing to “put up with the annoyances” in order to access the features that made the platform valuable to them in the first place: visiting friend pages, commenting on walls and engaging in chats.

The survey of 2,000 (14-17 year old) teens suggests many find the changes “confusing, annoying, disappointing and useless,” (among comments made repeatedly in our discussion forums).

Teens mention Facebook’s biggest strength is its simplicity and ease of use. Only 19 percent of teens felt that the interface was easier to navigate, with 45 percent saying the page feels cluttered by all of the new features.

Social media fatigue may become a bigger problem, with an onslaught of updates streaming through the newly-added ticker, causing 35 percent of teens to feel “uncomfortable” with the new level of sharing.

But “Timeline” gets a big thumbs up. Timeline received the most praise from teens in our study (27 percent said it was their favorite above all Facebook features). Securing a position on a teen’s Timeline will have meant that your brand achieved a defining connection in the life of a teen. In contrast, apps that are currently auto-posting their way on to Timelines of unsuspecting teens will need to quickly adapt in order to maintain long-term relevance and placement.

Since most teens have between 100 and 500 friends, the ticker scrolls too-fast to provide meaningful updates. The ticker is seen as a distraction, over-communicating their activities without providing any real value. Only 17 percent see any value in viewing friend activity this way, with 31 percent of teens trying to ignore its very existence on the page. They worry that a ticker provides information that “is not theirs to see” in the first place, with the word “stalker” being mentioned on several occasions.

Overwhelmingly, teens view apps as not adding value to their news feed. They view apps as “clogging” their wall with “spam” and an unnecessary level of communication. At best, “it depends” on the type of app being used. The top apps on Facebook with teens are Twitter (27 percent), Ticketmaster (21 percent), Yahoo (24 percent), Netflix (20 percent) and Spotify (15 percent).

According to the survey, 25 percent of teens will be using Facebook less and Google+ more, with 10 percent saying they would drop Facebook completely. Among teens that are already using Google+, they rave about the platform as being cleaner and “more social” than Facebook.

Lack of knowledge about Google+ seems to be the biggest barrier to entry among teens who express interest in staying loyal to Facebook. Also, teens have opted for staying with Facebook over Google+ because the majority of their friends are already on it.

Screen Shot 2011-10-11 at 10.25.36 AM
Overwhelmingly, teens view apps as not adding value to their news feed. They view apps as “clogging” their wall with “spam” and an unnecessary level of communication. At best, “it depends” on the type of app being used. The top apps on Facebook with teens are Twitter (27 percent), Ticketmaster (21 percent), Yahoo (24 percent), Netflix (20 percent) and Spotify (15 percent).

According to the survey, 25 percent of teens will be using Facebook less and Google+ more, with 10 percent saying they would drop Facebook completely. Among teens that are already using Google+, they rave about the platform as being cleaner and “more social” than Facebook.

Lack of knowledge about Google+ seems to be the biggest barrier to entry among teens who express interest in staying loyal to Facebook. Also, teens have opted for staying with Facebook over Google+ because the majority of their friends are already on it.

Teens react to Facebook changes


Friday, October 7, 2011

Facebook on a Mobile Without a Data Plan

Gemalto is offering feature phone users a way to use Facebook on their mobiles without buying a data plan. The service is not free. Instead, customers are charged a subscription of $1 for a day, $3 for a week, $9 for a month,  for unlimited access to "Facebook for SIM."

Sunday, October 2, 2011

Digital Monopolies?

FacebookLogo 520x304 Facebook, Twitter, iTunes and Google: The rise of digital monopoliesA "digital monopoly" can be a strange thing. An application, whether Facebook or PayPal or Google or iTunes can have external characteristics that resemble what might have been seen as monopolies in other earlier contexts.

But they are odd sorts of monopolies. They can be used "for free," so price gouging is hard to discern. There are other alternatives for all applications and devices, over time, so lack of choices is likewise hard to discern.

But in some quarters there is concern over such application "monopolies," even when traditional tests of consumer harm are virtually impossible to prove.

Advertising is Revenue Model for Most Social Networks, So Far

Observers used to worry about how social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and now Google+ would create a sustainable revenue model. So far, the answer has turned out to be "advertising." But there are some additional questions that arise from such asnwers. 


Sometimes it is hard to precisely figure out what business social networks are part of. 


Sure, at a high level, every business has the primary task of creating a customer. At a fundamental level, that's the "business" every business must master, with profits being the price of continuing to create and sustain those relationships. Beyond that, every discrete business can be categorized by its products, revenue models, technology approaches, geographies served, revenue and customer segments, among other potential taxonomic approaches. 


Google is a hard firm to characterize, for example. It makes its money from advertising. Normally, if you ask what sort of company makes its money that way, the answer is "media." But Google always says it is a technology company, not a media company.


There are reasons. Valuations of media companies carry lower multiples than technology companies. The content Google wants to index comes from content and media companies that aren't comfortable with the idea that Google is a competitor. So Google has a couple of good financial reasons for positioning itself as a technology company, not a media company. 


But Google is the biggest technology company you've ever heard of that makes its money from advertising rather than hardware or software. It's just hard to categorize. The issue isn't exclusive to Google. Is Apple a media company because it sells music, video and games? 


Is Amazon "just" a retailer now that it creates and sells Kindles, and sells magazine, newspaper, book, music and video content? 


Back to the original question, what is a social network? Social networks make their money on advertising. And what sorts of companies historically do that? Media companies. 






Friday, September 30, 2011

How Much Sharing Will Facebook Users Really Want?

Privacy and sharing always are in tension with any application a user wants to experience in a personalized and custom way. It' hard for an application to provide a personalized experience without knowing a fair amount about a user's preferences.

We are about to find out whether 800 million Facebook users prefer the "Open Graph apps" to share widely, or will ratchet up their privacy settings. How many people will give services permission to share everything on Facebook, and then rue it months or years later when something they don't want the world to know about is instantly distributed to all?

Will users want to give Facebook the right to log all actions?

Facebook Tracks Users Who are Logged Off

Facebook is facing new regulatory scrutiny after revelations that the application is tracking users even after they have logged out of the application.

In a letter to the Federal Trade Commission, Reps. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and Joe Barton (R-Tex.) wrote that Facebook’s use of “cookie” software should be investigated under the “unfair and deceptive acts” clause of the agency’s mandate.
Privacy issues

Facebook says it has fixed the problem, which had been that every time a user visits a site that features a Facebook "Like" button, a record is sent back to Facebook, even after you log off your account.

The new application programming interface allows applications to post status items to a Facebook timeline without a users intervention. It is an extension of "Facebook Instant" and the privacy concern here is that because you no longer have to explicitly opt-in to share an item, you may accidentally share a page or an event that you did not intend others to see. Logging out of Facebook is not enough.

The advice to "log out of Facebook," in and of itself, does not fix the problem. Logging out of Facebook only de-authorizes your browser from the web application. A number of cookies (including your account number) are still sent along to all requests to Facebook.com.

Even if you are logged out, Facebook still knows and can track every page you visit. The only solution is to delete every Facebook cookie in your browser, or to use a separate browser for Facebook interactions, some would argue.

Facebook said the issue has been fixed.

But some now raise further issues about Facebook’s new “friction-less sharing” features, which allow applications to post user activity in real time, without requiring permission from account holders for each update. The apps require users to grant permission once to generate updates, and users have the ability to change these settings at any time. But many users will not.

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

WSJ.com Inside Facebook

WSJ Social (https://social.wsj.com) is The Wall Street Journal’s app on Facebook, through which you can read, share and comment on WSJ content right within the Facebook environment.

How does WSJ Social differ from WSJ.com? WSJ Social is The Wall Street Journal’s app on Facebook, offering a new way for you to easily read and share the most important WSJ news to you – all within the Facebook environment. In WSJ Social, you’re the “editor.” Every user is an editor, and the best editors – the ones who amass the greatest number of readers by consistently sharing the most relevant and interesting content – are the app’s top editors.

How do I log in to and access WSJ Social? To log in to the WSJ Social app on Facebook, use the same login and password you use to log into Facebook today. To add the WSJ Social app to your Facebook account, simply go to https://social.wsj.com and accept the Facebook permissions request.

Monday, September 19, 2011

Facebook Is Expected to Unveil Media-Sharing Service - NYTimes.com

Facebook is expected to unveil a media platform that will allow people to easily share their favorite music, television shows and movies, effectively making the basic profile page a primary entertainment hub. In other words, Facebook will become a content distributor in a more active way, if not a direct way, at the moment.

Facebook, which has more than 750 million users, has not revealed its plans, but the company is widely expected to announce the service at its F8 developers’ conference.

Sunday, September 18, 2011

Social Media Conversion Rates Low, But Worth It?

Marketers continue to believe that Twitter and Facebook are worth the effort. A new report from RichRelevance states that online retail shoppers who click through from Facebook only convert 1.2 percent of the time. If you think that’s bad, Twitter’s number is only 0.5 percent.

But Twitter shoppers actually spend more money when they do order.


Online conversion rates—the ratio of purchase sessions to shopping sessions—has remained relatively unchanged between 2010 and 2011, based on a year-on-year comparison of mass merchants. This rate was 2.1 percent in August 2010 and remained 2.13 percent in August 2011.


Overall online average order value has dropped from $128.27 to $116.58 in this period. The decline may be attributed to several factors, including increased cost consciousness and increased shipping efficiencies that encourage smaller purchases.


Shoppers behave very differently depending on how they arrive at the retail site. For example, while fewer shoppers come from Twitter than anywhere else, they spend more per order once they are on the site.

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Facebook leads online "time spent"

No question about it: people spend a significant amount of time interacting with Facebook, especially news feeds and profiles.

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Report: Facebook Doubles Revenue

Facebook has doubled its revenue in the first half of 2011, Reuters reports. Facebook made $1.6 billion in the first six months of this year, nearly double what it made in the same time in 2010. Facebook doubles ad revenue

The largest portion of Facebook's revenue is believed to come from advertising, showing that the company has created a viable ad business. Facebook Doubles Revenue

It isn't yet clear what the composition of the advertising was, but display advertising is where Facebook has been growing rapidly, outpacing Yahoo, which had a big head start, and Google, which is growing its display revenue fast, a business it has not been part of, in the past.

Nor is it clear whether local ads have started to have impact. Many of us probably suspect Facebook has done best in national advertising.

eMarketer_Dispay Ads June11.jpg

Monday, May 2, 2011

Facebook Dominates Display Advertising

Google Facebook Yahoo revenues

It wasn't so long ago that observers speculated about whether Facebook could keep growing, much less find a viable, self-sustaining business model. Looking at Facebook's share of online display ads, the concern about business or revenue model is not relevant any longer.

[FACEBOOK]The only question might be the scale of Facebook's ad operations. These days, it is Twitter that occasionally still faces questions about its own revenue model.

http://goo.gl/utliu


Saturday, April 30, 2011

How Social Drives Shopping

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Social Shopping: What's the Big Deal?

Sunday, January 30, 2011

Mark Zuckerberg on SNL

Saturday, January 29, 2011

"Sponsored Stories" by Facebook Not Seen as "Ads"

Facebook's "Sponsored Stories" program clearly is an "advertising" program, but it is intentionally designed not be be seen as such.

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Facebook Valuation

You can decide for yourself whether there is a bubble building (again) in the Internet app space.

Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Is Google Now Microsoft? Facebook Bull Thinks So

Rare is the company that keep up hyper levels of revenue growth forever. Even if you agree with this view, Facebook itself is going to be "legacy," sooner or later.

Directv-Dish Merger Fails

Directv’’s termination of its deal to merge with EchoStar, apparently because EchoStar bondholders did not approve, means EchoStar continue...