Facebook and Twitter are Big

Facebook and Twitter both are big. Here's a look at how big the two firms are. You can click on the image for a larger view.

Facebook is Social Network Market Leader in 115 Countries

Facebook is the leading social network in 115 out of 132 countries.

Facebook "Single Sign On" Deepens Mobile Integration

 Facebook's new "Single Sign On" capability means smartphone owners can sign up once on Facebook and then use those credentials on the device for any other application that supports the "single sign on" feature.

This works on any Android phone or any iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch device that supports multitasking (most iOS4 devices).

The Facebook Blog

Social Media Clutter Grows

Social media is more popular than ever (81 percent of U.S. online users engage with social tools at least once per month), but that popularity also increases "clutter" in the space, making it harder for marketers to stand out in a busy environment, says Nate Elliott, Forrester Research analyst.

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The average U.S. Facebook user has 135 friend connections on the site, and MySpace and Twitter users aren’t far behind, with MySpace users having an average 107 connections and Twitter users an average 77 connections.

In addition, nearly 75 percent of online users consume other social content outside of social networks, like blogs posts and YouTube videos. Younger users are even more active than the averages suggest.

Also, most users don’t check their social feeds that often, Elliott says.  Despite the lingering stereotype of Facebook and Twitter users being tethered to their computers, the average social network user logs in only every few days, with Facebook users checking in less frequently than users of other popular networks.

From a marketing standpoint relatively few online users become "fans" of brands’ social networking pages. With more than 500 million people around the world using Facebook, and with nearly every business having started its own Facebook page, you probably could’ve guessed that social networks are by far the most common social technology through which consumers engage directly with brands.

But even this type of engagement remains disappointingly rare. Just 18 percent of U.S. online users have become “friends” with or “liked” a brand on a social network in the past three months.

Users are even less likely to engage with brands on less-popular social platforms. For instance, only eight percent have been to a brand-sponsored social network recently, while just six percent have read a brand’s blog. Only five percent of online users have followed a brand on Twitter in the past three months.

If such low levels of engagement continue, it will become difficult for marketers to justify dedicating budget to social channels. In fact, this challenge is already becoming evident: The majority of the large interactive marketers we survey say they’ve chosen not to increase their social media marketing budgets from 2009 to 2010.

With clutter growing, and with social networking users much more interested in engaging with each other than with brands,  interactive marketers have two options for reaching their audiences through social media: cut through the clutter, or  avoid it altogether.

And though many marketers try to fight through social clutter, this strategy is fraught with danger because most marketers simply aren’t interesting enough. Unless a marketer is blessed with genuinely unique content or a breakthrough creative idea, it remains tough to cut through the clutter.

It also costs money to get users’ attention on popular social networks. Although many marketers still think of social media as a “free” strategy, we rarely see successful social programs that didn’t involve some form of paid promotion, says Elliott.

Nothing is ever too easy in the online and mobile marketing business, it seems.

The Value of a "Liker"

Newspapers and other content organizations can use social mechanisms, such as the Facebook "Like" mechanism, to drive traffic, engagement and clickthrough rates, Facebook argues. Do get those results, content publishers should use social plugins, beginning with the Like button.

When a person clicks "Like," it publishes  a story to their friends with a link back to a site, adds the article to the reader’s profile, and makes the article discoverable through search on Facebook.

Publishers also should optimize their "Like" buttons, perhaps  showing friends’ faces and placing the button near engaging content, but avoiding visual clutter with plenty of white space. That can increase clickthrough rates by three to five times.

Publishing engaging stories or status updates (things that are emotional, provocative, related to sporting events or even simple questions) increase on-page engagement by 1.3 to three times, Facebook says.

Highlighting the most-popular content on a site leads people to view more articles. Those who click on the "Activity Feed" plugin in particular generate four times as many page views as the average media site viewer. Place it above the fold on a home page and at the bottom of each article for maximum engagement.

Publishers should use the "Live Stream" to engage users during live events, as well. The live stream box can serve as a way to reach an  audience, facilitate sharing of content, and get them involved in what is streaming, be it an interview, conference, or other type of event.
People who click the Facebook "Like" button are more engaged, active and connected than the average Facebook user, Facebook says. The average “liker” has 2.4 times the amount of friends than that of a typical Facebook user. They are also more interested in exploring content they discover on Facebook. They click on 5.3 times more links to external sites than the typical Facebook user.

Many publishers are reporting increases in traffic since adding social plugins, including ABC News (+190 percent), Gawker (+200 percent),  TypePad (+200 percent), Sporting News (+500 percent), and  NBA.com (number-two referral source). Publishers have also told Facebook that people on their sites are more engaged and stay longer when their real identity and real friends are driving the experience through social plugins. For example, on NHL.com, visitors are reading 92 percent more articles, spending 85 percent more time on-site, viewing 86 percent more videos, and generating 36 percent more visits.

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"Places," Either from Google or Facebook, is About Local Advertising

Now that Google and Facebook both have launched initiatives called "Places" that add geo-location capabilities, it is safe to say both firms now recognize the potential for grabbing a share of the local advertising market.

Overall, small and medium-sized businesses with 100 or fewer employees spent $35 billion to $40 billion in all forms of local advertising in the U.S. in 2009, estimates BIA/Kelsey, a local-media advisory firm.

AdSense is one way businesses have tried to target local advertising, but there is nothing like "current location" in that regard.

Facebook Message Congestion?

As is the case with Twitter, mobile users tend to receive many more Facebook, than text messages, in a month's time.

That might suggest more reliance on Facebook and Twitter for communication programs is a reasonable decision.

But it might also indicate the odds of getting noticed are much lower for Facebook or Twitter campaigns.

Ad Sales On Facebook To Reach $1.3B In 2010

For a company that for quite some simply said it would discover a revenue model, Facebook will book $1.28 billion in ad revenue in 2010, compared to $665 million in ad revenue in 2009.

MySpace, on the other hand, will bring in just $347 million this year, down from over $400 million in 2009. MySpace might book just $297 million in 2011, according to eMarketer.

eMarketer: Ad Sales On Facebook To Reach $1.3B In 2010; MySpace Sales To Plummet

Facebook Is Closing the Ad Revenue Gap with the Portals

Facebook’s self-serve ad product apparently generated $300 to $400 million in revenue in 2009, a significant portion of the $800 million or so Facebook generated in total. The self-serve system allows advertisers to create small ads that appear on the right-hand side of Facebook pages and then target the ads to segments of the Facebook audience.

Facebook Is Closing the Ad Revenue Gap with the Portals - The eMarketer Blog

Google, Apple, Microsoft Trusted by Half of Adults, Just 8% Trust Media

Nearly half (49 percent) of U.S. adults trust Apple, Microsoft and Google, according to a new Zogby Interactive survey.

About 13 percent of respondents trust Facebook.

Almost nobody trusts traditional media or Twitter, each of which had a trust level of eight percent.

Google And Apple Trusted More Than Facebook And Twitter | jatiN mahindrA doT coM

Facebook 2009 Revenue Was Almost $800 Million

Facebook’s revenue in 2009 was nearly $800 million, and the company turned a part of it into a solid net profit, according to Reuters. That's a big deal for a company that, for the longest time, had no obvious long-term revenue model.

The number is significantly higher than earlier estimates of $500 million revenue in 2009, and even the projected $710 million revenue in 2010. Facebook, as usual, declines to comment on any of these numbers, but sometime in 2009. Facebook seems to have became cash-flow positive.

Facebook 2009 Revenue Was Almost $800 Million [REPORT

Is Email Going Away?

Lots of people, including Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, think email is fading away as a communiation activity. "Only 11 percent of teens email each day," Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg says. "Email is probably going away."

Part of that behavior pattern can be explained by the fact that teens are not in the work world in the same way as older users are, and email remains highly important in the work world.

This is good news for Facebook and online advertising in general, she argues.
People are more comfortable seeing ads directed at them in their Facebook "News Feed" than they are in their email inboxes, she argues.

While ads in an inbox are called "spam," Facebook users will even sometimes click "Like" on a brand's Facebook page and volunteer to receive messages directly from advertisers.

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Users Now Spend 22% of Their Online Time With Social Media

Three of the world’s most popular brands online are social-media related (Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia) and the world now spends over 110 billion minutes on social networks and blog sites, according to Nielsen.

This equates to 22 percent of all time online or one in every four and half minutes. For the first time ever, social network or blog sites are visited by three quarters of global consumers who go online, after the numbers of people visiting these sites increased by 24 percent over last year.

;The average visitor spends 66 percent more time on these sites than a year ago, almost 6 hours in April 2010 versus 3 hours, 31 minutes last year.

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Facebook Updates Privacy Rules

Basically, users will have more control over their own sharing.

Facebook Not Completely Set on How It Will Use "Location"

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says his firm still is not exactly sure what it is going to do in the geo-location area, yet, and hasn't finished building the application.

Sometimes it is quite refreshing to hear influential CEOs frankly say they aren't completely sure how they will use an important feature, or what the business model might be. Perhaps that is a problem when a CEO "never" seems to have answers about such questions, but it is okay to figure it out and get it right, even if it sometimes takes a while.

Of course, it is less comforting when a firm does not basically have enough current revenue to fund current operations, but that isn't Facebook's problem.

Mark Zuckerberg: We Don't Know What We're Doing With Location Yet:

58% of All U.S. Web Users Visit Social Networking Sites

As popular as social networking has proven to be--eMarketer now says 58 percent of U.S. Internet users visit a social networking site at least once a month--there have been questions about Facebook's business model. The answer typically has been that "a model will be found," as improbably as was the case for Google before it.

Advertising and e-commerce have been the most-frequent answers to the question of how any widely-used "free to use" application can support itself over time. And despite some "privacy" stumbles of late, Facebook continues to explore ways to position itself as an advertising venue, despite some obstacles, related in part to fragmented use of the service (there is no single "home page" everybody goes to, which would create a huge venue for display ads) and the suitability of the content environment (YouTube has the same basic problem).

Still, the rule in media is that whenever a sufficient number of "eyeballs" can be aggregated, advertising becomes viable.

eMarketer estimates that 57.5 percent of Internet users, or 127 million people, will use a social network at least once a month in 2010. That's eyeballs.

Two-Thirds of Web Users to Visit Soc Nets in 2014 - eMarketer

Social Networking and Brand Building: B2C Works Better than B2B

The top 10 brands on Facebook, according to number of fans suggests a couple of obvious "lessons" for marketers. All of the top-10 brands are in the consumer space, and all tend to have "enterprise" size marketing budgets. Facebook itself is in the top position, but ignoring that, the list looks like:

#2 Starbucks 7,266,488 Fans
#3 Coca-Cola 5,567,046 Fans
#4 YouTube 5,114,322 Fans
#5 Red Bull 3,727,372 Fans
#6 Disney 3,488,088 Fans
#7 Victoria’s Secret 3,470,724 Fans
#8 Converse 2,749,691 Fans
#9 McDonald’s 2,270,109 Fans
#10 H&M 2,062,377 Fans
#11 MTV 1,924,744 Fans"

In the business-to-business space, and especially for any firm that is small or mid-sized, Twitter probably is a better bet.

Is Social Media a New Way to Build a Brand? | Millennial Marketing:

What Works Better for Marketing Campaigns: Twitter or Facebook?

After studying Twitter and Facebook as business marketing vehicles, Irbtrax says "Twitter performed better in the general business to business marketing category due to its viral marketing benefits."

But Facebook performed better in the business to business marketing category for select companies that are 'personalities'. In other words, "hot" products or services with high user inmvolvement can use Facebook in ways that other firms cannot. That also means Facebook likely is better for consumer products.

The study concluded that it is not even necessary to have a large group of Twitter followers to benefit from Twitter's viral marketing advantages. Twitter also might be better for real-time promotions, events, special offers or location-based offers, the study suggests.

The study concludes that both work, and that it is best to create a presence on both. But extrapolating from the findings, one might argue that a business-to-business campaign is better suited to Twitter, while consumer products might fare better on Facebook. That especialy would be true for products without a high degree of personal and emotional involvement.

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Twitter Users Want News, MySpace Users Do Not, Unless it is Celebrity News

Twitter is a social networking medium, but it also is a news distribution mechanism, it appears. A new stydy by Chitika shows Twitterers mostly consume news while MySpace users want games and entertainment.

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Facebook also is a news site, but less so than Twitter is. About half the traffic (47 percent) that Twitter generates falls into the news category. In fact, Twitter users’ interest in the news genre surpasses that of Facebook users by nearly 20 percent, which would appear to make it the number-one social network for news-focused users.

MySpace users, on the other hand, seem to have no interest in news whatsoever. Instead, MySpace members seem to prefer video games (28 percent) and celebrity and entertainment content (23 percent).

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The Creative Age is Different, Way Different

General Motors isn't Facebook. Heck, it isn't even Cisco or Microsoft. But neither are any of those companies like Facebook. I don't mean "like Facebook" in financial, social or cultural terms. Facebook is unlike other companies in the way that it creates a product. Most companies create products using some combination of internal resources ("employees") and business partners ("suppliers").

Most companies can tell you who "works for the company" and who does not. What is different about Facebook, and Wikipedia, Google and YouTube is that the "product" is produced by all sorts of people, both inside a "company," inside its "partner suppliers," and from "outside the company." What makes Facebook's product different is that "users" must participate to create a better and more useful product.

That might be true for any sizable organization, to some extent. Consumers help shape products when they decide to buy some more than others, and some not at all. Consumers help products evolve when they start to use products in new and unexpected ways.

But Facebook and others with a "social" product cannot develop with passive or secondary input. They require active creation of content, links and networks by participants. Not every product can be produced in this way. But it is a so-far distinctive attribute of products produced in a "post-information age" era.

Some might call the upcoming era the "creative" era, to differentiate it from the information age. Collaboration is a key cultural attribute of firms that create social products. Facebook depends on users, developers to create its product, which is an experience.

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