Today, Facebook will cross 200 million active users worldwide. Assuming each of the users are unique, that’s 20% of the 1 billion online population world wide. It’s another benchmark in how popular social media properties are becoming worldwide. For comparison, Yahoo sees about 560 million people monthly, Microsoft sees 650 million, and Google sees 775 million (Comscore).
Posts Tagged ‘facebook’
An Interactive World Map of Facebook’s 200 Million Userbase
Wednesday, April 8th, 20094 Realz? Facebook Adds SMS To Fan Pages
Friday, March 27th, 2009According to Dave Kerpen, Facebook has added SMS to their fan pages. The new feature lets anyone fan a page by texting “fan [page name]” to FBOOK (32665).
So far the rollout is limited and appears to only be for Fanning a page. I have no idea how Facebook determines who’s profile the text is from, other than checking against your listed phone number. I texted the service myself and got “access denied” in response.
People Like Twitter, But Not Twitterizing Facebook
Thursday, March 19th, 2009
Neilsen released some startling growth numbers for Twitter today. The burgeoning micro-blogging platform has shot up 1382% over the past year, far surpasing any other social media site they track.
But Twitter’s 7 million additional users aren’t the only one’s who’ve taken to the service over the past year. Facebook has admired the service’s ability to get people to share information about themselves. So much so, in fact, that they offered $500 million in Facebook stock and cash to buy the company last Fall.
In the intervening months, Facebook has released a new website redesign that incorporates Twitter’s familiar micro blogging thought-stream. Turns out it hasn’t been a favorite of Facebook users, if you believe a recent poll conducted by a polling application running on Facebook’s own platform.
Over 700,000 people have already participated, and about 95% are giving the redesign a thumbs down. While there may be a silent majority in favor of the redesign, the sentiment is undeniable.
Facebook’s userbase has never been shy when it comes to critiquing Facebook’s direction. Beacon and a one sentence adjustment to the site’s privacy policy sparked an uprising. However, one of Facebook’s most revolutionary features, news feed, met a great deal of oposition when it was first introduced. Over time users accepted the new feature. The same will happen this time around.
But I don’t think Facebook will attract the same fervor as Twitter. There are still big differences between the two services. Twitter’s basic tenent is as a broadcast platform. The starting assumption is that all content is public and uniformly a maximum of 140 characters. Facebook’s news stream is multi-media and assumed to be limited to your real friends. It’s YouTube vs. Google Video. YouTube makes you famous, Google video was a tool to share videos with friends. Even if Facebook made your stream public, it doesn’t have the concept of “followers” that lets Twitter be a broadcast medium instead of a conversational medium.
Page Data Knows How Unpopular Your Brand Is On Facebook
Tuesday, March 17th, 2009Facebook’s new Page redesign has re-energized interest in the product. Pages are becoming more like profiles, letting owners communicate more directly with fans. However, there’s no easy way to know how well your page is doing, until now.
The popular Facebook blog InsideFacebook has released a new section called Page Data that tracks the number of fans for each Facebook page. Here’s today’s leaderboard:
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Coke Gets 3 Million Facebook Fans For Free
Monday, March 16th, 2009Sometimes the best things in life are free, and in no place is that more true than social media. Nothing beats your customers pushing their own marketing initiatives around your products. And that’s just what happened to Coca-Cola.
In late August 2008, Dusty Sorg, frustrated by not finding a Coca-Cola fan page on Facebook, created his own with friend Michael Jedrzejewski. Five months later and the page has over 3 million fans. Since Sorg created a fan page and not a group about Coke (the main difference being the vanity URL facebook.com/coca-cola), Facebook was either going to shut it down or hand it over to Coca-Cola. Coke did the right thing and struck a deal with Sorg to cooperatively keep up the page. Sorg and Jedrzejewski get the credit, while Coke gets the voice in the community.
So far the page has 808 photos, 15 videos, and 48 conversations. Considering the number of members, the participation is low. It seems that people became fans more to identify with a brand they love, instead of to participate in a conversation with the company.
Facebook Driving More Traffic Than Google
Friday, March 6th, 2009The bread and butter for most publishers has been search traffic, specifically Google traffic. In fact, Google’s search traffic is so important it sprouted a whole new industry, search engine optimization. SEO firms helped publishers get more traffic, which translated into more viewers, which translated into more advertising dollars.
Within the past couple of years, social media properties have sprung a new “social media optimization” industry, based around optimizing content to be found within social media properties. This tended to focus on link services like Digg or StumbleUpon.
However, the looming question has been whether SMO would be a compelling counterpart to SEO. Turns out that that day may be fast approaching. As NewTeeVee reports, Facebook drove more traffic to Perez Hilton on his highest traffic day than any other source, including Google.
After Perez Hilton recorded a single-day high of 13.9 million page views on the day after the Oscars, web research firm Hitwise found that the celeb gossip site’s top traffic source is Facebook. That’s crazy — for nearly as long as web analytics have been widely available, the top referrer for just about anything has been Google.
But since the last week of December, Hitwise analyst Heather Hopkins said, Facebook has given Perez more visits than Google; with 8.70 percent compared to 7.62 percent in a week in the middle of February.
via Changing Nature of Virality: Facebook and Twitter « NewTeeVee.
New Channel For App Invites, Facebook Chat
Thursday, March 5th, 2009Facebook has released a new chat API that lets developers integrate chat right into their applications. I’m holding my breath on how effective this will be, but any new viral channels are more than welcome.
Here’s how it works:
1. After embedding the fb:chat-invite FBML element, users will see a list of their Facebook friends that are online and available to chat. (Like with Facebook’s multi-friend selector, developers can choose which friends should or shouldn’t appear in this list.)
2. Users select a friend to send a Facebook chat invite to.
3. The recipient receives the invite through a Facebook chat message that pops up on their screen.
This is a new viral channel that should convert very well for developers due to:
1. The prominence of invite delivery. Unlike regular application invites, which go into the general requests inbox, chat invites pop up on the recipient’s screen instantly.
2. The social pressure to respond to chat messages in real time. If your friend wants to talk to you and knows you’re online, it’s awkward to ignore them. The same dynamic will apply to application chat invites.
via New Viral Channel: Facebook Launches Chat Invite API for Applications.