Posts Tagged ‘facebook’

Facebook’s Mobile Strategy & Stats

// February 17th, 2010 // No Comments » // SEO, Social Media

Facebook’s VP of User Growth, Mobile and International Expansion Chamath Palihapitiya shared the social networking giant’s current mobile strategy and its plans for the future. Read below:

- Facebook believes 2010 will be a watershed year for mobile
- The service is now actively used by more than 400 million people
- 100 million users (25% of total number of users) actively uses Facebook’s mobile products at least once a month
- 200 million people have interacted with Facebook on mobile at least once
- Facebook now works together with some 200 mobile operators – and they are striving to convince more about the added value of such partnerships
- Mobile users demonstrate twice as much engagement than Web users (2x the pageviews, interactions, consumptions and productions)
- They use the above as an argument to convince operators services like Facebook can help drive more sales for more capable phones and heavier data plans
- Facebook is traditionally strong in English-speaking countries, but that’s not all – for example,every single user in Indonesia apparently uses Facebook’s mobile products

* There are 3 key themes to Facebook’s mobile strategy:
- MOBILE WEBSITE: two versions, one for regular phones and one for touch-screen enabled phones – these have now been translated into 70+ languages, covering about 98% of the world population.
- SMS: interactions through Facebook using shortcodes – so far there are deals with 80 operators in 32 countries
- DEVICES: applications or ‘integrated experiences’, which means Facebook intends to hook its service deeper into the core OS handsets run on

* New developments:
- VODAFONE UK TRIAL: the carrier offered Facebook mobile free of charge for a week, which not only caused an expected usage spike, but also resulted in an increase of 20% of people who kept using and paying for heavier data plans after the trial
- FACEBOOK ZERO: stripped down, text-only version of Facebook’s mobile website – carriers can offer this free of charge for as long as they like, and attempt to transition users to a charged model at a later stage more effectively
- Facebook aims to turn FB Connect into a ‘foundational element’ of the web, whether accessed on mobile phones or not.
- In the future, Facebook Connect should become more of a core integration both on an OEM, app and OS level (naming iPhone, RIM, Windows Mobile and Android as examples)
- Facebook intends to play a more important role in the app developers ecosystem
- The company stressed that their goal is to keep pushing the envelope for users, operators, device manufacturers and developers.

How to use Facebook Chat with iChat

// February 10th, 2010 // 1 Comment » // Random

Step 1: Find your facebook username by going to: http://www.facebook.com/username/

Step 2: Open iChat Preferences in the menu under iChat > Preferences and click on the accounts tab

Step 3: Click on the + (plus) sign below to add an account.
• Choose Account Type as Jabber Account
• Account name is username@chat.facebook.com and your password
• Click drop-down arrow to reveal Server options. Enter chat.facebook.com as the server name.
• Enter 5222 as the port. Hit ‘Done’

Click done and you are good to go

Web Stats From State Of The Union

// January 30th, 2010 // No Comments » // Random

There’s no doubt that President Obama’s White House has been using technology more than any other previous administration. The President has a Twitter account, is using YouTube in innovative ways and has even developed an iPhone app. The White House is releasing some impressive engagement numbers from this week’s State of the Union address.

The White House had a live stream of the speech that was embeddable on blogs or websites. Nearly 1.3 million people tuned into the WhiteHouse.gov’s live video feed of the speech, which is a ten-fold increase in traffic over the most popular live-streamed event. Unfortunately, the White House doesn’t have any concrete statistics on the number of unique streams of the speech from the new iPhone App, but says that nearly a terabyte of data was served to iPhones with the application during the event.

After the speech, over 50,000 people engaged in a live chat on Facebook. It was just the latest in our Open for Questions series where you can ask questions directly to the officials who work here at the White House. And the President will be holding a live video event next week on CitizenTube to answer questions that people submitted following this week’s address. So far, over 40,000 people have submitted 472,000 votes and 9,926 questions.

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66% of companies are using Social Media

// August 18th, 2009 // No Comments » // Social Media

Nearly two out of three companies in 2009.

As marketers embrace new media platforms, social media and viral videos have seen the largest jump in ranking, according to a survey done by the ANA (Association of National Advertisers), BtoB Magazine and in partnership with marketing services firm ‘mktg.’  The survey had the following findings:

  • 66 percent of marketers utilized social media in 2009, as compared to 20 percent in 2007.
  • Fifty percent employ viral videos, up from only 25 percent in 2007.
  • 55 percent of respondents funded new media formats by shifting funds from their traditional media budget, while 48 percent shifted funds from other marketing communications budgets.   Twenty-six percent of marketers created an incremental budget.
  • Top concerns for marketers when considering newer media are:
  • Inability to prove ROI-45%

The top concerns for marketers when considering newer media platforms are

  • the inability to prove ROI (45 percent) and
  • having metrics to properly allocate the mix of traditional and digital media (43 percent).

Among social networks being embraced by all marketers, the top sites used are:

  • Facebook (74 percent)
  • YouTube (65 percent)
  • Twitter (63 percent)
  • LinkedIn (60 percent)

B-to-B vs. B-to-C Marketers

Mobile is used by 32 percent of overall marketers, and it is three times more likely to be used by b-to-c versus b-to-b marketers (52 percent vs. 18 percent).

  • LinkedIn rates first among b-to-b marketers while Facebook is top among b-to-c.
  • Twitter is used more by b-to-b marketers (70%) than b-to-c marketers (46%).
  • B-to-c marketers see much more effectiveness from SEM (76 percent) than b-to-b marketers (48 percent)
  • Webinars are a much more effective platform for b-to-b marketers (48 percent) versus b-to-c (6 percent)

In the next year, blogs are the new media format at the top of the list for all marketers (34 percent), followed by mobile (28 percent) and social media (23 percent), among marketers not already using each respective platform.  Viral video and podcasts are also of high interest for many b-to-b marketers to begin using.

Social Media Revolution

// August 17th, 2009 // No Comments » // Videos

Socialnomics: Social Media Revolution compiles stats from various third party sources (go to socialnomics.com to see them all). Places them to music showcasing in 4 minutes that social media is not a fad but a fundamental shift in the way we do business.

http://www.vimeo.com/6105199

Hitler Is Not Pleased About Facebook’s Acquisition Of FriendFeed

// August 11th, 2009 // No Comments » // Videos

An enterprising soul has re-created the pivotal Hitler scene from the movie Downfall, but done so with subtitles explaining why Hilter is so mad that Facebook has acquired FriendFeed.

1-800-FLOWERS.COM Sets Up Shop Inside Facebook

// July 29th, 2009 // No Comments » // Social Media

In another testament to the notion that Facebook is quietly turning into the internet on top of the Internet, online flower retailer 1-800-Flowers.com has launched an e-commerce store inside its Facebook Page and it’s the first online retailer to launch a fully functional commercial storefront inside Facebook.

Registered users can now order all kinds of floral products from the popular florist and gift shop without ever leaving the social network.

Currently, 1-800-FLOWERS accepts payment with all major credit cards, but it’s conceivable that it will be quick to implement Facebook’s upcoming proprietary payment platform, which is currently being tested with a handful of developers.

To conclude, a tip: when you become a fan of the retailer’s Facebook Page, you get a discount code. Happy flower shopping!

Fortune 100 CEO’s and Social Media

// July 12th, 2009 // No Comments » // Social Media

UberCEO recently did a study with the headline “It’s Official: Fortune 100 CEOs Are Social Media Slackers.” It goes on to analyze the social-media habits of CEOs at large companies and concluded, shockingly, that they don’t use social media much. They looked at Fortune’s 2009 list of the top 100 CEOs to determine how many were using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, or had a blog.  The results show a miserable level of engagement.  Here are the topline results:

• Only two CEOs have Twitter accounts.

• 13 CEOs have LinkedIn profiles, and of those only three have more than 10 connections.

• 81% of CEOs don’t have a personal Facebook page.

• Three quarters of the CEOs have some kind of Wikipedia entry, but nearly a third of those have limited or outdated information.

• Not one Fortune 100 CEO has a blog.

I’m surprised but then again… I’m not surprised. Too many CEOs think there are more important things to do besides identify with and build an audience for themselves and their company. I also suspect the reasons CEO’s aren’t using social media is because of fear and lack of knowledge seeing that the CEO’s that stood out of the pack are all from technology companies – Michael Dell (Dell), Gregory Spierkel (Ingram Micro) and John Chambers (Cisco).

Facebook URL Madness

// June 16th, 2009 // No Comments » // Social Media

As you no doubt heard last weekend, the whole Facebook vanity URL grab thing was big. Within seven minutes of the service being available last night, 345,000 users grabbed one. Within 15 minutes, over a half million had, Facebook spokesperson Larry Yu told Bloomberg. Within one hour, over 1 million Facebook usernames had been snapped up.

Facebook was worried that traffic would be so high that Facebook could overload. What numbers am I talking about?

- It took 3 minutes to reach 200,000 usernames registered. That’s an astounding 1111+ registered per second during the first minutes of the feature release.

- After 15 minutes, the number of usernames jumped to 500,000. The pace slowed down, but there is no laughing at 555.5 usernames or so taken per second. How many other websites could handle that type of load?

- By 10:01 PM PT, a full hour after release, around one million custom URLs had been claimed. That’s an average of 278 usernames per second or so.

- Where do Facebook usernames stand now? Well, as of 2:00 PM ET, over 3 million usernames have been taken. That’s 3,000,000 custom URLs during a Friday night.

And of course, not everyone was happy with the results of the landgrab (see pic below). Not surprisingly, people are already trying to sell their Facebook vanity URLs as well. The service Assetize, already has 4 accounts for sale. The accounts listed are: cotman, pokerbook, sexybook and shekhar. The listing amount for each is “best offer” — none have any bids.

facebook username ul

Facebook in Real Life. Brilliant.

// May 1st, 2008 // No Comments » // Social Media, Videos