Monthly Archives: February 2013

Why Facebook?

Why Facebook?

In our previous post, The History of Facebook: Part 3, we continued our series on Facebook with the final part of a three part series on the history of the company.

In this post, we continue on with our discussion by asking, why Facebook?

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Why Facebook?

As the world’s largest social network, no matter what you used to think about Facebook, your enterprise needs to be there. When we did training on Facebook in mid-2009, many of our students still had the mentality that Facebook was a toy for kids, and many expressed the belief that they would never have any use for the social network.

That was then. This is now:[1]

  • Facebook reported its second-quarter 2012 ad revenue rose 14% from the previous quarter and 28% from a year ago. However, quarterly ad revenues in 2011 grew by as much as 87% from the year-ago period. Global online ad sales represented 85% of its 2011 total $3.7 billion in revenue.[2]
  • Facebook is sticky. Nielsen findings indicate members spent on average almost seven  hours on the site in May 2012, by far the most time spent on a Website among the top 10 (Yahoo was a distant second at 2:11.)[3]
  • Facebook was the number five video streaming site in September 2012 with more than 46 million unique viewers, trailing YouTube and Yahoo, AOL and Vevo [4]
  • Facebook’s user growth may be slowing after it hit a billion users, but the company thinks there’s plenty of global growth ahead.

    Facebook User Growth

  • Facebook’s total number of users is on track to overtake China’s population total  within the next five years
  • In May, 2012, Facebook had 158.01 million unique visitors in the United States, edging lower from 158.69 million in April and 158.93 million in March, according to traffic measurement company comScore[5]
  • Far from being just for kids, Facebook shows great demographic balance:
    • While more than half of users are in the 18-34 age group, the 35+ demographic now represents more than 38 percent of the entire user base
    • The strongest growth segment, 55+, grew a whopping 922 percent in 2009 and 35 percent (3,443,460 users) in the first half of 2010
    • Teenagers are just 10 percent of the membership

FacebookByAge

Figure 57 — Facebook Users by Age — June, 2011 [6]

If we’ve succeeded in browbeating you into submission with all these stats, and you’re ready to get serious about Facebook, the posts that follow will get you started.

Next up: Use Facebook Professionally


Why Facebook? is the 120th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’re just past page 325. At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 6WXG8ABP2Infinite Pipeline book cover

Get our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success online here. You can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

What Others Are Saying

Infinite Pipeline offers practical advice for using social media to extend relationship selling online. It’s a great way to get crazy-busy prospects to pay attention.”
—Jill Konrath, author of SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies

“Sales is all about relationships and trust. Infinite Pipeline is the ‘how to’ guide for maximizing social networks to find and build relationships, and generate trust in our digital age.”
—Sam Richter, best-selling author, Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling (2012 Sales book of the year)

Infinite Pipeline will be the authority on building lasting relationships through online social that result in bottom line business.”
—Lori Ruff, The LinkedIn Diva, Speaker/Author and CEO of Integrated Alliances


[1] Stats courtesy of iStrategy Labs 1/2010: bit.ly/dlB2lg and 6/2010: bit.ly/dlB2lg

[2] Inside Facebook’s Push to Woo Big Advertisers, on.wsj.com/NosIrb

[3] Top U.S. Web Brands and News websites, Nielsen Wire bit.ly/Yv6pP7

[4] comScore Releases September 2012 U.S. Online Video Rankings bit.ly/X59s51

[5] Facebook’s unique visitors slipped in May: comScore | Reuters reut.rs/UYKWlR

[6] CheckFacebook.com: bit.ly/lBSBBN

How The 85 Oscar Academy Awards Were Celebrated oN Facebook [Infographic]

See on Scoop.itEnterprise Social Media

This year, buzz about the Academy Awards reached an all-time high on Facebook. Hollywood’s biggest night is inherently social, and from the announcement of this year’s nominees, to the red carpet and the ceremony itself, people from around the world connected with fans, filmmakers and celebrities in record numbers, with 66.5 million Oscar-related interactions on Facebook.

Here is a deeper look at which films, people and moments shaped the conversation of the 2013 Oscar season.

The event scored a 7.17 on the Facebook Talk Meter, trumping last year’s awards ceremony, and we saw the most buzz in the Northeast (New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Connecticut) followed by California.

Mike Ellsworth‘s insight:

Fascinating

 

See on www.thetechnologycafe.com

Is Mobile Video Advertising More Effective Than TV Spots?

See on Scoop.itEnterprise Social Media

Is Mobile Video Advertising More Effective Than TV Spots? – 02/26/2013

Mike Ellsworth‘s insight:

Oddly, mobile video ads perform better on recall tests than TV spots. Part of the reason is the control afforded to the user: "Users not only choose to view the video but often can choose their advertiser, so self-selection is at work here.

Via @contentxpert

See on www.mediapost.com

Manager’s Drunk Facebook Post Leads to Retaliation Claim – Delaware Employment Law Blog

See on Scoop.itSocial Selling for Lawyers

Readers may recall the case, Stewart v. CUS Nashville, LLC, which is one of the few opinions on the discoverability of a party’s social-media account. There were at least a couple of interesting issues in that decision but the most…

Mike Ellsworth‘s insight:

Slowly caselaw is building. This author thinks the court got it wrong . . .

See on www.delawareemploymentlawblog.com

The History of Facebook: Part 3

In our previous post, The History of Facebook: Part 2, we continued our series on Facebook with the second part of a three part series on the history of the company.

In this post, we continue on with Part 3 – our third and final look at the history of Facebook.

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The History of Facebook: Part 3

The common thread in Facebook’s growth from 1 million users in 2004 to more than a billion in early 2013 is innovation. The 32 feature introductions and other notable events in this list demonstrate a commitment to improving the Facebook experience for its members. It also demonstrates a kind of clueless­ness about how some features will affect their users as well as a general push to make more and more of members’ data available to the public (more on this in a bit).

It’s clear from the following table, however, that, while market leader MySpace languished, Facebook’s innovation fueled staggering growth in numbers of users and revenue.

Table 8 — Facebook User and Revenue Growth

Date

Users
(millions)

Revenue (millions)

2004

1

2005

5.5

2006

12

$52

2007

50

$150

August 26, 2008

100

$280

April 8, 2009

200

September 15, 2009

300

$800

February 5, 2010

400

July 21, 2010

500

$1,100

Mid-2011

750

$4,050

These are very impressive results, you’ll have to agree. Facebook members must really love the site, right?

Wrong. And far from it. Facebook is the fourth most-hated companys, ranking in the bottom five percent of private companies, and jostling for position with companies from traditional hated industries such as airlines and cable companies.[1] We can speculate as to why, and there are probably many reasons, but we think two major reasons are Facebook’s tendency to make big changes without warning, without asking what their users want, and their steady erosion of their members’ privacy, making more and more of members’ information available to the public by default.

The difference between Facebook’s default privacy settings from 2005, the year after the site debuted, and now is remarkable. Whereas once almost everything was private by default, today almost everything is shared with the world by defaults, according to researcher Matt McKeon.[2]

Over the years, the only two personal details that have remained unexposed to the public Internet by default are your contact information and your birthday. Of course, Facebook enables you to change your privacy settings to prevent the sharing of this information, but doing so can be quite difficult. Facebook has finally gathered all its various privacy controls in one place, but it still can be a bit of a chore to change them all.[3] Be sure you check out these links at the bottom of the page: Applications and Websites and Controlling How You Share. It’s easy to overlook these, but they are very important.

Of course, if you are using Facebook for your enterprise, perhaps you’re not too concerned about privacy. But if you have volunteers or other supports using Facebook on your behalf, and community members connecting with you on Facebook, it’s good to know the facts. We cover setting your privacy settings in the upcoming post Control Your Privacy Settings.

Next up: Why Facebook?


The History of Facebook: Part 3 is the 119th in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’re just past page 323. At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 6WXG8ABP2Infinite Pipeline book cover

Get our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success online here. You can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV

What Others Are Saying

Infinite Pipeline offers practical advice for using social media to extend relationship selling online. It’s a great way to get crazy-busy prospects to pay attention.”
—Jill Konrath, author of SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies

“Sales is all about relationships and trust. Infinite Pipeline is the ‘how to’ guide for maximizing social networks to find and build relationships, and generate trust in our digital age.”
—Sam Richter, best-selling author, Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling (2012 Sales book of the year)

Infinite Pipeline will be the authority on building lasting relationships through online social that result in bottom line business.”
—Lori Ruff, The LinkedIn Diva, Speaker/Author and CEO of Integrated Alliances


[1] The 10 Most Hated Companies in America – Yahoo! Finance yhoo.it/YRiqzh

[2] McKeon’s The Evolution of Privacy on Facebookbit.ly/cwpQNq

[3] Facebook’s privacy settings: on.fb.me/bEyk8w

How to Write Articles That Go Viral

See on Scoop.itEnterprise Social Media

What does it take for something to go viral? 

 

Have you ever written an article that got a ton of shares on social media sites? If you haven’t, you’re going to learn 10 tips for writing content that will increase the likelihood of your posts going viral on social media. If you have, you’ll be able to review these ideas and potentially further improve your writing in order to provide yourself with even more exposure, visibility, and popularity around the subject and topics your’re trying to introduce. By understanding the key concepts that will be listed below, you’ll likely be a force to be reckoned with in social media!  

Mike Ellsworth‘s insight:

One surprise in this excellent article is that longer pieces get shared more readily.

See on socialmediatoday.com

Social Media Link Building

See on Scoop.itEnterprise Social Media

This article identifies different social media options for website owners and optimizers. Promoting your site through social media is a good link building method, as well as brand development and r…

Mike Ellsworth‘s insight:

Social media signals are becoming more and more important in search engine placement. Friend recommendations will always trump big budget ad campaigns. This aritcle does a good job of laying out the social SEO landscape.

See on seooptimizationarticles.wordpress.com

Social Media Users Say Pinterest Is as Popular as Twitter

See on Scoop.itEnterprise Social Media

A new study by Pew reveals that social media users use Pinterest just as much as they use Twitter.

Mike Ellsworth‘s insight:

If this were from any other source, I would be inclined to not believe it. Wow! Pinterest has come out of nowhere to challenge the #3 social media network. What’s next?

See on mashable.com