"Ghost town" is a phrase that's been tossed around when describing the apparent low activity levels on Google+, but a new study suggests that it could also apply to business activity using Facebook Pages. Recommend.ly, a social media tools/analytics company that we've covered before when it looked at Wal-Mart's Facebook Page strategy, is now out with a wider study that looks at overall Facebook Page activity ... and it isn't pretty. In October, the company examined more than 5.7 million Facebook Pages with at least 10 "Likes", and used a subset of about three million Pages to dig deeper [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Facebook | Facebook: Pages | Facebook: Statistics | Statistics: Social Media | Top News

Facebook is still tops when it comes to how much its average users spends on the site, but that time has declined by nearly a half-hour over the past six months. My assumption is that you can blame mobile for that. The numbers are from Nielsen's Top 10 web brands list for September 2012. Nielsen estimates that Facebook users spent about six hours, 40 minutes on the site in September. That's more than triple the time spent on Yahoo and Google and almost four times the amount of time that users spent on YouTube. But six months ago, in its March 2012 report, Nielsen estimated time spent [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Facebook | Facebook: Statistics | Social Media Marketing | Statistics | Statistics: Popularity & Usage | Statistics: Social Media | Top News

In addition to the spikes in search activity, Thursday's U.S. Vice-Presidential Debate also heated up across popular social networks. You won't be surprised to know that both Twitter and Facebook saw plenty of debate-related discussion, and I'll share some of that in a moment. But I want to start with a fascinating map from a different source. AddThis & The VP Debate AddThis, provider of social sharing buttons used by 14 million domains, shared debate-related data today, including this map showing which candidate had the most social mentions across the U.S. (Click for larger ve [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Facebook | Facebook: Statistics | Features & Analysis | Social Media Marketing | Statistics | Statistics: Online Behavior | Statistics: Social Media | Top News | Twitter | Twitter: Statistics

Facebook announced they have hit a billion active users and to celebrate they released a TV ad. The TV ad goes through the events, life cycles and routines people go through on a daily basis and explores those emotions conveying how Facebook is there to help you keep track of the things that connect you. The TV ad is named "The Things That Connect Us." Here is the ad: Facebook explains that chairs, doorbells, bridges, and airplanes. "These are things that people use to get together and connect. Facebook is also something that over a billion people around the world use to connect w [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Facebook: Business Issues | Facebook: Marketing | Facebook: Statistics | Top News

Walmart's launch of 3,500 Facebook Pages last year for its local stores has had "very low consumer impact," and the pages aren't as popular as the Facebook pages of competing small businesses in similar local areas. Those are some of the findings from a new study by Recommend.ly, a social media tools/analytics company. Walmart launched the "My Local Walmart" campaign last October, which involves a Facebook app that stores can use to communicate sales, specials and other updates with fans in the local area. But, according to the study, local stores haven't been using their pages effective [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Facebook | Facebook: Pages | Facebook: Statistics | Features & Analysis | Social Media Marketing | Statistics: Social Media | Top News

There are stereotypes attached to certain social networks about the makeup of their user base. LinkedIn is for business people. Facebook has a lot of older Americans. Pinterest is for girls. That's the conventional wisdom. (And just this week, a local friend of mine -- a guy -- gave me a hard time when he found that I have a Pinterest account. I'm very comfortable with that.) But are the stereotypes true? In a report issued this week that's ostensibly about social photo/video sharing activities, the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project also shared its latest social n [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Content Marketing | Facebook: Statistics | Features & Analysis | LinkedIn | Pinterest | Pinterest: Statistics | Social Media Marketing | Statistics: Popularity & Usage | Statistics: Social Media | Top News | Tumblr | Twitter: Statistics

In an effort to tout its advertising programs, Facebook is sharing some of its current worldwide activity statistics. Among the most interesting: Facebook users create 3.2 billion likes and comments every day. Facebook users spend an average of 6 hours, 35 minutes per month on the site, almost double Google's 3:20. (These are desktop-only hours.) Of Facebook's 955 million monthly active users, 58 percent visit the site daily. Facebook's 543 million monthly active mobile users represents 67 percent y-o-y growth. There are also a lot of ad-related stats included, all of which [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Facebook | Facebook: Statistics | Social Media Marketing | Statistics: Social Media

Yes, it is possible to have too much of a presence on social media. Just like with anything else, customers can feel inundated and overwhelmed by company tweets and status updates. According to a survey published in September 2011, 36% of all unlikes on Facebook are because a company was posting too much. This means that a user is irritated enough to go over to settings on the actual Facebook page and complete the actions to unlike the page. Likewise, on Twitter, users may unfollow others for tweeting too much (thus clogging up their newsfeed) or making their tweets (and, likewise, Faceb [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Analytics | Facebook: Insights | Facebook: Statistics | Social Media Marketing | Social Media Marketing Column | Twitter

In a new report, market research firm eMarketer estimates that 88 percent of U.S. companies will be marketing on Facebook by 2014. That's more than double the estimated 43 percent that were using Facebook in 2009, and would be up from the 83 percent that are estimated to be marketing on Facebook this year. (And significantly higher than the 17 percent of marketers using or planning to use Pinterest that we reported earlier today.) Here's the eMarketer growth estimate for Facebook marketing adoption: Facebook has been offering free Pages for businesses since 2007, but needing to i [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Facebook | Facebook: Advertising | Facebook: Statistics | Social Media Marketing | Statistics: Social Media | Top News

Facebook has returned to the number two spot on comScore's monthly ranking of the most popular video sites in the U.S. The July 2012 Video Metrix chart shows Facebook with a little more than 53 million unique viewers, which is about 4.5 million more than the usual No. 2, Yahoo. It should go without saying that YouTube is top site on the chart, with 157 million unique viewers during July. This isn't the first time Facebook has held the No. 2 site on comScore's video rankings. It also happened in August 2010, when both Facebook and Yahoo had more viewers than they did last month. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Video | Facebook | Facebook: Statistics | Statistics: Market Share | Statistics: Popularity & Usage | Video

The 2012 London games are officially over with the Americans topping the medal count at 104. But which athletes and countries had the most success on Facebook once the games where officially over? Wildfire created and tracked the growth of fan bases across Facebook to help determine just who exactly won the Facebook Gold. The biggest winners were the championship U.S. Women's Gymnastics team. Of the top 10 athletes by Facebook Fan Base Growth the U.S. Gymnasts took 4 places. The number one growth leader across all the games as Gabrielle Douglas who increased her fan base growth from 14,358 [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Facebook | Facebook: Pages | Facebook: Statistics | Social Media Marketing | Statistics: Popularity & Usage | Statistics: Social Media | Top News

During Facebook's first earnings call last week a good chunk of user data was released. Facebook reported 955 million monthly active users, 552 million active daily users, 543 million monthly active mobile users. The official 10-Q filing that was published this week was quite transparent around user data showing that a total of 8.7% of users (83.09 million) were not real accounts. The false users can be broken down by the following groups and percentages: 4.8% - Duplicate accounts 2.4% - Mis-classified accounts (business page as a profile..etc) 1.5% - Undesirable accounts (spammers [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Facebook | Facebook: Statistics

An Achilles heel of pay-per-click internet advertising is the risk that someone will click on an ad they're not the least bit interested in. To the extent that unqualified clicks are limited to a few over-caffeinated users who click wildly, this isn't really a big concern -- especially to advertisers accustomed to the targeting constraints of traditional media. Yet click fraud, usually called invalid clicks by advertising platforms, has been a real concern over the years. Click fraud comes in many forms. Paid to read schemes target ads which compensate the hosting site with a percenta [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Facebook Marketing Column | Facebook: Advertising | Facebook: Marketing | Facebook: Pages | Facebook: Statistics | Statistics: Online Advertising

Fewer "top brands" are using Facebook and Google+ today than eight months ago. But it's not a huge decline and may just represent the normal coming and going of online brand activities. In its latest Social Share Report, BrightEdge says that 90 of the world's top brands have Facebook pages and 75 have Google+ pages. That's as of July 2012. Eight months ago, in its SocialShare Report from last December, BrightEdge reported that 93 top brands were on Facebook and 77 were on Google+. Not shown in the chart is that BrightEdge says 80 of the top 100 worldwide brands have a Twitter pre [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Facebook | Facebook: Pages | Facebook: Statistics | Features & Analysis | Google | Google: Google+ | Social Media Marketing | Statistics: Popularity & Usage | Statistics: Social Media | Top News

Facebook now claims 543 million monthly active mobile users. The good news for Facebook is that mobile users are "more active" than PC users. The bad news is that mobile users are much harder for the social site to make money from. This challenge has been widely discussed and was the subject of several questions on the recent Q2 Facebook earnings call. Facebook executives repeated several times during the call that they were being cautious about monetizing mobile so as to not disrupt the user experience. Source: Facebook Facebook is going to need to do something different with its [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Facebook: Advertising | Facebook: Mobile | Facebook: Statistics | Facebook: User Interface | Statistics: Social Media | Top News

Facebook continues to be web users' preferred option when it comes to social login, and has now seen two consecutive years of quarterly growth in that area. According to Janrain's latest quarterly report, Facebook now accounts for 48 percent of all social logins as of Q2 2012. That's up from 45 percent in Q1 of this year, and represents eight straight quarters that Facebook's share has risen -- dating back to Q1 of 2010. Google remains second at 30 percent in Q2, which is consistent with where it's been over the last six quarters. Twitter has moved into third place with nine percent, th [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Facebook | Facebook: Open Graph | Facebook: Statistics | Social Media Marketing | Statistics: Market Share | Statistics: Online Behavior | Statistics: Social Media | Top News

The annual American Customer Satisfaction Index is out for social media sites, measuring satisfaction with Google+ for the first time against other social networks. What a debut! Google's year-old social network had the best satisfaction while the world's most popular social network, Facebook, came in last. Top Marks For Google+ The scores look like this: On the scale, 100 would be perfect satisfaction. Google+ came in at 78, or what I'd call a B- or C+ letter grade, far from perfect. But it was much better than Twitter (64 points, rated for the first time), LinkedIn (63 points, also rate [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Content Marketing | Facebook | Facebook: Statistics | Features & Analysis | Google: Google+ | LinkedIn | Pinterest | Statistics: General | Statistics: Popularity & Usage | Statistics: Social Media | Top News | Twitter | Wikipedia

After a couple months of stagnant activity, Facebook usage rebounded in June according to new data from comScore. The company says that Facebook users averaged just above 400 minutes on the site in June, which is about a five percent gain from the 381 average minutes they spent in May. But it's not the first time usage surpassed the 400-minute level; earlier this year, comScore reported that Facebook users were averaging 405 minutes on the site. ComScore also reports that Facebook's unique visitor count rebounded slightly in June after a couple months of declines. There were an e [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Facebook | Facebook: Statistics | Social Media Marketing | Statistics | Statistics: Popularity & Usage | Statistics: Social Media | Top News

More than one-fifth of the web links to Facebook in some way, and almost eight percent use Facebook's Open Graph tags -- two numbers that offer a glimpse of Facebook's deep grip on the web. The numbers come from a Zyxt Labs study of about 1.3 billion URLs earlier this year. The study found that more than 242 million pages, about 21.7 percent of the total studied, referenced at least one Facebook URL -- usually things such as the Like and Share buttons and other social widgets, but also traditional links to Facebook profiles or Facebook Group pages. Here's a look at the breakdown of the [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Facebook | Facebook: Buttons & Plugins | Facebook: Open Graph | Facebook: Statistics | Features & Analysis | Social Media Marketing | Statistics: General | Statistics: Popularity & Usage | Statistics: Social Media | Top News

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? That’s the question a lot of marketers are asking themselves since Facebook began providing reach data directly on Timeline posts. Now “no one” may be a bit extreme, but if only 3% to 6% of your posts are reaching your Facebook community, that sound is just not loud enough. It’s been suggested that the recent addition of this data is meant to illustrate how many people brands are not reaching, thus prompting marketers to consider Facebook’s Reach Generator. The Reach Generator, which sounds [...]

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