social media news

FACEBOOK CELEBRATES 500MM USERS + FACEBOOK STATS

Wednesday, 21 July 2010
Facebook statistics – By the numbers

by Tom Mason

Facebook celebrated 500 million users yesterday. Here’s some more stats to satisfy your desire for information about the big blue social network…

The average Facebook user:

Has 130 friends

Spends around 1250 minutes on Facebook per month.

Creates around 70 pieces of content (updates, links, comments) per month

Uploads five photographs per month

Watches 5.6 Facebook videos per month

In the United Kingdom:

There are 27,020,020 Facebook users (43.7 per cent of the total population)

The United Kingdom has the second highest number of Facebook users (5.54% of global audience)

51.8% are female (13,576 100) while 48.2% are male (12,626,280)

Most users in the UK are between 25 and 34 years old. (26.5% of UK national audience)

62.5% of the UK online population have a Facebook account

31 per cent of users state they’re single

43 percent state they’re engaged, married or in a relationship

Global users

70% of the Facebook audience come from outside the United States

The top ten audiences are from (in millions):

1. United States 128,936,800
2. United Kingdom 27,020,020
3. Indonesia 26,277,000
4. Turkey 22,924,780
5. France 19,351,420
6. Italy 16,858,340
7. Canada 15,756,400
8. Philippines 15,284,460
9. Mexico 13,788,560
10. India 11,534,480

Between 2009 and 2010, Taiwan was the fastest adopted of Facebook, registering a 884% growth of users over the period

If Facebook would be a country it would be the 3rd largest in the world

There are 65 million mobile users of Facebook worldwide

User behaviour per month

20 million videos are uploaded globally

More than 2 billion videos are viewed through Facebook’s video format

Woman post 55% more content than men

The average user writes 25 comments and likes nine things

14 billion pieces of content are shared across the entire site

3.5 million events are created

1.6 billion status updates are made

PAGES

20 million users like new pages every day

There are around 5.3 billion likes for pages across the site

There are 1.6 million active pages

There are 700,000 pages for local businesses

The average user likes 2 pages per month

The most popular pages relate to movies, television shows, books and bands

The most popular brand pages on Facebook (globally) are:

Starbucks
Coca Cola
Skittles
Orea
Red Bull

The most popular pages on Facebook (globally) are:

Texas Hold’em Poker
Michael Jackson
Facebook
Mafia Wars
Lady Gaga

GAMES AND APPS

There are over 550,000 active applications

55% of Facebook gamers are female

28% of all Facebook gamers have purchased in-game currency

The average gamer plays six social games

Of the 200 million users who log into Facebook every day, 15% play FarmVille

80 million users regularly play FarmVille each month

Zynga, FarmVille’s creators, are responsible for five of the ten most popular Facebook games including Mafia Wars and Texas Hold’Em Poker

In 2009, Zynga’s revenue was estimated at $270 million

SOURCES:

http://www.facebakers.com/facebook-pages/
http://www.facebakers.com/facebook-pages/brands/
http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics
http://mashable.com/2010/07/07/oxygen-facebook-study/
http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/6128/The-Ultimate-List-100-Facebook-Statistics-Infographics.aspx
http://www.ekaterinawalter.com/2010/06/key-facebook-statistics-every-marketer-should-know/
http://www.insidefacebook.com/2010/06/10/facebook%E2%80%99s-video-stats-show-growth-in-uploads-and-views/
http://mashable.com/2010/02/17/social-gaming-survey/
http://www.nickburcher.com/2010/07/facebook-usage-statistics-by-country.html
http://www.checkfacebook.com/
http://gigaom.com/2010/07/21/facebook-officially-passes-the-half-a-billion-user-mark/

*Disclaimer – The author takes responsibility for incorrect stats or information.
Source of this article: http://bit.ly/source_facebook_stats_article

Reflections on The Dachis Group/SOMESSO Social Business Summit

Reflections on The Dachis Group/SOMESSO Social Business Summit by Nathaniel Hansen

(Held on March 18, 2010 at Limkokwing University in the Mayfair District, London, UK)

Published originally on May 17, 2010 in Marketing Week, Greece’s leading marketing publication. www.marketingweek.gr

On March 18, 2010, I was the sole representative of Greece in the External Customer Facing Social Solutions case study group at the SOMESSO Social Business Summit in London. The summit was a invitation-only event for leaders in social business theory, solutions and practice. I was invited due to the pioneering work I have been involved in within Athens, a true blue-ocean environment for social business integration. At the summit, our joint project in the External Group centered around providing a solution for a large bank. After the session, I had many confirmations of what businesses need as they enter the social fabric of the internet.

OVERARCHING THEMES:

• Businesses need simple, efficient solutions, which tie internal, external and eco-system elements together.

• De-mystification of the social business process and education in the possibilities.

• Our businesses must be customer-centric vs. brand or product-centric.

EXTERNAL FACING SOCIAL SOLUTIONS:

MARKETING: Creation of simple, effective and proven strategies for social media marketing success. A blended approach with traditional media is advised. Marketing projects must always begin with a Digital Brand Assessment, where intelligence about where the brand is currently functions as a baseline for achieving gains in social equity and understanding of the CLV (customer lifetime value).

Marketing Departments and advertising organizations MUST understand the importance of getting their customers and audiences involved in the co-creation of their offerings.

PR: Training of existing PR staff in simple monitoring software and remedial techniques for reputation management.

INTERNAL BUSINESS PROCESS SOCIAL SOLUTIONS:

HR: Training of HR Director on what to look for in an adept Community Manager, Online Brand Ambassador, and Chief Customer Officer. Training of existing staff in social networking best practices while at work and out of the office, instituting company-wide rewards for employees who act as brand ambassadors.

In the social oriented business, the CCO plays a central role in communicating to brand managers what the customer wants.

sCRM: Training of COO and Executive staff through one-day seminars on how to use their existing databases for quickly building their social equity (eg.- followers and fans in specific social properties + what serves this community).

In the coming 12-24 months, Greece and the Balkans will see a deepening involvement in social business due to an overwhelming migration of audiences from traditional gathering points. Studying best-practices and successful case studies from mature social markets will be an essential action toward creative solutions geared toward Greek and Balkan audiences.

An excerpt from Robert Scoble's experience at the F8 conference…Amazing stuff!

Facebook’s ambition
by ROBERT SCOBLE on APRIL 22, 2010

1. It gets Facebook plastered all over the web. Already Facebook likes are on many many sites and I’d expect to see Facebook’s new social features to show up on at least 30% of the web’s most popular sites within a month.

2. It lets us apply our social graph “fingerprint” to sites we visit. You do this by adding social plugins to your site, which is pretty easy to do.

3. It lets us apply our behavior “fingerprint” to sites we visit. Again, by adding social plugins onto your sites.

4. Facebook gets to study everything we touch now and will bring a much more complete stream back to the mother ship. This lets them build new analytics features for publishers, too, as All Facebook’s Nick O’Neill writes, but now Facebook will have the best data on the web for advertisers to study.

5. Facebook gets us to keep our profile data up to date. Marketer Ed Dale nailed why this is such a big deal.

6. Facebook gets to overlay a commerce system, called Credits, on top of all this. Justin Smith of Inside Facebook writes about that.

7. Facebook has opened up to enable all this stuff to flow back and forth and has removed the 24-hour limitation on storing data gained from its API. This is probably the biggest deal for developers, Inside Facebook writes about that, but they’ve also made their API more granular so that sites can ask for, and get, very specific data instead of getting everything stored on a user. We’ll be talking about this for a while, because it actually has good implications for privacy.

8. All this new data will enable Facebook to build new kinds of search experiences, as All Facebook hints at in a post where they say Facebook is trying to build a version fo the semantic web. Search Engine Land goes further in detail about what these changes will mean.

9. It lets Facebook minimize the need for a “public” fan page, like mine. Inside Facebook explains more in detail why this is true. Mostly because they’ll spit all those bits over onto my blog, if I add the code to my blog (which I’m pretty sure I will).

10. Finally a stream of focused bits for the people who are actually visiting your page can be pushed back out to you, as Inside Facebook demonstrates.

11. They made the API much simpler and shipped a powerful graph API so more developers can build apps for Facebook (this has been one of the advantages of Twitter, for instance, because Twitter’s API was simple to figure out). Heck, you can even hit it from a web browser to see what it returns. Here is what it returns for http://graph.facebook.com/scobleizer (if you want to try it yourself, just include your Facebook name instead of mine).

(full article, including many great videos of the F8 conference, here)

NO FACEBOOK FOR PRIESTS – Really?

NO FACEBOOK FOR PRIESTS
APRIL 22, 2010
ATHENS, GREECE
(Source: kathimerini)

A prominent bishop has warned priests to take extra care when using Facebook and perhaps even avoid the social networking site altogether to avoid becoming embroiled in situations that could embarass the Church.

Archbishop Irenaios of Crete sent a circular yesterday in which he advises priests to be cautious when either posting messages or setting up a profile on Facebook. “It is a precautionary measure so that our priests do not get involved in matters the extent of which they do not fully comprehend,” he told Kathimerini.

The social networking site is becoming an increasingly popular way for priests to keep in touch with their faithful. “Worshippers often ask to confess their mistakes,” said Father Pavlos, a priest from Thessaloniki who has more than 1,500 Facebook friends. “The distance seems to help and makes young people, especially, feel more comfortable expressing themselves.”

(It is FABULOUS and NECESSARY that ALL spiritual beings, teachers and practitioners be in Social Networks. Social Networks are inherently spiritual, tapping into the emotional sub-strata of humanity ~ Nathaniel Hansen).