Facebook

Latest Facebook facts from Tom Chisolm, Midwest Director of Ad Sales for Facebook

Howard Brown of Circle Builders attended a presentation last evening from the Midwest director of ad-sales for Facbook – Tom Chisholm

He covers 5 Midwest states and accounts for advertising like 3 autos, PG, Kellogg’s, Compuware, Quicken Loans

Social graph (you at center then family, college, work) of connection, sharing and conversations:

•92% of ALL college students have a FB account
•1 million new registered user a DAY (1/3 US / 2/3rds International)
•74 languages (more native tongues on the way
•324 million total users up 100m this year (1/3 US / 2/3rds International) (intense infrastructure to handle this never been done before bandwidth, storage, processing power…)
•70 million photos posted a day (largest photo sharing site in the world – all others combined do not equal FB)
•4 times the amount of events than evite
•Avg stay time (stickiness) 19.6 minutes
•Analytics – 200 data points per user profile (data is Trojan horse to revenue with advertisers)
•40% of all user profiles public ally list cell phone #
•FB connect has been a game changer
•Best advertisers – Virgin, Addidas, Starbucks
•No plans to charge users – FB will monetize by acting as ad agency:

national accounts
regional / small biz
online

FB considers:
Web 1.0 = static
Web 2.0 = interactive
Web 3.0 = sharing

Just became cash flow positive last month

FB is content to become the worlds largest monopoly / utility

Facebook Trumps Top 20 Sites in Time Spent

What Exodus? Facebook Trumps Top 20 Sites in Time Spent
Length of User Experience Can Help Media Buyers Gauge Influence, and Soc-Net Is at the Top of the Pack

by Abbey Klaassen
Published: September 07, 2009

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — How many visitors a website gets matters, but so does the amount of time people spend on the website. And in that category, Facebook is smoking the rest of the big guns.

Mike Murphy, VP-global sales, Facebook
Users spent an average of five hours and 12 minutes on the site in July, according to Nielsen — that’s up from just one hour and 30 minutes a year ago. The next-closest of the giant web properties: Yahoo, at three hours, 23 minutes; followed by AOL (two hours, 36 minutes); Fox Interactive (two hours, 19 minutes); and MSN (two hours, eight minutes). Who ever said portals were dead?
One explanation for the growth: The network effect. As Facebook’s audience has ballooned, there are more people on the site for any given user to connect to, play games with and comment on, making it more useful and entertaining and increasing the amount of time each user spends on it. It also helps that Facebook has managed to maintain frequency of use.

“A couple years ago, about half of our users logged onto Facebook every day, and as we’ve grown to 250 million worldwide users, that number hasn’t changed,” said Mike Murphy, VP-global sales at Facebook. “It makes it more engaging from a user standpoint and we get more minutes spent, which means we have more opportunities to show more people an ad message in a given day.”

That, he said, has allowed the site to expand the number of big advertisers it works with. Right now, 83 of Ad Age’s 100 Leading National Advertisers are on Facebook.

Influential metric
Time spent is increasingly important as a site saturates the online audience. The law of large numbers means it gets harder to grow by just adding new users, so it’s important to grow the amount of time spent and mind share among existing users. Today, Facebook is the fourth-largest property in terms of unique visitors, with just shy of 97 million monthly unique visitors, behind Google, Yahoo and MSN/Windows Live.

Time spent is an increasingly important way for media buyers and planners to gauge a site’s importance and influence on people, said Rachel Ooms, VP-group media director at Moxie Interactive.

“Buying media is about targeting mass audiences and it’s about where people are flocking. If people are there, we want to be there,” she said.

Added Rick Gardinier, chief digital officer of Brunner: “Unique visitors or banner-ad click-throughs are just one piece to the puzzle. We’re starting to look at engagement and time spent in rich media or in specific content areas. Those are sometimes more important.” However, he cautioned, just because people spend a lot of time on a site doesn’t mean they’re in prime ad-reception mode. And that can occur with social networks.

Still, from Facebook’s standpoint, the more time people are on it, the more time they will have to see its homepage ad, which is a key part of its monetization strategy. That equation — more time on a website equals more opportunity for exposure — has inspired some web sellers to recast their sales models to sell on time-based metrics. Betawave, under CEO Matt Freeman’s direction, is aggregating sites that command attention, using time as a proxy. And VideoEgg has been marketing its network based on the idea that attention to an ad is what really matters. Time is an essential component of that.

Time suck
“Most brand-building environments have historically been about taking discrete pieces of consumer’s time,” said Videoegg Chief Marketing Officer Troy Young. “So how do we make internet advertising less about traffic generation and navigation and more about time?”

Incidentally, Facebook commands a lot of time — the most of the 20 largest sites — but it’s not the biggest time suck on the web, according to Nielsen. Among sites with more than a half-million unique visitors, Blizzard Entertainment is tops, with almost 24 hours a month, followed by an array of other mostly gaming-related sites. Facebook ranks eighth.

Not every site wants people to hang around. Google, for example, has for years talked about its goal to get people to what they’re looking for fast. In fact, Google’s Marisa Mayer has said a page-load delay of 400 milliseconds can translate into a 1% drop in search query volume.

Listening to Director of Monetization moderate Turning the Social Web Into Real ROI panel at SES 2009 San Jose

Turning the Social Web Into Real ROI

Today the social web is essential to how we live our lives and how we stay connected. We use it to keep up with friends, family, colleagues, and even public figures and businesses. But does it really present an opportunity to marketers? The social web has proven to be effective in helping marketers reach the right audience at the right time. The way we stay connected has moved beyond email to a world of real-time reciprocal communication. With more time spent on Facebook than email these days, marketers are able to reach a large and interested audience and engage in a two-way dialogue with consumers.

This session will explore best practices in how marketers can leverage the social web as a simple way to quickly build and manage effective campaigns. Our panel of experts will share their first-hand experience and help marketers gain a better understanding of what they can do to maximize their success through the use of these tools.

Moderator:
Tim Kendall, Director of Monetization, Facebook

Speakers:
Sean Heywood, Managing Partner, MR Barber Shop & Urban Lounge
Claudia Virgilio, Vice President Western Region, Performics
Rogelio (Ro) Choy, Chief Revenue Officer, RockYou

QUOTES FROM THIS SESSION
(these are all direct quotes from these leaders)

Conversions 11% higher with social media properties involved in campaign

Campaigns typically double ROI when social media is involved

Virality is the driving force in Social Media
But how you measure it?
Click throughs on notification and then whether that person forwards it

More focus on fan pages vs. web pages….dynamic, growing, community….value of fan page vs. web site (fan page FACEBOOK hands down better due to MULTIPLIER EFFECT!)

52%-58% higher ROI through Facebook in a targeted test of online marketing of different web properties – Claudia Virgilio

3 to 1 ROI on FB for my clients on average – Claudia Virgilio

If we reach a 30% forward rate, we know it is viral and we get really excited. -Rogelio (Ro) Choy, Chief Revenue Officer, RockYou

There was much conversation during this talk about the Facebook fan page vs. traditional landing pages and other web properties in terms of ROI. All agreed the ROI due to the MULTIPLIER EFFECT was huge).

FB and social media in general offer businesses super niche , super specfic campaign opportunities. Again, conversion is 11% higher through a FB fan page than a landing page. – Claudia Virgilio

More focus on fan pages vs. web pages….dynamic, growing, community….value of fan page vs. web site (fan page FACEBOOK hands down better due to MULTIPLIER EFFECT!)

52%-58% higher ROI through Facebook in a targeted test of online marketing of different web properties – Claudia Virgilio

3 to 1 ROI on FB for my clients on average – Claudia Virgilio

If we reach a 30% forward rate, we know it is viral and we get really excited. -Rogelio (Ro) Choy, Chief Revenue Officer, RockYou

There was much conversation during this talk about the Facebook fan page vs. traditional landing pages and other web properties in terms of ROI. All agreed the ROI due to the MULTIPLIER EFFECT was huge).