status updates
What Internet Users Like to Share on Social Media Sites
source: http://www.marketingcharts.com/wp/online/what-internet-users-like-to-share-on-social-media-sites-36804/?utm_campaign=rssfeed&utm_source=mc&utm_medium=textlink
7 in 10 internet users across 24 countries say they’ve shared some type of content on social media sites in the past month, according to new survey results from Ipsos OTX. Given the growing popularity of visually-focused sites such as Instagram, Pinterest, and Snapchat, it’s no surprise that pictures emerge as the content type respondents are most inclined to share, with 43% claiming to have done so in the past month.
Beyond pictures, the study finds that opinions, status updates regarding one’s activities, and links to articles (each at 26%) are most likely to be shared.
That suggests that the social media buffs surveyed late last year by SocialToaster were pretty much on point in their judgment that pictures and links are most likely to be shared.
The Ipsos survey also indicates that a significant proportion of internet users are sharing other types of content on social media, including:
- Something they like or recommend, such as products, services, movies, and books (25%);
- News items (22%);
- Links to other websites (21%);
- Reposts from other people’s social media posts (21%);
- Status updates of what they’re feeling (19%);
- Video clips (19%);
- Plans for future activities, trips, and plans (9%); and
- Other types of content (10%).
Who’s Most Likely to Share?
While 7 in 10 overall claim to share content, some demographic groups are more likely to engage in this behavior than others. Respondents aged under 35 are most likely to share (81%), a completely unsurprising result. Still, about 7 in 10 online users aged 35-49 said they had shared content on social media site! s during ! the past month, as did a majority 55% of respondents aged 50-64.
Also unsurprising: women (74%) were more likely than men (69%) to have shared some type of content during the past month. (Ipsos had also found sharing activity to be greater among youth and women in a previous study.)
Remember When Facebook Wanted Your Phone Number For ‘Security’? It’s Using It To Sell Ads (FB)
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-phone-number-security-being-sold-to-advertisers-2012-11
Since about September, Facebook has offered its advertisers a powerful new way to track its users as they surf the web: It’s called “phone number retargeting.” The move came after Facebook made a big effort to collect its users’ mobile phone numbers to prevent security breaches.
More recently, according to AdExchanger, Facebook has combined phone retargeting with a new “conversion pixel” — a type of tracking device, basically — within ads displayed on Facebook.
The combination of phone retargeting and conversion pixels allows advertisers to target you directly with ads and then measure exactly how you respond to them, whether by clicking, ignoring or buying something from the advertiser’s site.
Some advertisers have been doing this kind of thing on other web sites for years.
But most Facebook users don’t know it’s going on within Facebook. Instead, they believe the primary reason Facebook prompts them for a mobile phone number is to prevent account hacking, and to allow users to upload photos and make status updates from their phones.
In fact, earlier this year, Facebook began asking every user for a phone number for “security” purposes. Here’s what Facebook says about that:
But Facebook has since made those phone numbers available t! o advert isers as part of its new Custom Audience targeting product. “Audiences can be defined by either user email address, Facebook UIDs, or user phone numbers,” the product states.
Here’s how it works: Let’s say you are a member of your local gym. You probably gave the gym your phone number. But then you let your membership lapse, and now the gym wants to persuade you to come back. The gym can cross-reference its list of members’ phone numbers with users’ phone numbers on Facebook, and serve an ad on the page of any user with a matching number. Suddenly, you’re seeing ads that say, “Get 10% off if you rejoin your local gym!”
If you click on that ad, a conversion pixel will enable a “cookie” to track what you do so that the gym can see how successful its campaign was.
There’s a level of privacy built in to the system: Although your phone number will be targeted by ads, the number will be “hashed,” meaning that the system disguises it by replacing it with random code, making you anonymous. So the gym might target 100 phone numbers, but it won’t know which of those specific people actually responded to the ad (until they pay for a membership online, of course). All the gym will know is that a certain number responded to the ad, and that those users must have been on the original phone list.
Facebook launched the system to make its ads more effective for advertisers. The company believes they lower cost-per-acquisition (of users) for advertisers by 40 percent.
Disclosure: The author owns Facebook stock.
Related: Here Are The Sealed Court Papers On ‘Invalid Clicks’ Facebook Doesn’t Want You To See
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How Advertisers Use Facebook To Figure Out When You’re Pregnant (FB)
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/how-advertisers-use-facebook-to-figure-out-when-youre-pregnant-2012-9
Facebook got taken to task by Ad Age this weekend in a report that accuses the social network of being “purposefully vague” about how it targets users based on their likes and interests.
We told you yesterday that Facebook has more than 200 ways of tracking its users around the web.
Age says Facebook’s advertising tool applies a hashtag to terms such as “morning sickness,” “ultrasound” and “pregnancy test” and can then serve ads against them. But Facebook declined to come out and say that it uses posts made by users to identify pregnant women (or other consumers going through a life change that might require a large number of new purchases):
Facebook, for its part, said it rarely uses the content of status updates as a signal for ad targeting.
But Facebook is careful to note that it doesn’t use the content of status updates to target pregnant women.
Finally, a spokesperson told Age:
“Not all advertisers are created equally in terms of how they define privacy as opposed to how we define privacy,” he said.
Facebook’s clients, however, told Age that they can use the site to ID pregnant women.
Café Mom VP-Marketing Kristina Tipton said her team has identified a Facebook audience of more than a million women who are likely to be pregnant or may have recently been so by anonymously targeting specific keywords that show up in users’ conversations … Ms. Tipton has been told by her Facebook rep that this process includes people who have mentioned the terms in their posts as well as users who have added those terms to their profile.
T! he big s urprise in the article is when Age all but accuses Facebook of lying:
Certainly there’s a gap between what marketers say they are being told and Facebook tells a journalist on the record.
Related:
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If You Miss Tweets Popping Up Automatically On LinkedIn, Startup IFTTT Has A 90-Second Workaround
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-tweet-to-linkedin-2012-6
Yesterday, Twitter cut ties with LinkedIn; tweets will no longer appear on LinkedIn via status updates.
It’s part of Twitter’s effort to control tweet consumption.
If you miss your tweets popping up automatically on LinkedIn, there’s a 90-second workaround using startup IFTTT [via Monica Rogati].
IFTTT creates a series of “If. Then” statements for web applications, like glue that binds the Internet together.
If you want two applications that aren’t currently integrated to work together, like LinkedIn and Twitter, you can create a “recipe” on IFTTT that says,
“If I tweet, then it will appear in my LinkedIn status.”
You can do this by heading to IFTTT and selecting Twitter as the trigger application, and LinkedIn as the action application in your if/then statement.
In 7 quick steps, your tweets will reappear on LinkedIn.
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Source: http://gizmodo.com/5882027/sharing-with-friends-of-friends-on-facebook-exposes-you-to-150000-people
Well this is mildly terrifying: according to a new Pew study, the Facebook privacy mode a lot of us rely on for photos and status updates is, on average, anything but private. Time to reconsider your settings, everyone.
The finding is staggering—Friends of Friends can hit as many as over seven million people:
Facebook users can reach an average of more than 150,000 Facebook users through their Facebook friends; the median user can reach about 31,000 others. At two degrees of separation (friends-of-friends), Facebook users in our sample can on average reach 156,569 other Facebook users. However, the relatively small number of users with very large friends lists, who also tended to have lists that are less interconnected, overstates the reach of the typical Facebook user. In our sample, the maximum reach was 7,821,772 other Facebook users. The median user (the middle user from our sample) can reach 31,170 people through their friends-of-friends.
When you think friend of a friend, the IRL analogue comes to mind. Your buddy’s buddy. That guy you met at a bar who seems okay. Your girlfriend’s pals from college. They must be okay people, right? They’re so narrowly removed from you, why not share all your photos with them?
Because 150,000+ people includes a hell of a lot of strangers you probably shouldn’t trust, and certainly don’t (and will never) know personally. You can read the study in its entirety below. [Pew]
Incredible Things That Happen Every 60 Seconds On The Internet
In a single minute there are over 695,000 status updates on Facebook. That’s just one example of the mind boggling scale of online activity.
The following infographics show a bunch of other incredible things that happen in 60 seconds (via Barry Ritholtz).
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See Also:
- Dumb Ideas Your Politicians Have About Technology
- Ads Are Coming To Your Facebook News Feed Next Month
- CHART OF THE DAY: Facebook Owns 95% Of Social Networking Time
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drag2share – drag and drop RSS news items on your email contacts to share (click SEE DEMO)
Guess What The Biggest Topic On Facebook Was This Year
The death of Osama bin Laden.
10 percent of all status updates (in English) mentioned Osama bin Laden in the days following his death, according to a Facebook blog outlining the top ten global trends in 2011.
Coming in second was Green Bay Packers beating the Pittsburgh Steelers in the Super Bowl.
Charlie Sheen was winning in March, if you recall.
Each month engagement centered around the hottest current events. For instance, conversations about the Royal Wedding were really popular during April. Mentions of the marriage shot up 600-fold, according to the Facebook post.
This is what your status updates revealed:
The blog post also looked at the memes that emerged this year.
In it, you’ll see planking — you know, where people lie down in an unusual place. It hit a spike after Max Key, the son of New Zealand Prime Minister John Key uploaded a photo to Facebook, then celebrities gave the meme a second wind, but then it just sort of disappeared.
If you don’t know what “lms” is or “tbh” — then you’re clearly not spending enough time on Facebook.
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See Also:
- Watch Sheryl Sandberg Dance Around The Facebook Phone Question
- Here’s What Facebook’s Management Is Constantly Thinking About
- REPORT: Facebook Buying Gowalla, A Foursquare Competitor
—
drag2share – drag and drop RSS news items on your email contacts to share (click SEE DEMO)
Facebook is going down – pageviews, average stay, pages per visit – why?
From the Compete charts below, it is clear that Facebook is seeing a decline in pageviews, average stay, and pages per visit. But why?
I know that I have reduced the time I spend on Facebook and I have also reduced the number of messages and other social actions as well. And I have deleted virtually all of my personal and family photos and will not upload any more. These may be the first signs of a waning of Facebook due to a number of factors.
I can’t get my stuff back out
For example, Facebook has stated that it will not participate in OpenSocial because they do not want people to be able to export their content, conversations, photos, etc, out of Facebook and use on another social network. I am concerned that I will not be able to retrieve or back up content which I believe is mine. I like to have control over my family photos, conversations with friends, etc. I am willing to accept as a “cost” of using the Facebook system the fact that they know who my friends are. But I am less willing or unwilling to continue putting my content where I cannot get it back, in its entirety. (Google Docs, for example, just launched a feature where you can back up everything back out of Google Docs into Microsoft Office formats).
Ads in the stream, erosion of trust
A second issue mentioned in a previous post is the increase in advertising on Facebook and also the more unscrupulous practice of injecting ads “into the stream” — ads masquerading as status updates. These are harmful to the overall trust built up in the community and I have un-friended quite a few people whose accounts were clearly used to promote events, products, etc.
Ad-effectiveness sucks
From a prior post – http://bit.ly/EhiW9 – Facebook advertising metric are absolutely abysmal. They keep trying to sell advertisers on the hundreds of billions of pageviews they throw off. But advertisers are getting smarter and more and more of them will buy ads on a cost-per-click basis (instead of CPM, cost per thousand impressions basis). This means that the ad revenues that Facebook enjoyed from gross INefficiencies will be decimated.
Facebook advertising metrics and benchmarks
Update Jan 2014
Summary
Facebook click-through rates of 0.01 – 0.05% (Facebook CTRs)
Facebook effective CPMs turned out to be $0.01 – $0.19 (Facebook eCPMs)
Facebook average CPCs ranged from $0.05 – $0.25 (Facebook CPCs)
Other social media benchmarks from my experiments (Adwords, StumbleUpon, PayPerPost / Izea) can be found here.
Comparison of click-through rates for search ads versus display ads
As a scientist, I like to run experiments. And I like to make stuff. So my team and I made a few Facebook apps that solved needs that we had (a few samples listed below) and shared them publicly on Facebook to see if they were also useful to other people too.
I beta tested some apps with a few friends by inviting them directly. Then to get it out to a larger number of people, we decided to try Facebook advertising, the much-hyped, holy grail of display advertising on one of the largest and most active social networks.
http://apps.facebook.com/netflixr/
– visual discovery, share, and queue management interface for Netflix
http://apps.facebook.com/musicsamplr/
– visual discovery and sampling interface for music (Amazon backend)
http://apps.facebook.com/phreetings/
– create and send photo or video e-cards by drag and drop (Flickr and YouTube backend)
http://apps.facebook.com/visualfriends/
– visual display of your friends (closest ones have the most recent status updates)
http://apps.facebook.com/myfavethings/
– social commerce – I’ll buy what he bought; things I have, things I want
But what I found was eye-opening to say the least. Despite the potential of social ads where the social actions of your circle of friends could make the ads more targeted, none of the anticipated positive effects were observed. Despite the promise of mass reach, there was not the corresponding attention or clicks. And despite the use of demographics-based targeting, there was no statistically significant difference between different targets nor the control sample, running during the same time period.
What we saw were click-through rates of 0.01 – 0.05% — and the 0.01% often seemed like rounding because they did not report more than 2 decimal places. As a result of these click rates the effective CPMs turned out to be $0.01 – $0.19 and average CPCs ranged from $0.05 – $0.25. I’ve been running these Facebook ads for more than 12 months; and millions of impresisons later, there is no observable improvements to CTRs and thus CPMs and CPCs. But since I set up the campaigns to only pay when there is a click (CPC basis), I can let these run indefinitely because I am getting so few clicks, it’s not even making a dent on my credit card (which I use to pay for the ads).
detail of low click through rates of facebook display ads
Ideas for Facebook
In the spirit of openness, as an advertiser who wants to continue using Facebook advertising, perhaps there are a few things they can do to improve the effectiveness of Facebook display ads.
1. reduce the number of ads per page to 1 — displaying multiple ads artificially depresses click-through rates because users can only click on 1 thing at a time, even if they liked more than one of them. Displaying 3 on a page simply increases the denominator while the numerator does not increase — in the click-through rate equation: clicks / impressions.
2. make ads sharable – in the rare instance a user views an ad, it may or may not be relevant to her, but she may know that it is relevant and timely for a friend. By making ads sharable, she can click and send to a friend, who is very likely to find it useful and valuable, especially having been sent by a friend.
3. let users opt-in to ads in specific topic categories – when users are in the market for specific things, they are more likely to subscribe to pertinent news feeds, offers, etc. related to that topic or category. By giving users more power over what they want to see, it will also give advertisers more targeted and engaged prospects to target.
4. expand search-based advertising – when users search they are looking for something and are open to discovering something they didn’t know to ask for. So ads served up in response to a search is usually a lot more effective than ads served up simply when a page is loaded (display advertising). Facebook can serve display ads based on pertinent search queries.
Earth to Facebook… anyone listening?
By Dr. Augustine Fou. Dr. Fou is Group Chief Digital Officer at Healthcare Consultancy Group a group of agencies within the Omnicom family specializing in pharma and healthcare. He helps clients develop digital marketing programs or improve the efficiency and cost-effectiveness existing campaigns via advanced analytics, social marketing, and digital strategy. You can read more of his writing on digital marketing on this blog and follow him on twitter @acfou.
Revision 6/30/2009: Facebook Click Fraud
Excerpt from TechCrunch: “Click fraud is serious business on the big search engine advertising networks because the bad guys can make serious money. Sign up for an Adsense account and put those ads on parked domain names or wherever. Then all you have to do is start clicking those ads like crazy, using bots or cheap labor.” On Facebook, “advertisers are clicking on competitor ads to drive up their costs and drive down their ROI.”
“So the bad guys just create thousands of fake Facebook accounts with a wide variety of demographic information. This sounds like a lot of work, but it’s highly automated. the going rate was just $10 per 100 accounts if you supply the unique email accounts. Once the accounts are created, they use software to fill out the varied demographic information, and that software also manages all these accounts. The fraudster then logs in to Facebook via these accounts and views the ads that are displayed. The right competitive ads come up and Bingo, the software then clicks them. Facebook rules allow an account to click any advertisement up to six times in a 24 hour period, and all those clicks are charged. All you need is a few accounts to view the ads and then click to the max.”
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/26/facebook-click-fraud-101/
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/21/facebook-admit-click-fraud-problem-says-fix-coming-today/
Despite click fraud, the click through rates are still incredibly low. So if you subtract all the click fraud, is ANY advertiser making ANY money from facebook advertising?
Others have found similarly dismal click through rates from Facebook advertising
Source: http://www.friendswithbenefitsbook.com/2008/04/07/facebook-ad-click-through-rates-are-really-pitiful/
Facebook Ad Click-Through Rates Are Really Pitiful
April 7, 2008 – 5:03 pm
Quite by coincidence, I’ve encountered a few statistics on Facebook’s advertising platform. I thought I’d post links to the results I’ve uncovered, in case anybody is wondering about average CTR rates for Facebook.
First up, Rod Boothby got a click-through rate of 0.01%:
This week, I ran $105 worth of Facebook Fliers. That bought me 52,500 impressions. It looks like the flier bought me about an extra 500 site visits. That’s about $0.21 per hit.
Michael Ferguson ran a bunch of Facebook ads for Kinzin:
Click-through rates are abysmal. I was running the identical ad in about 15 different regions (you need to run them as separate ads to get the stats broken out), getting just over 10M views. Our average clickthrough rate was 0.06% (that’s 1 in 1513, for those counting at home). The best we did anywhere was 0.14%.
He later reports that the conversion rate was “at a pretty reasonable clip” at about 5%. By ‘conversion’, I think he’s meaning people who actually signed up for Kinzin’s free service. All of this stuff is contextual, but if visitors had to lay down money, the conversion rate would be considerably lower.
The folks at Valleywag report similarly dismal numbers:
Media buyers — the agency people who book campaigns — report that the college social network is a truly terrible target. They’re mainly students, with low disposable income, of course; but, beyond that, the users appear to be too busy leaving messages for eachother to show much interest in advertising. Facebook’s members appear indifferent even to movie advertising aimed at their demographic. Clickthrough rates, the percentage of time users click on an ad, average 0.04% — just 400 clicks in every 1m views — according to one report seen by Valleywag.
From AllFacebook:
Fred Wilson has been updating the world about his venture in Facebook advertising over the past week. Today, Fred posted and updated screenshot of his ad campaign’s performance and it doesn’t appear to be too stellar. For one of his campaigns, out of 10,080 impressions there were only 8 clicks. The average cost-per-click for Fred was $0.08 and the average CPM was $0.06. This is a less than stellar performance. This is nothing new though.
And lastly, from a digital student marketing blog in the UK. This would seem like a natural fit for Facebook’s audience:
Our most recent campaign saw 1.4 million page impressions delivered at specific universities – and only a 0.04% clickthrough rate. Ouch.
Click-through rates seem to sit around 0.04%, which is profoundly lame if you ask me. I’m no online advertising expert–it’s not really our thing–but I’ve run a bunch of Google AdWords and other contextual advertising campaigns. We regularly get click-through rates of 3%, and I gather that’s nothing special.
Here’s my theory on Facebook: it’s a silo. People visit the Fun House of Facebook, and conceptually treat it slightly different than the rest of the web. They’re in Facebook, interacting with friends, playing games, sending messages and now chatting on IM. As such, they’re really unmotivated to leave. Who wants to leave the Fun House?
We’ve seen similar results across Facebook. It’s really difficult to drive visitors out of the app and to your own website.
Digital Consigliere
Dr. Augustine Fou is Digital Consigliere to marketing executives, advising them on digital strategy and Unified Marketing(tm). Dr Fou has over 17 years of in-the-trenches, hands-on experience, which enables him to provide objective, in-depth assessments of their current marketing programs and recommendations for improving business impact and ROI using digital insights.
http://twitter.com/acfou
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