The ACSI has been conducting yearly studies about the performance of various online media brands of portals, search engines, news and information sites etc. This year for the first time they have included social media sites like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Wikipedia in their study.

Much to everyone’s surprise, the popular social media sites have not been ranked too highly on the customer satisfaction index.

On a scale of 0-100 Facebook has scored just 64, MySpace 63 and YouTube 73 points. The less popular but steady, Wikipedia has scored 77 points.

Larry Freed Chief Executive of Foresee Results says, “Customer satisfaction is a combination of what you get and what you expect [from a website]. The business model of starting out free and ad-free, then turning your site into something else over time works somewhere in tech, but from the average consumer standpoint it doesn’t work.”

Facebook which has faced several changes over the years, and which includes a lot of ads and gaming services has not satisfied its customers very well. Users also have some reservations about some of Facebook’s policies regarding privacy issues.

Wikipedia on the other hand, which is not a commercial site has maintained a steady format, thus allowing customers to achieve a certain level of comfort while accessing it.

One glaring omission in the study is Twitter. The reason for this is the fact that most users access it through third party apps rather than through Twitter.com, thus making it difficult to to collect accurate results. However it is likely to be included in the study from next year.

Facebook with a score of 64 ranks even lower than the IRS, and is in the bottom 5% of private companies studied along with airlines and cable companies. According to Larry Freed, one reason why users keep going back to Facebook in spite of low satisfaction, is that they do not have a better alternative at present.

Among other online categories studied, Google is at the top of the search engines with 80 points, but it has fallen 7 points since the previous study. While Bing which has been satudied for the first time, has 77 points followed by Yahoo! with 76 points, AOL with 74 points and Ask.com with 73 points.

Among the news categry Fox News was at the top with 82 points while MSNBC.com had 74 points and CNN.com had 73 points.

Orkut which is owned by Google, is way behind Facebook as a social network on a worldwide scale. But in India and Brazil Orkut has so far been the dominant social network.

However, it now looks as if things are about to change in India.

Growth of Orkut v Facebook in India

According to comScore’s findings, in May 2010, Orkut had 19.7 million unique visitors while Facebook had 18 million unique visitors. But the rate at which Facebook has been growing in India is much faster than the rate at which Orkut is growing.

In the previous year, Facebook had only 6.5 million users in India, which means that they have grown by 177%, while Orkut has grown only by 35% in the same time period.

By that yardstick, it is possible that Facebook has already overtaken Orkut by now.

Facebook for their part are leaving no stone unturned to capture the Indian market. They have started operations in India since march this year and the office will be based in Hyderabad.

They are currently on a hiring spree and intend to hire around 500 professionals to work with them.

They have already appointed Kirthiga Reddy as Director of Online Operations and Manoj Varghese as Director of User Operations.

In the entire Asia pacific region, social media has started affecting the buying decisions of users in a significant manner.

Online product reviews have become very popular and are next in line only to recommendations by family and friends. Products such as consumer electronics, cosmetics and cars are frequently reviewed here.

Interestingly however, different countries vary greatly in the way they share reviews. While the Koreans are most likely to post positive reviews the Chinese are most likely to post negative reviews of any product.

The report also shows that blogging is most popular in Japan, with over 1 million blogs being posted there every month. Twitter which had only about 200,000 users in Japan last year now has over 10 million users, which is 16% of the Japanese Internet population.

In China more than 80% of social media content is through bulletin boards, and new comers indulge in social gaming while the more experienced tend to share content. Virtual product placement in social gaming is very popular and social media celebrities like Sister Phoenix and Mr. Yuan are more popular than real celebrities.

Though Orkut is the most popular social network in India, Facebook is fast gaining in popularity. Twitter is also growing very fast and over 57% OF Twitter users in India, have joined in during the last year. Online product reviews are also very popular here.

In Korea, 95% of the Internet population accesses their social site Naver every month. The elections in June also saw the growth of mobile social media.

Australia has the highest global average for time spent on social media with users spending over 7 hours per month. Activities relating to sports and parenting are frequently discussed here. LinkedIn has also grown in popularity by 99% in the last year.

The popular singer now has 11,109,469 fans, while the U.S. President has also crossed the 10 million threshold and now has 10,018,956 fans.

11 million+ people Like Lady Gaga on Facebook

Lady Gaga has more fans than the U.S. President on twitter too.Gaga’s 4.9 million Twitter followers make her the 3rd most popular Twitter user, compared to Obama’s 4.5 million, which rank him 5th, after Ellen DeGeneres.

While Lady Gaga is the first living person to have achieved this record on Facebook, she is at the sixth position in the general category, after, Texas Hold’em Poker, Michael Jackson, Mafia Wars, Facebook and the U.S.  television show Family Guy.

Of these, Texas Hold’em Poker has the largest fan following by far, with over 20 million fans on Facebook. Lady Gaga has a long way to go, if she wants to be at the top of the list.

A while ago, Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg, mentioned that Google was working on building a full-fledged social network – Google Me. Kevin Rose says that he got his information from a “very credible source”. His tweet, though, has now been deleted from Twitter.

This information has since been backed up by Adam D’Angelo, who was formerly the CTO at Google.

D’Angelo, who worked for Facebook after he left Google, now has his own site, Quora, where he made this announcement. According to him, the Google Me project is more than just a rumour. He says that a lot of people are working on it, and he is very confident about it. He feels that Google has realised that their site Buzz is not good enough o compete with the very rapidly growing Facebook, and hence they would like to set up a full fledged social network of their own, and this is now a high priority task for them.

According to D’Angelo, Google had earlier assumed that Facebook’s growth would slow down in time, but as there is no sign of that happening, they have decided to take up the challenge and start their own social network.

Also, Facebook has now ventured into search, which is traditionally the strong hold of Google, so Google has decided to enter the field of social networks.

Google had tried their hand at social networking in the past with Orkut and later with Buzz, but for one reason or other, both these sites did not too well on a worldwide level, so now they could be starting afresh with Google Me.

It is also obvious that owning a social networking site would improve their potential for advertising, to a very large extent, which means that they will generate more revenue, hence the rush to start the new social network.

Prime Minister, David Cameron, was accompanied by his Secretary of State for Culture and Media, Jeremy Hunt. Nobody has actually disclosed what they discussed in the course of the meeting.

Jeremy Hunt, however, sent out a tweet stating that Zuckerberg was a really smart guy with some good ideas. Mr. Hunt’s press office did make it known that the meeting had been organised by the Prime Minister’s office itself.

Mark Zuckerberg later praised the U.K.’s open data initiative, which had been launched by Tim Berners-Lee under the previous Labour government. He also found that the Prime Minister and his team were very “insightful”.

While Facebook’s social networking prowess is unchallenged, their record on consumer privacy is rather poor, at best. The Conservative government would need to tread with extreme caution when taking on any serious initiatives based on Facebook in order to avoid any privacy faux-pas akin to the Labour government employee losing CDs containing personal data of 25 million citizens.

On the whole, though, Cameron and his government’s intention to involve the public and open themselves and the workings of the government up a bit more is definitely commendable.

The confirmation came during a Facebook Developers Garage event in London. Zuckerberg said, “We are finishing designing our application soon and hope to offer it soon.”

Ever since Twitter talked about delivering location-based services, there has been speculation about Facebook following their lead and launching some location-based features.

The New York Times was probably the first to report, in March, that Facebook would allow users to share their location details by April. When that did not happen, Advertising Age said in May, that the features would be launched by June.

Facebook reportedly had to put aside several projects that were in the developmental stages, including the location feature, in order to sort out the problems that arose from their new privacy interface.

Now that Twitter has already gone live with Places, the Facebook team has made the time to concentrate on building location awareness. However, there is still no clarity about how the features will function and how they will affect the user as well as the market. If history is anything to go by, it will most likely be very similar to Twitter Places!

Facebook location features will probably link to Facebook Community Pages such as this one.

A study conducted by the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) has found that several people over 50 years of age in the USA are not only using the Internet very comfortably but are also adept users of Facebook and the latest gadgets such as the iPad.

AARP interviewed 1,360 adults over the phone last month and found that 27% of Americans over 50 years of age use social networks. They also found that Facebook was the most popular social site for this age group, ahead of other sites like MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn. eMarketer had also conducted a similar study a while ago and found similar results.

49% of those between 50 and 64 years of age and 40% of all above 50 years said they were very comfortable with the Internet and frequently used it as a means of communication.

It was also found that 47% of these users heard about the social networks from family members and 70% of them did so through their children or grandchildren. Most of these senior citizens use the networks to keep in touch with their children (62%) and grandchildren (36%) and not to spy on the youngsters as some might suppose.

83% of the respondents had also heard about the iPad and while only 2% of them had already bought one, 11-14% of them were planning to do so.

Apart from referring to traditional news sources such as newspapers and television, people are now increasingly relying on blogs and social networks to receive news.

In fact, news is fast becoming a shared social experience. However, the type of news that is popular on these different sources varies widely.

The Pew Research Center has carried out a study on the top news stories carried by different sources and analysed the data collected. The study was carried out between 19 January 2009 and 15 January 2010 on blogs and YouTube and from 15 June 2009 to 15 January 2010 on Twitter.

The study not only found that the lead stories on social media channels varied widely from traditional news media, but it also varied substantially from one channel to another.

It was found that during the course of the study the top story on blogs, YouTube and Twitter coincided only once, during the Iranian Presidential elections held between June 15 2009, to June 19 2009.

Bloggers, in general, were found to be more interested in emotional stories or issues that related to individual or group rights or similar ideologies. Stories that could be personalised and shared attracted a lot of attention. Political news, however, tended to be both pro-liberal as well as pro-conservative.

On Twitter, there was a very different tendency – stories concerning technology, in general, and Twitter, in particular, gained more prominence. However, even here, the Iran elections were the most popular lead story and topped the charts for 7 weeks in a row.

In contrast, on YouTube, the news is usually shared through videos and often does not even contain any added comments. There is also a tendency to pay more attention to international news.

One common factor among all the social platforms studied, was that the stories did not stay on top of the charts for long.

Also it was not uncommon to find that the news stories on all these sources, differred considerably from the top stories on the traditional news channels.

Blogs are more likely to borrow information from the traditional media, but the reverse trend rarely occurs. Bloggers might face a tough time once their main sources, such as The New York Times and The Times go behind pay walls. It has already been announced that the New York Times will start charging for the use of some of their news content from January 2011.

Several well known brands such as Kraft Foods, Unilever, Heinz etc. have started contests, wherein, their users are asked to provide suggestions for the names of certain products and also to give an idea for an ad.

Unfortunately, most of the ideas received and accepted by the concerned brands have not yielded very favourable reviews. In fact, most of the ads can be described as ranging from being unintentionally funny to being downright lacklustre.

San Diego based brand strategist, Denise Lee Yohn says, “It’s almost like a parody, and it’s being treated like a game. That’s definitely affecting the quality of what we’re seeing.” According to her such campaigns lack authenticity and may even result in a backlash against the brand.

Jackie Huba, co-author of a book called Citizen Marketer says that marketers should instead lay much more stress on word-of-mouth publicity. These contests are losing their novelty factor now.

While it is certainly true that the public in general may provide some very good ideas for an ad, it is up to the brand concerned to exercise some caution while selecting and displaying only those ads which could be classified as intelligent or inspiring.

In fact “contextual” has become the new buzz word for online advertising. It would be a good idea for brands to to gain popularity by concentrating on making ads that would seem contextual to the user.

Apart from concentrating on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, advertisers should also pay attention to other sources such as StumbleUpon to reach the maximum number of users. And, they should also pay more attention to building links for organic search rankings and referral traffic.

The new service can be accessed at:

0.facebook.com/

While the service is similar to Facebook mobile in most respects, it will not include photos on the site. Photographs will be just one click away, but users will be charged for accessing them at the regular data rates.

Other than viewing pictures, users will be able to carry on most of the regular activities they do on Facebook such as updating their status, viewing news feeds, posting comments and writing on a friend’s wall etc.

0.facebook.com has been created with the aim of overcoming two of the major obstacles of using social networks through mobile handsets: the speed (or lack) of using social sites on a mobile device and the cost of accessing such media-rich services on uncapped mobile data plans.

Facebook has partnered with mobile operators to deliver this service. Users will not pay any data charges to access this service. They will only be charged the regular data tariffs if they wish to view a photo or if they wish to move away from 0.facebook to browse another site. In both cases, they will receive a notification informing them that they will be charged for doing so.

Initially, 0.facebook will be available only in 45 developing countries and territories in collaboration with over 50 mobile operators. The service will be introduced in a few more places shortly.

Facebook already has over 100 million active mobile users with over 200 mobile operators spread across 80 countries. With this move they are sure to expand their reach even further.

Facebook has, for the first time, overtaken Yahoo! and Microsoft in delivering display ads in the U.S. They served 176.3 billion display ads on their website in the first quarter of this year, which accounts for 16.2% of the total display ad impressions delivered to U.S. home, work and university locations.

The world’s largest social network, Facebook, has grown by 52% between the last quarter of 2009 and the first quarter of 2010. During the last quarter of 2009 they showed 115 billion ads, compared to the current 176.3 billion.

Yahoo! on the other hand, has actually dropped from serving 140 billion ad impressions to 132 billion during the same period. Microsoft served 60.2 billion impressions in Q1 2010.

While the numbers indicate that Facebook is now far ahead of Yahoo! and Microsoft in serving display ads, the figures do not take into consideration the number of ads that Yahoo! and Microsoft display on other websites, which accounts for a large portion of the revenue they generate through advertising.

Also, display ads counted here only include static and rich media ads. The numbers exclude video ads, house ads and very small ads less than 2,500 square pixels in dimension.

Moreover, while Facebook may have the volumes, the actual revenues earned by Yahoo! and Microsoft through advertising on their Web properties are much higher.

Last year, Facebook generated $ 500 million from advertising and expects to earn $1 billion this year. In contrast, Yahoo! earned $6.5 billion last year and Microsoft earned $3 billion.

In spite of being far behind in terms of revenue generated, Facebook’s growth is worth noting, as the number of people on Facebook continues to grow and users continue to spend more and more time on the social network. It will most likely be just a matter of time before they establish a more effective way to monetise all this traffic.

Brands such as Verizon, Toyota and Ford were among the top advertisers on Facebook this year, but were nowhere on the list of top 25 advertisers on Facebook last year. This indicates that Facebook is becoming an important platform for advertising, and marketers are probably diverting their ad spend from other sites towards Facebook.

Reports from Nielsen corroborate Facebook’s growth in display advertising – they found that Facebook’s share in the U.S. display advertising market grew from 2% in April 2009 to 20% in April 2010. However, according to Nielsen, Yahoo! is still the U.S. display market leader with 34% share of the market in April 2010.

Facebook accounts for nearly half the traffic generated from social networks and other social media sites, contributing to 48% of the total. The next largest referrer is StumbleUpon, which sends 25% of the total social media traffic. Twitter ranks third and accounts for 10% of the traffic sent from social sites.

Top 7 Social Media sites that referred traffic to global websites in Jan – Mar 2010.

StatCounter has arrived at these figures after analysing 13 billion page views from all their member sites. Their CEO, Aodhan Cullen, says, “From a business perspective the findings suggest that there is merit in having a corporate Facebook page or Twitter account.”

Quite surprisingly, StumbleUpon has managed to remain the second largest driver of social media traffic through the last year. In the U.S.A; it was the topmost source of social traffic in March.

YouTube, reddit, Digg and MySpace are next in line, in terms of driving traffic, with 6%, 4%, 2% and 2% contribution to total social media referrals respectively.

However, Cullen warns that the social media market is known to fluctuate quite sharply and during the last Christmas and New Year season, Facebook was not only at the top but accounted for almost 75% of the traffic referrals.

Last year, the top three slots were occupied by StumbleUpon, Facebook and MySpace, in thet order.

Now, with the recent introduction of Annotations and @anywhere by Twitter and the ‘Like’ button by Facebook the situation could change all over again.

The service, which has been created in under 4 months, will allow users to create and share Microsoft Office documents with some or all of their friends on Facebook. The service is currently in the beta testing phase.

Users can either create the documents directly in the app or can even upload the documents from their PC. The new documents will show up in the recipient’s news feeds just like a status update.

In keeping with the basic rules of user privacy, the site allows users to decide whether they want to share a given document with only a few of their friends, with all of their friends or to make the document available to the general public.

Docs.com has been created by Microsoft’s FUSE labs, which was set up specifically to improve social network technology and facilities within Microsoft products.

This may be Microsoft’s answer to Google’s Google Docs. One could even argue that by using Facebook, Microsoft may have beat Google to the punch, as Facebook has been far more successful than any of Google’s social networking attempts.

Video Tutorial: Getting started with Docs for Facebook

Myxer, which was started in 2005, now boasts a user base of 30 million unique visitors who download entertainment content from it regularly.

A ‘More Malice’ content channel has been created on Myxer to promote the album. It will provide behind the scenes content on mobile videos to promote the album. The Myxer URL is:

http://www.myxer.com/MALICE

More Malice is the sequel to Snoop’s previous album, ‘Malice in Wonderland’. The record is accompanied by a mini-movie based on the previous album and it features Snoop Dogg playing the central role of Malice.

While the presence on Myxer is central to the album’s release, it will not be limited to the site. Ring tones and wallpapers of the album will be available to interested users. Embeddable widgets will also be placed on various music sites and on Snoop Dogg’s social network profiles.

CEO of Myxer, Myk Willis says, “It is becoming clearer by the day, that artists’ fans want to use their mobile phone as the connection vehicle to their favorite artists. We recently launched MobileStage as a free, customisable mobile web site for artists, and the response has been great.”

Artists seem to increasingly recognise the value of connecting with their fans directly. Radiohead launched a very successful album solely online back in 2007. In the past couple of years most artists have built Facebook Pages and Twitter profiles, which they or their PR teams use to interact with fans, keeping their loyal customers engaged.

“These days its all about the artist interacting with the fans directly”, said Snoop Dogg. “I know what my fans want and now with Myxer I can give them what they want and need by delivering the best content straight into their hands, giving them exclusive content, and what they can expect to see on my upcoming More Malice album.”

The community page is essentially a new version of the Facebook Page. They were created to stop people from building Fan Pages on topics that are neither brands nor famous personalities.

In the past, users have created Fan Pages on trivial topics such as “I bet I can find 1,000,000 who HATE Miley Cyrus”, which should have perhaps been a rant for a celebrity forum or a Facebook group, but should never really have been a Facebook Page.

Now, people who are interested in a topic can network with each other on Community Pages.

These pages are connected with the Bing Maps Platform, so if a particular community page is associated with a geographical location, the place will also be pinpointed on a Bing Map that will be visible on the page.

Community Pages are still in the beta phase. Facebook and Bing aim to turn the new service into a site much like Wikipedia, Squidoo or Mahalo, where shared knowledge is available on any topic. To start with, the page will show information from Wikipedia, but Facebook looks forward to contributions from users on the subject.

In order to drive users to these pages, Facebook will suggest specific pages to users based on their interests, place of residence and other details mentioned on the users’ profiles. Users will always have the option to accept pages suggested or to ignore page suggestions.

Community Pages will be public, so users must keep in mind that any comments they make or pictures they post will be visible to all users.

Facebook Community Page for Johannesburg, Gauteng

Users access various social activities such as social networks, blogs reading a message board etcetera at least once a week. However the site which has really done very well for itself, is without a doubt Facebook.

According to the Nielsen report, commissioned by women-focused blog network BlogHer and NBCU’s iVillage, Facebook is now catching up with TV in terms of popularity in the U.S.

While 55% of the population is believed to watch TV daily, 47% of the population visits Facebook daily. In fact, Facebook is now much more popular than other channels of information and entertainment such as radio and newspapers, which are accessed by 37% and 22% of the population respectively.

One of the major factors which draws people to Facebook, could be social gaming. Nielsen reports that 32.7 million people are now playing social games like Farmville daily. This figure is equal to the number of daily newspaper readers and double the number of magazine readers.

Other forms of social media such as blogs are not so popular, however, and attract only 11% of web users daily.

In terms of actual numbers, that is 240.3 million unique visitors to social networks.

Among all the networks, Facebook held the top spot in most of the countries in the region, with a few exceptions such as India, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.

Users spent an average of 2.5 hours each on the social networks in the course of the month, and each visitor accessed a social network about 15 times in the month.

The Philippines was found to lead the way for social network penetration, with 90% of its online population visiting social networks in February 2010. They were closely followed by Australia, which has 89.6% penetration and Indonesia, which had 88.6% penetration.

It was also found that the Philippines had the highest level of engagement, with an average of 5.5 hours and 26 visits per user. Indonesia had an average of 5.4 hours and 22 visits per user. Australia had 3.8 hours and 20 visits per user. Malaysia had nearly 3.8 hours and 22 visits per user.

Facebook was the most popular social network in places like the Philippines (84.5% market share), Australia (69.4%), Indonesia (84.9%), Malaysia (77.5%), Singapore (72.1%), New Zealand (63.6%), Hong Kong (62.6%) and Vietnam (18.4%).

In other markets, several other networks had the lead. In India, Orkut was the leader with 46.8%. Wretch.cc in Taiwan commands 62.5%, CyWorld in South Korea has 54.2% and Mixi.jp has 18.9% of the Japanese market share.

Social media will help the parties get the attention of the public and, in turn, garner more supporters.

Facebook has about 20.9 million users aged 18 and over in the United Kingdom, which is almost the same as the number of people who voted in the last general election.

At the time of publishing this article, the official Labour Party page has 11,922 fans on Facebook. The Conservatives have 31,745 fans and the Liberal Democrats have 11,550 fans.

YouTube, Twitter and Facebook feature prominently on all three major parties’ websites. RSS feeds are just as prominently available for subscription and blogs are widely used.

The extent to which the Internet is expected to help in the U.K. is less than in the U.S. as it is a much shorter campaign and the level of fund raising is much lower.

It is rumoured that the Conservative party’s digital team is spending as much as 20% of their time on Twitter. Sarah Brown, the wife of the current Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has a follower count of over 1.1 million on Twitter – which should be a reason for the Tories to worry, as they only have a little over 23,000 followers!

Channels such as YouTube, Delicious, Livestream, podcasting and even email are also expected to play an important role during this election.

This is the first time the Internet will play an important part in the U.K. election process especially by allowing the party leaders to communicate directly with the younger generation – usually the most politically indifferent demographic.

Political parties will be able to show highly targeted ads to the users, which will be much cheaper and more effective than traditional newspaper ads.

The down side of such an increased network presence is that the slightest mis-step by a party leader can go viral and be broadcast to millions of voters in no time. All candidates now need to be more aware than ever of the fact that they can now be tracked almost all the time and their privacy is something they can never be entirely sure of having.

Liberal Democrats on YouTube

Unfortunately, most of the technology giants such as Apple, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Facebook rely on companies that generate their power from coal. The use of coal to generate power adds to the carbon foot print.

It has been estimated that by 2020 data centres will consume 1,963 kilowatts of electricity, which is more than the power that France, Germany, Canada and Brazil jointly consume at present.

Tom Dowdall of Greenpeace said to the BBC that the availability of smartphones and netbooks is increasing the demand for cloud computing, which requires companies to invest even more in huge data centres.

However, instead of trying to use greener sources of energy, most of the companies are only concerned with efficiency.

Facebook, which is developing its first custom-built data centre in Oregon, will use an evaporative cooling system to cool their servers. Pacific Power, the company that supplies Facebook power, uses more coal than the U.S. average.

Over 380,000 people have joined English and Spanish language groups on Facebook set up by Greenpeace to pressurise Facebook to use 100% renewable energy. Facebook, however, claims to be helpless as they have to rely on the local power grid.

Microsoft uses a similar air cooling system but claims to use 100% hydropower in their data centre in Dublin. Yahoo! also uses hydropower for their data centre in Buffalo, New York.

Dowdall says, “We would like to see more examples of companies using purchasing power to drive an increase in renewable capacity.”

Google is the only tech giant that has truly pulled its weight and has invested in a number of environment protection and green energy related initiatives.

Common sense would probably indicate the same without the need for research. If a consumer elects to receive a brand’s messaging on their Facebook news stream or Twitter feed, that consumer is already likely to be a champion of the brand. It is just natural that such a consumer would then be more likely to buy that brand’s products.

Assuming that social media prompts consumers to buy would be a leap of faith not justified by this research. The only role it plays, according to this piece of research, is to prompt consumers who already like a brand to buy more of its products.

iModerate Research Technologies and consumer market research firm, Chadwick Martin Bailey, conducted the survey on the effect social media has on brand followers in February 2010 across more than 1,500 adult respondents in the U.S.A.

The study reveals that 60% of Facebook fans and 79% of Twitter followers are more likely to recommend brands that they follow or become fans of. Similarly, they are more likely to buy products of those brands.

51% of Facebook fans and 67% of Twitter followers said they were more likely to buy from the brands that they follow.

Vice President at Chadwick Martin Bailey, Josh Mendelsohn says, “Companies not actively engaged are missing a huge opportunity and are saying something to consumers – intentionally or unintentionally – about how willing they are to engage on consumers’ terms.”

Consumers of both sexes and various age groups who participated in the study also felt that brands that are not involved on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are either unaware of the opportunity they are missing or are not very interested in interacting with their consumers.

Considering that Facebook has over 400 million active users and 50 million tweets are posted on Twitter every day, the brands that are not on these networks are certainly missing the opportunity to reach a large audience.

According to eConsultancy, most consumers follow a brand to get discounts, but about 2% of them said they follow the brand to show support for it.

Twitter had started location sharing as an API feature last August is now all set to allow geotagging of Tweets directly from its site.

The feature is currently being rolled out. It will be available only to users in the U.S.A for now, and that too only to users browsing via Mozilla Firefox3.5 or Google Chrome.

Users on other browsers, such as Internet Explorer and Safari, in the U.S.A and all users anywhere else in the world will have to await their turn patiently.

Location tagging will come with the choice for users to opt in and will remain off by default, thereby avoiding controversies regarding user privacy. Those interested in using the location sharing feature will have to adjust their account settings accordingly.

Users will get the choice of broadcasting their exact location or an approximate location such as a neighbourhood or town name. They will also be able to switch on or off the location feature with each tweet. User will be able to delete their entire location history if they decide to do so.

Those who wish to start using the location sharing feature should first read instructions provided on the support page about tweeting with your location.

The information was given to The New York Times by unnamed sources who have not yet been authorised to talk about the upcoming feature.

It is likely that Facebook may announce this feature at f8, their yearly developer conference, which is due to be held next month.

One of the reasons why rumours about this feature sound more credible could be the fact that Facebook changed their privacy policy last November. The policy now says, “When you share your location with others or add a location to something you post, we treat that like any other content you post.”

However, in anticipation of protests by the advocates of user privacy, Facebook also said, “If we offer a service that supports this type of local sharing, we will present you with an opt-in choice of whether you want to participate.”

It is believed that Facebook has been working on this location sharing feature for almost a year now. However, when questioned about the service, official spokeswoman, Meredith Chin said, “We’re constantly experimenting with new things around here, but we don’t have any details to share right now.”

The location sharing feature will supposedly be offered directly by Facebook to its users and will also have a set of software tools for developers to offer location-based services.

The fact that 50% of Facebook users log in at least once a day and 100 million users (25%) use their mobile phones to do so, makes location sharing an important feature for Facebook.

While this feature will give competition to smaller location-based networks like Foursquare and Loopt, it is more likely to compete with Google for a share of the revenue from the small business local advertising sector.

U.K. based insurance comparison site, Confused.com has warned users about this eventuality.

Another site, PleaseRobMe.com has been actively trying to create awareness among people about how using social media sites like Twitter, Facebook etc. makes them vulnerable to burglars.

The simple fact is that when users post updates, on these sites regarding their current location, daily schedule etc. they are obviously informing people that they are not at home. This information can easily be abused by miscreants.

In other words, people are making their homes more vulnerable to robbers. Insurance firms surely won’t ignore this.

Darren Black, head of home insurance at Confused.com says, “I wouldn’t be surprised that as social media grows in popularity and more location based applications come to fore, insurance providers consider these in their pricing of an individual’s risk and we could see hikes of up to 10% for people who use these sites.”

It does seem quite surprising that the advocates of user privacy, have not yet raised objections to the location based apps on social media sites, even though they had been quick to object to services like Google Maps and Street View etc. as they had then rightly pointed out that burglars are getting more and more sophisticated, where planning and execution of their attacks is concerned.

In view of these facts, it seems reasonable that insurance firms have started taking note of these factors, while providing insurance and assessing claims. After all home security is more than just putting up sophisticated locks on the door.

Facebook Zero will be a stripped down, text-only version of the original social network. It will run on a lower bandwidth. The site will not allow access photos or videos. It will be a text-only site.

The popular social network, which has been growing rapidly, claims they now have over 100 million users a month on mobile alone, and this figure is expected to grow even further. This new version will help Facebook to free-up a lot of critical bandwidth.

Facebook Zero is likely to be offered to users free of charge, and then interested users can change over to a paying model with a multimedia service.

Almost half the time spent by users online on their mobiles is dedicated to Facebook. In December 2009, users in U.K. spent 2.2 billion minutes on Facebook through their mobile phones.

According to Brandee Barker, a spokesperson at Facebook, “[Facebook] are discussing it… as an option to make Facebook on the mobile Web available to everyone anywhere and allow operators to encourage more mobile Internet usage.”

A slimmed down version of Facebook, called Facebook Lite, is already available in places with slow Internet connections, such as in third world countries.

Facebook Zero will be launched in the coming weeks.

Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, will now be providing Facebook users with a more detailed search experience. Facebook users will now have full access to several features that are available on Bing, instead of just a few links as they previously had.

This means that Facebook users will get better search results, with the use of the new tools now available to them.

Microsoft has a 1.6% stake in Facebook, which they had bought for $240 million about two years ago allowing search integration between Bing and Facebook in the U.S. This search integration will now be available to Facebook users all over the world.

So far, Bing has been providing display ads on Facebook, but it has been mutually decided that from now on, Facebook will provide their own display ads. They can better decide what ads will be best suited tot heir website. Microsoft will, however, continue to provide search ads to Facebook and Facebook search results will of course continue to be powered exclusively by Bing.

This has been a good time for Facebook, as they will not only earn more revenue through the display ads, but they are also completing six years of social networking. They now have about 400 million users, which is a landmark in itself, and the figure has almost doubled over the last year.

It is also expected that Facebook will set up its own full-fledged webmail product, and with more and more people spending so much time on Facebook, they could soon become the top news source on the Internet.

The GSMA is the industry association for mobile phone operators. It carried out a study on mobile Internet use in December 2009. The study showed that almost 16 million people in U.K. spent nearly 4.8 billion minutes on the mobile Internet and generated 6.7 billion page views between them. Of this, nearly 50% of the time people spent on the mobile Web was on Facebook.

The total number of mobile Internet users is likely to be much more than 16 million, as T-Mobile and 3 were not included in the survey. This data will be published shortly.

While Facebook was visited by almost 5 million users, it was closely followed by Google, which was used by 4.57 million users. Users did not spend anywhere near as much time on Google, though, as they did on Facebook.

The figures were released by the Mobile Media metrics service, which has been recently launched by the GSMA and comScore, to help various brands and agencies to set up their mobile ad campaigns and to judge the response they receive, to these campaigns.

Mobile marketing has definitely been on the upswing lately. Mobile commerce showed significant growth in the 2009 holiday season and reports predict that mobile Internet access will overtake PCs in 2013.

The survey was answered by 800 teenagers between 12 to 17 years of age and 2,253 young adults between 18 and 29 years of age. This is the section of the population that is a key indicator of future technology trends.

The study reveals that while blogging was a popular activity in 2006, with about 28% of the users indulging in it; in 2009, only 14% of teenagers and 15% of young adults were participating in blogs.

In the past, MySpace, which was then the most popular social network encouraged blogging, but Facebook which has now taken over the number one spot among social networks, advocates the use of short status updates. It has been found that in 2009, only 48% of young adults used MySpace, compared to 73% who used Facebook.

The study also reveals that Twitter has not yet caught the fancy of teenagers like Facebook has managed to do. Only 8% of teenagers use Twitter and the vast majority (66%) of teenagers prefer text messaging.

That social networks are growing, in general, is obvious from the fact that in 2008, about 42% of those surveyed used more than one social network, while in 2009, 52% did so.

Among adults aged 30 or more, only about 40% used social networks in 2009, while blogging activity among them increased marginally from 7% to 11%.

Social search started as an experiment in Google Labs, undertaken to try and make search more social and personalised. Based on the number of sign ups to try this feature, Google has now released it in beta on their regular search results in the USA.

With this new feature, when users query Google, they will receive all the relevant results as usual. Google will additionally search for information on the subject that has been posted by the users’ contacts on their blogs and social networks and add that information as “Results from your social circle” in the search results page.

Users might give more weight to these social results in some cases, as they already know and trust the opinions of the contacts these results were based on.

The social feature has now also been implemented for Google Images. When a user does an image search, Google will include photos from the user’s contacts’ accounts on public sites like Picasa and Flickr. These results will also be shown under the heading “Results from your social circle”.

Two new links are visible alongside every set of social search results – “My Social Circle”, which shows the extended network of the user’s online contacts and how they are connected  and “My Social Content” which lists the user’s public pages that might appear on other people’s social results.

Where Social Search Stops Being Social

The last point mentioned above, though, might be the single biggest shortcoming of social search. Google relies on social information that is public. Unfortunately for them, the largest social network in the world, Facebook is largely closed off to search spiders. Public information on Facebook is sparse, at best.

Since these services are still in beta, Google probably expects to be able to improve upon them further in due course. If social search is to be truly social Google’s improvement efforts might need to focus on obtaining content from Facebook without violating user privacy.

Using Social Search

To start using social search, a user must first create a Google profile, and then add links to his / her other public online social network accounts.

During the week ending on 26th December 2009 social networks and forums took a lead over the search engines, in terms of number of visit, for the first time ever.

This peak over the Christmas holidays was followed by a dip in social networking, but the sector has already recovered and social networks and forums are once again showing a definite upward trend.

During the week ending on 16th January 2010, visits to social networks in Australia were only 0.4% behind search engines.

Another trend, which has been visible over the last three months, is that social networking shows a significant rise during the weekends, especially on Sundays. This was first seen by Hitwise on Sunday the 15th of November 2009 and then again on Saturday the 21st and Sunday the 22nd of November 2009.

One remarkable finding pointed out by Hitwise was that while social networking reached its highest point for 2009 on Christmas day at 14.8% share of Internet visits, search engines reached their annual peak on 10th January 2009 at 14.5% share of Internet visits.

Facebook and YouTube both had their highest number of visits on Christmas day with 8.0% and 2.2% of the market respectively.

Search engines still dominate the market in the U.K. and U.S.A. However, if the trend in Australia is an indicator of the future, social media marketing might be set to increase in importance a whole lot more.

Every change made by Facebook seems to upset privacy pundits. The latest changes in their policy have once again not gone down well with the advocates of user privacy. EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center) and nine other groups filed a complaint against Facebook with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

The FTC is now looking into the matter and has asked EPIC to arrange a meeting. They have, however, refused to confirm or deny whether an investigation is being conducted on the issue or not.

David Vladeck, the FTC’s consumer protection chief wrote in a letter to EPIC, “As the amount of personal information shared on social networking sites grows and the number of third parties and advertising networks with access to such information grows it is important that consumers understand how their data is being shared and what privacy rules apply. The commission staff believes it is critical that companies provide transparency about how this data is being handled, maintained, shared and protected and what steps consumers can take to control the use of their information.”

Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, said, “people have already gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect, what the current social norms are.”

In other words, Zuckerberg claims that the increased acceptance of social networking gives Facebook the right to decide how much of their users’ information can be shared and with whom. This stance is likely to invite the ire and criticism of the FTC.

As if to add insult to injury, an unnamed employee of Facebook allegedly said, “we track everything. Every photo you view every person you’re tagged with, every wall post you make and so forth.” He also says that all information is stored in a database, even if a user tries to delete it.

The new service will enable third-party websites to integrate features of Twitter directly and easily into their own websites.

This description of the yet-to-be-launched service sounds suspiciously similar to Facebook Connect, which was launched in 2008 and has been responsible, to an extent, for the massive growth that Facebook has continued to enjoy in the last year and a half.

According to reports from Facebook, Facebook Connect has been integrated into 80,000 different websites, resulting in Facebook receiving 60 million users who connect to Facebook through these websites every month. In fact, for many of these websites, Facebook Connect is the only means for new users to create an account and then log into it.

Facebook Connect has a lot of widgets, through which Facebook features are brought directly to these sites.

Twitter too has a good few features offered to users via the Twitter API, which allows other sites to authenticate users and pull and publish data. The process of doing so, is however not as simple as that of Facebook Connect.

With the introduction of the new system, the process of integrating Twitter will become easier for webmasters, thereby spurring the growth of Twitter further.

Update: Facebook Mimics Twitter Right Back

In a comical twist of strategy, Facebook has just launched a feature very similar to Twitter’s retweets. Users can now “retweet” updates from their friends by clicking on a ‘Share’ link in their Facebook news feed.

Now, whenever Facebook users receive a notification email regarding a friend’s status update, photo upload, wall post, video etcera the user can send their reply to Facebook via email, without actually having to sign in to their Facebook account.

Facebook has also implemented some special features within this functionality that will enable filtering out all unrelated text, such as the user’s email signature.

This feature will be particularly useful to those who want to check their Facebook status while they are at work, or through their mobile phone, while on the go, as this facility will allow them to do so without signing in to Facebook, thereby bypassing any restrictions set by IT departments.

When the user receives an email notification, he or she just has to click ‘Reply’ and then type a comment at the top of the email received. Clicking ‘Send’ will automatically direct the email to a Facebook service that will add the main email contents as a comment on Facebook.

Visits to Facebook by individual users could fall, as a result, though the added interaction this prompts could keep Facebook atop of user’s minds longer. Advertising could very easily be integrated into email notifications if Facebook wanted.

Users who don’t currently receive email notifications can simply visit their account settings and choose to receive email notifications through the ‘Notifications’ tab.

Hollesley Bay prison, where Lynch was being held is an open, or minimum security prison. Moreover, Lynch was near the end of his sentence and was out on a day pass to help him integrate back into society. The act of escaping was not particularly daring.

What is really daring, however, is the fact that instead of trying to stay out of the limelight he has drawn a lot of media attention towards himself.

Lynch keeps posting recent pictures of himself, along with details about his meals or his plans for the day. He also makes rude comments about the police regularly on his Facebook Page.

During Christmas, he wrote about how he would take his “little princess” to a particular mall, so she could meet Santa Claus. Some time later, he added another update saying that he was already in that mall and was walking around with a big Winnie The Pooh in his hands. He later mentioned his plans to attend a New Year’s Eve party to be held in Lowestoft, Suffolk.

The police, on their part, have claimed to be working with Facebook to track down the IP address from which he operates and hope to catch him soon.

What seems really appalling however, is the fact that he has collected over 40,000 fans who regularly view his profile page and send him fan mail. People have even designed T-shirts and a song in his honour!

Some other Facebook users have been sending him hate mail, and trying to remind his fans that they are honouring a criminal. On his part, Craig Lynch has asked these “haters” to get off his back and to stop saying that he hit and robbed an old lady, as he claims to have done no such thing.

Facebook Page for Craig ‘Lazie’ Lynch

This information was revealed to Rory Maher a research analyst with TBI by sources close to Facebook. According to eMarketer, Facebook has become “the premier destination for marketers who are using social media.

A major factor in this super success of Facebook is the fact that they have concentrated on building ad technology, and this has let Facebook leap ahead of its rivals like MySpace in a relatively short time.

Due to the up-to-date technology which they offer, Facebook is able to charge its advertisers at premium rates. Facebook’s rate card shows that they charge $20 per CPM (Cost per 1,000 impressions) which is much higher than what most other social sites are able to charge. Facebook has also set a minimum spend limit of $50,000 for agencies.
Facebook also offers a CPC (Cost per click) basis service which ranges from $0.15 to $1.10 per click depending on the product being advertised.

They have also greatly increased the use of their self-serve advertising platform. Another important reason for their sudden growth is the fact that their audience has now crossed the 350 million mark worldwide.

Facebook also allows their advertisers to target their audience in a very precise manner, using any number of criteria they want.

Facebook also forms a very crucial part of every viral campaign. Advertisers are allowed to create fan pages, or connect to Facebook Connect, thus notifying all the contacts of Facebook users about the products they are advertising.

Facebook has also recently struck a deal with Microsoft, to incorporate their feeds into the search results on Bing.
All this indicates that Facebook is likely to continue growing next year as well.

Yahoo! users will be able to view the activities of their Facebook friends on Yahoo! and at the same time Yahoo! content will be accessible on Facebook.

This integration will make it possible for Yahoo! users (500 million across the globe) to keep in touch with all their friends and access their social activities from a single site.

Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! Answers, Yahoo! Finance and Flickr will all be accessible directly through Facebook Connect and users will have the choice of updating their status messages either from Facebook itself or through any of the Yahoo! sites.

Due to this integration users will be able to add comments, share news with each other or access their friend’s news feeds by accessing Facebook through Yahoo!, thus giving a much larger audience to Yahoo!

For a while now, Yahoo! had been discussing the possibility of integrating their social features such as email, address book and messenger with each other, but as of now they have decided to simply outsource these services to Facebook. They have thus lost the opportunity to monetise their own social network.

Ikea came up with an innovative and yet extremely simple way to use the popular social network, Facebook, to promote their new store in the town of Malmo, Sweden.

While using a social network to promote a product or brand is nothing new, the way they have done it is commendable, simply because the idea is so simple and inexpensive.

Forsman and Bodenfors, Ikea’s marketing agency created a profile on Facebook for the manager of the new store, Mr. Gordon Gustavsson, and then they uploaded pictures of several pieces of furniture in the store in his photo album.

Facebook users were then informed that the first person to tag their name to any piece of furniture in any of the pictures could take that article home for free!

The brilliance of this simple campaign lies in its intrinsically viral nature – when someone tags themselves on a photograph, all of their friends see the photograph, and therefore find out about the campaign. These friends then try to find a piece of furniture to tag themselves by going through the other photos in the album.

Certainly not wanting to lose out on a good opportunity, Facebook users started flocking to the profile at a feverish pace, as word of this campaign got around to more and more friends via the profiles page and Facebook news feeds. In fact users have been asking Ikea to upload more and more pictures so they can get some more freebies.

Ikea is, of course, enjoying all the publicity that is being generated for their store as a result of this campaign.

A survey of 22,000 US consumers conducted by BIGresearch shows that consumers are increasingly expressing a negative attitude towards mobile marketing.

The percentage of people who are not in favour of mobile marketing has grown since June 2008.

67% of consumers surveyed said they dislike text ads, up from 64% in 2008. 60% dislike voicemail ads, also up from 57% in 2008. And 60% dislike video ads, up from 56% in 2008.

In fact, 52% of consumers surveyed actually felt that mobile marketing is an invasion of privacy. This number too is up from 2008.

The majority of users expressed the view that marketers should take prior permission before sending any such ads to consumers.

These findings are sure to give some sleepless nights to mobile marketers, who must now find a way to get their ads across to users without upsetting them, as that would defeat the whole purpose of advertising.

On a more general note, it was found that the mobile marketing audience consists of 58% males. The average age of these users is 39.2 years. These users also tend to access social networks in large numbers. 38% use Facebook, 23% use MySpace and 13% use Twitter on a regular basis.

Realtime search service OneRiot, which is in talks with Yahoo! to provide them with realtime search, is also tying up with mobile search engine, Taptu, to deliver realtime search services to mobile Internet users. Taptu will make use of OneRiot’s API to provide these realtime search results.

OneRiot has already started developing additional APIs that will be able to provide relevant ads on mobile handsets, thus monetising the service. The service collects realtime results from various sources such as Twitter, Digg and Facebook.

Taptu has added a new feature on it homepage, which is essentially a search engine interface compatible with mobile browsers. The homepage has a search box with options to search the Web, Images and now, ‘Buzz’, which is where the realtime search results will be provided.

Buzz search is currently available on all iPhone, iPod Touch, G1 (Android), Blackberry Storm 1, Nokia N97 and 5800 handsets. All other devices still show the old search interface, which provides the option of ‘All’, images, video and music searches.

Until now, mobile users could access realtime search results by searching for trending topics on Twitter. However, this new service will certainly be more direct and efficient.

Mobile users with compatible handsets can test the service at:

www.taptu.com

A total of 3.920 billion hours were spent by users on Microsoft sites in September 2009, which is approximately 14.5% of the total online time by all users in that month. Of this, nearly 70% was on Windows Live Messenger.

In contrast only 2.512 billion hours were spent on Google sites, which is about 9.3% of the market share.

Google can take consolation in the fact that the usage of their sites has grown by 48% when compared with the usage in September 2008. Microsoft has grown by 44% in the same period.

Yahoo! sites, which accounted for 1.699 billion hours of online use have actually lost 14% in the same time frame.

The greatest (but not really surprising) growth was shown by Facebook. They clocked 1.387 billion hours in September 2009 compared to 474 billion hours in September 2008, which is a growth of 193%.

Graph showing change in user hours clocked on Top 4 Internet sites

A total of 27 billion hours were spent on the internet by 1.2 billion users over 15 years of age. The total population accessing the internet has grown by 20% in the last 1 year and is growing further.

Analysis of time spent online on a regional basis shows that Microsoft sites are largely preferred in Europe (16.8%), Latin America (35.9%), Middle East and Africa (33.1%), while Yahoo! has a sizable fan following in North America (11.2%) and the Asia-Pacific region (7.9%). Google sites are prominent in Latin America (19.4%), Middle East and Africa (9.7%), Europe (9.6%), and North America (9.1%).

Graphing Twitters Decline on Compete.com

The graph above, taken from Compete.com shows a clear decline in the total number of visits over the last three months and a slight decline in the number of unique visitors to the site in the last month.

As far as the subject of Twitter competing with Facebook is concerned, quite contrary to the general expectation that Twitter may soon overtake Facebook, Twitter is actually way behind Facebook in the race, and seems to be losing ground, as can be seen in the graph below:

Comparing Twitter’s Decline to Facebook ‘s rise, based on Alexa traffic ranks

While neither Compete.com nor Alexa.com’s numbers areprecise, they do give a very good general idea of trends, and in both cases, the trend for Twitter over the last month has been downward.

On October 24th Hitwise analyst Bill Tancer studied the number of U.S. Internet visits to both Twitter and Facebook. He found that while Facebook accounts for 6.1% of the market share, Twitter has only 0.14%.

Tancer also says that “At iMedia Breakthrough, Jeff Rosenblum from Questus, referenced a Harvard Business School Study finding that the median number of tweets per Twitter account is 1”.

The final admission that Twitter is not doing too well at present comes from none other than its CEO, Evan Williams, who told CNN, “It’s grown a little bit slower lately, but we have some things in the works that we think will change that.”

We can only wait and watch to see if that actually happens.

IT service company, Morse, recently conducted a study to find out the amount of time employees spend on various social networks when they should have been working instead.

The survey was conducted across 1,460 office workers. The results of the survey are quite appalling at first glance to say the least. They have come to the conclusion that employees spend 40 minutes every week on social networks, when they should have been concentrating on more official matters. The financial cost to their employers is estimated to be about $2.25 billion a year.

Another study claims that Facebook alone costs ₤130m a day in the U.K. and 233 million hours are lost every month due to this, while a study in the U.S. found that just web surfing costs U.S. $63 billion per year.

While these figures are indeed serious, and employers would be justified in trying to look for ways to cut their losses, it is not possible to plug the holes completely.

Employers would do well to remember that employees are bound to take some breaks from time to time. In fact, 40 minutes a week is less than 10 minutes a day for a typical 5-day working week. It is also possible that a short break may refresh an employee and inspire him or her to work better and be even more productive than usual, which is beneficial to the employer.

Thus it may seem advisable to overlook such lapses as long as they remain within reasonable limits.

As with previous occasions, when the homepage was redesigned, this time too several groups of users have formed to object to the recent changes. One group called ‘PLEASE GIVE US OUR OLD NEWS FEED BACK!’ is over 500,000 members strong.

Some of the complaints these users have raised are as follows:

• The Live Feed is not “live” enough
• Alerts are not shown when new content is posted
• While the alerts are actually being posted on the News Feed, they are not very prominent
• The news feed is not very good as some of the stories are almost one day old
• This time, Facebook did not give them enough notice about the impending changes and suddenly incorporated them in the homepage.

To be fair, Facebook has made these changes only to correct some errors in their previous design, like adding information about friends of friends, and placing the events and birthdays column above the fold.

Facebook has also improved some of their features like the ‘Share’ button. Facebook will now be able to provide detailed analytics to their publishers, so they can find out how popular a particular link is, and how many actions have taken place on Facebook, how many comments have been received etc. This feature is quite similar to the retweet counters that work with Twitter.

They have also updated their APIs to allow for the building of new apps.

In spite of the large number of protests, the allegations are not really serious and Facebook is sure to be able to survive and continue growing.

The Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg, has confirmed the deal, and she says that the feature is likely to be launched within the next two months. She has however reassured Facebook users that their privacy will be respected and therefore, Facebook will only stream data from those users who have their privacy settings mentioned as ‘everyone on web’. In fact sorting out this public data from the more private one is the reason, it will take about 2 months to launch this new feature.

Ms. Sandberg has also confirmed that Facebook will not be receiving any monetary compensation for allowing Bing to access their data. In due course of course, it is reasonable to expect that the increased access of Facebook data will lure more marketers and advertisers to Facebook. Thus indirectly this deal between Facebook and Bing is sure to help Facebook to earn more money.

The deal should also help Bing to boost its market share in the search market as they have managed to get these deals through before Google. Bing search results are now likely to be more real-time based than those on Google thus attracting more customers to Bing.

At the same time, Bing must make sure that they do not just clutter up their search results by adding data from Twitter and Facebook. That would only serve to confuse users, instead of providing better quality search results, which is the aim of these partnerships.

To understand this phenomenon better, Nielsen carried out a study across 1,800 participants in August 2009. For this study, users were categorised into 3 groups. Those who used mainly search engines (searchers), portals (portalists), and social media (socialisers) during their research operations.

The study surmised that approximately 18% of people used social networks as their primary source of information. Although this amount is smaller than that of search engine users (37%) and portal users (34%), it is nonetheless significant and growing constantly.

A major cause for this change could be the fact hat the internet is literally flooded with information on all subjects, thus making it difficult for the average user to decide what part of the information to trust, thus creating more confusion, rather than clarifying matters. On the other hand, when they go to the social networks, there is a lesser amount of information available, and equally important is the fact that this information is provided by ones friends and family, which reassures the user that he can trust the matter provided there.

Another factor in favour of social networks like Twitter and Facebook is the fact that they provide information in real time, while the search engines take a while to get updated.

In spite of these facts, social networks have a long way to go before they can overtake or replace the search engines for search. For one thing, social engines are more useful for information like local recommendations etc. while information about general topics is more easily available on the search engines.

Also the search engines are already working on systems for better filtration of the information available, so that users are not overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of content.

The latest statistics, collected by Brian Solis of Google Ad Planner, and published on Information is Beautiful, show that women also dominate the social web.

While the numbers seem to be more or less equal on a few of the social sites like LinkedIn, DeviantArt and YouTube, it has been found that the men are far outnumbered by the number of women on most of the other sites like Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter, MySpace etc.

The percentages of women using some of the popular social sites are as follows:

The only site on which men were found to outnumber women was Digg, which has 4.7 million more men (64% of the user base).

While there will definitely be those who say that women dominate the social Web because women often have more time to spend on unimportant matters, like chatting with their friends, because more women stay at home all the time as compared to the number of men, it is also very possible that women spend more time on social networks than men because they are the ones who really care about people and like to nurture and strengthen relationships.

Whatever the reasons for this difference, these demographics will certainly be very useful to marketers, as they give a very good indication of what sort of products and campaigns should be displayed on the social networks in order to get good conversion rates.

The new service being provided will be called Nielsen BrandLift.

Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook says, “Nielsen is the leader in measurement and is an excellent partner for us as we look to provide marketers with richer ad effective data”.

BrandLift will make use of opt-in polls on the Facebook homepage. The poll will help marketers to understand the opinion users have of a particular brand and thus the likelihood of purchase intent.

According to John Burbank, the CEO of Nielsen’s online division, Facebook has now become a vital link between consumers and brands, and with this partnership Nielsen will be able to add tot heir knowledge of media measurement. He further says, “we will be able to provide the missing elements to clients seeking better understanding of how web content and online advertising affect consumer behavior.”

This survey will help marketers to receive better market data and it will be made available to them sooner which is a great plus point for them.

Facebook will take care to see that individual users are not flooded with too many polls at once. Also no personal identification will be gathered through this poll, thus maintaining user privacy, which should please users.

The survey will consist of two questions put forward to consumers in standard ad positions. The survey will help advertisers to measure brand awareness, ad recall, message association, brand favorability and purchase consideration.

The service has already been used by a few brands such as Proctor & Gambol, and Sony Pictures on a trial basis. They have reported encouraging findings.

The service will be made available to all marketers in due course.

Several advertisers have admitted that of late, the results they get from advertising on Facebook are better than those achieved from advertising on Google, and that is in spite of spending less on Facebook than on Google.

According to several advertisers and marketers, the response they have been getting from Facebook has improved substantially in the last 6 months, and due to this, more and more businesses are buying ad space on Facebook.

Tim Kendall, director of monetization at Facebook, however, maintains that the advertising growth curve at Facebook has maintained a steady pace and there has been no sudden jump in the demand for ad space on their site. It is true, though, that the number of advertisers on Facebook has tripled over the last three years.

One important factor for this growth surge at Facebook is the ability of advertisers to find their target audiences accurately from the profile data available about Facebook users. Facebook has always been very strict about users using real names and information on the site, and has often deleted profiles that posted false information. As a result, demographic data on Facebook is more reliable than on other networks.

When a Facebook user likes a product they are likely to recommend it to most of their friends, who are already on Facebook. This feature has certainly attracted a lot of marketers to Facebook.

While Google has not commented on this topic, Facebook has announced that they have logged annual sales to the tune of $500 million. Coupled with Facebook’s fast growing user base, it may only be just a matter of time before the social networking leader out performs Google on the advertising front.

First they added real time search to Facebook, soon after it was incorporated into Twitter and then they acquired FriendFeed.

Their latest move along this path is the incorporation of @mentions on their status updates, which allows users to respond directly to various comments, event announcements and so on.

To use this feature, the user has to type the ‘@’ symbol in the status update box, and a drop down menu then allows the user to tag friends, groups events etc. The concerned party will then receive a link to this post. This procedure is expected to simplify the use of Facebook.

@mentions, which were earlier called @replies are an extremely popular feature of Twitter. In fact, @mentions are one of the main reason behind Twitter’s popularity as a quick  communications tool.

Several Facebook users made use of Twitter for their status updates. With this new feature, users will no longer need to access Twitter to message their friends. Facebook users will now be able to tag and chat with each other directly on Facebook. It will, in fact, be possible for users to update Twitter through Facebook, instead of the other way around, which has been the case so far.

Marketers and advertisers will also now be able to communicate and interact with their clients through Facebook as they will be able to follow each comment attached to their name. This will be beneficial for them as Facebook has 250 million users and Twitter has only 10 million.

Another major advantage for Facebook will be the ability this feature gives users to broadcast breaking news on Facebook instead of on Twitter.

Though all these changes are likely to have an impact on the numbers of Facebook and Twitter users, one thing to be remembered is that most users use Facebook only to communicate with a group of known friends, whereas Twitter is used to follow the comments and opinions of people with a common interest, even if they are complete strangers in the real world.

According to comScore research, the total number of ad impressions on all social sites put together accounts for 21.1% of the total online ad displays in the U.S.

The most popular social sites, MySpace and Facebook, together received the vast majority of ad impressions. Individually, MySpace received 9.2% and Facebook received 8.2% of all online ad impressions.

Less popular sites like Tagged.com, Hi5, Bebo, Classmates.com and many others account for the remaining 3.7% of all online ad impressions. Each of them receives about 0.1% of the total, with the exception of Tagged.com which has 0.6% and MocoSpace.com which has 0.2%.

The popularity of social networks has increased rapidly in the last few years, so it is quite natural that advertisers would try and make use of this medium to reach the maximum possible target audience. Another motivating factor for using the social networks is the high reach and frequency of usage among target segments against low costs .

Jeff Hackett, Senior VP at comScore, says, “Social media is becoming an increasingly attractive vehicle for major advertisers seeking to optimise campaign reach and frequency, and small advertisers desiring to reach a highly targeted audience.”

One should, however, note the fact that although the number of ad impressions on social sites is over 20%, the actual number of clicks and conversions received from social networks could be significantly lower. If that is the case, social networks are no more than excellent branding channels.