The iPlatform » General

Time Spent on Social Media Sites up 82% Year-on-Year

Carolina — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 17:28:58 +0000

The average consumer spent more than five and half hours on social networking sites like Facebook in December 2009, an increase of 82% in comparison to the same time a year before, according to a research report by The Nielsen Company. Australia led in average time per person spent (6 hours and 52 mins), with the United States and the United Kingdom in a close second and third, (6 hours 9 minutes and 6 hours 7 minutes respectively).

The overall traffic to social networking sites has also grown continually over the last three years. Social networks and blogs are the most popular online destination, followed by online games and instant messaging.

These numbers show once again how relevant Social Media is for marketing campaigns that wish to reach a growing part of the global population.

If you want to find out how we can help you build and deliver successful campaigns on Facebook, get in touch now.

Facebook Fans Become More Loyal Customers

Carolina — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 01:01:12 +0000

Facebook has more than 3 million active pages, with 1.5 million maintained by local businesses. In total, these pages have more than 5.3 billion fans. These are impressive numbers, and show the extent to which Facebook has become a new major communications channel between brands and customers. However, despite the general view of fan behaviour being a ‘lightweight’ action from the customer, a recent study has found that Facebook fans actually become more loyal customers.

The study, by Rice University, examined the dollar value of Facebook fans on the sales of the cafe chain Dessert Gallery (DG), by setting up a Facebook fan page and measuring the effect on customer behaviour between fans and non-fans. The page was updated regularly with pictures, news and promotions.

Over the three months of the study, the research found that customers who became a fan of Dessert Gallery on Facebook became more loyal throughout the period. Although they spent the same average amount of money in each visit as non-fans, they visited the cafe 20% more often and were more likely to recommend the cafe to friends, and showed a stronger emotional attachment to the company.

It’s possible that simply the act of publicly declaring themselves a fan created a positive feedback loop with how they felt about the company, and this had a real affect on sales and recommendations. This shows the potential for all brands in increasing their fan page activity, even on a most basic and simple level.

The iPlatform delivers marketing campaigns and competitions in Facebook and other social platforms. If you are interested in finding out how we can help, get in touch now.

People spend longer on Facebook than any other site

joshuamarch — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 14:26:08 +0000

Facebook users spend on average seven hours using the social networking website, according to a recent survey by Nielsen, with a month on month growth of nearly 10%.

The iPlatform delivers marketing campaigns and competitions in Facebook and other social platforms. If you are interested in reaching and increasingly part of the population who spend time in the social networking website, get in touch now.

Turkey, UK, France and Germany show impressive active user growth

joshuamarch — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 14:59:14 +0000

As the number of Facebook users in Europe reached 123 million at the beginning of February, UK, France and Germany showed the biggest growth among the regions countries, according to Inside Facebook.

With its 24.3m users, the UK is still leading – with an impressive 40% of the population on Facebook. In comparison, Turkey, France and Germany have rates of 26.3%, 24.3%, 8.1%.

These numbers show once again how relevant the Facebook platform can be for marketing campaigns that wish to reach a growing part of these countries’ population. If you want to find out how we can help you deliver successful marketing campaigns on Facebook, get in touch now.

Social Media Gives More Return Visitors Than Search

joshuamarch — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 18:45:25 +0000

The vast majority of traffic to a website still comes from search engines. However, new research by ad network Chitika suggests that not only are users more likely to discover new sites through social media, but that users referred by social networks tend to be more loyal as well. The research shows that 20.7% of site visitors referred by Facebook are loyal – meaning that they come back to the site four or more times during a week.

In comparison, less than 12% of visitors referred by Google become loyal to a website.

Source: eMarketer.com

If you want to find out more about marketing in Facebook, get in touch now.

Target friends of your fan pages with Facebook adverts

joshuamarch — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:52:07 +0000

Facebook has now allowed advertisers to target ads to the friends of their connections. Up until now, they could only target their own connections, which means exclusively the actual fans of their Pages, users of their Applications, members of their Groups and attendees of their Events.

With the new targeting, friends of these connections who see the ads will receive them with a message saying which of their friends is a fan of that page, for example.

You can even use the targeting for URLs outside Facebook, which could become a powerful way of driving traffic.

If you want to find out more about marketing in Facebook, get in touch now.

Facebook beating Bebo at its own game

joshuamarch — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 15:45:00 +0000

New research carried out by the Dubit Informer Panel (30,000 young people in the UK) shows that Facebook is winning the social network war in the UK on almost all measures. Although there are slightly more registered 12-17s on Bebo, the usage stats show that Facebook has replaced Bebo even among the youngest demographic. Their findings:

12-17s – membership
Bebo is the SNS with more registered teenagers 12-17 (67%); Facebook (FB) 64%; MySpace (MS) 54%

12-17s – usage
FB is used more frequently than Bebo. 53% use FB at least once a week, and this usage increases at the older end; Bebo 42%; MS 30%. Gender is also important: girls are more likely to register with, and use, Bebo.

16-25s – membership
83% have a profile on FB; MS 51%; Bebo 36%. Registrations on FB are evenly spread across all ages, from 16 to 25, but MS and Bebo registrations decrease significantly as age rises.

16-25s – usage
FB is accessed by 70% of 16-25s at least once a week (the second most used website just below Google); MS 23%, but steep decline as age increases.

When Facebook was first growing among the closed university networks, Bebo managed to gain a leadership position amongst a younger audience unable to access Facebook. This is clearly reflected in the stats showing that more 12-17 year olds are registered on Bebo than anywhere else. However, Facebook’s pure relentless pursuit to be the social graph identity provider of the web is now paying huge dividends, with Bebo (and MySpace) falling to the wayside in every single demographic, even taking over Bebo for usage in the 12-17yr old category. We’re strongly recommending all of our clients to focus their strategies on success in Facebook rather than spread themselves thinner across the other networks.

Over 70% of Facebook’s userbase engage with applications every month

joshuamarch — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 16:53:26 +0000

In a new post by Brian Solis, he collates some interesting stats about Facebook. These include:

Every month, more than 70% of users engage with applications developed for the Facebook platform
There are more than 350,000 active applications currently available on the Facebook Platform
Over 200 applications maintain an active monthly user base of more than one million
15,000, and counting, websites, devices and applications have implemented Facebook Connect since its launch in December 2008

As well as the well known stats that there are 250m+ active users, 50% of which are logging in daily – generating 5 billion minutes on Facebook every single day.

Also interesting is that 8 million users ‘fan’ Facebook fan pages every day – an impressive statistic.

Check out the original post for more information.

Turn your website visitors into Facebook fans with the Fan Box

joshuamarch — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 07:11:26 +0000

Facebook have just a released the ‘Fan Box’, a simple to integrate (just a few lines of javascript) connection between your own domain and your Facebook fan page. With the box, visitors to your website will be able to easily see the wall posts and updates made from your fan page, and will be able to click to become a fan (and start receiving your updates into their Facebook stream), all without leaving your website.
As fan pages become more important brand properties, as way of communicating with your customers through their stream, and as launching points for interactive applications, competitions, promotions, etc, turning your regular website visitors into fans as well is becoming just as important. If you run a brand website as well as a fan page, we’d strongly recommend looking at how you could use this solution. Find out more on the Facebook Developer Blog here.

Upstream Traffic Swings from Search to Social Networks

joshuamarch — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 10:44:31 +0000

A new report from Hitwise is showing that as more time online is spent inside social networks, e-commerce sites are receiving less traffic from search (both natural and paid) and more from social networks. They found that for UK online retailers, the amount of traffic they received from paid search listings fell from 10.1% in March 2008 to 8.9% in March 2009; meanwhile the amount of traffic these sites are receiving from social networks has increased from 5.2% to 7.1% over the same time period.

A similar shift has happened from webmail providers to social networks; whereas a year ago the traffic they generated for e-commerce sites was roughly equal, Hitwise now reports that social networks are generating 58.3% more traffic that webmail providers.

With the UK (and the rest of the world) in a downturn, margins for online retailers are being squeezed, and reducing the cost per acquisition has never been more important. Companies are now showing that it’s possible to generate effective traffic from the social networks, which if done right is far cheaper than paid search; ASOS, the online fashion retailer, is receiving over 13% of its traffic from Facebook alone. Brands which get this right will be have a cheaper CPA and better margins than their competitors, giving an essential edge in this climate.

(Data sourced from Hitwise Intelligence).