Posts Tagged ‘Facebook’

The Facebook vs MySpace debate is long running.  While many users have profiles on both, some people only utilize one or the other.  For a business, questioning which platform is worth your time and marketing budget is a valid question.

What are Your Customer Demographics?

The MySpace audience is a slightly younger group.  While the average age is 31, a full third of their users are under the age of 17.  Facebook’s average customer age is 36.  Facebook’s male to female ratio is almost even at 57% female, where MySpace is 64% female.

As MySpace has evolved, they have lured more high school users through their customizable pages and heavy focus on music and bands.  Facebook has gone out of their way to appeal to an older generation by being user friendly and looking professional.

Do More People Use Facebook or MySpace?

In early 2010, Facebook boasted more than twice the number of users than MySpace.  While Facebook has grown rapidly over the last few years, MySpace growth has stayed steady or declined.

How Much Time is Spent on Facebook and MySpace by the Average Users?

By January 2010, the amount of time an average user spent on Facebook had grown to over seven hours a month.  While MySpace doesn’t offer as many analytics to the public,vusers spend about a fourth of the amount of time that site as they do Facebook.

The Bottom Line, Which is Better for My Business?

It depends.  If your business targets teenage music lovers, you might be better off focusing your attention on MySpace.  If your business targets any other demographic, Facebook is the better choice.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Gone are the days when people wrote long letters to each other and waited for weeks on end till they got a reply back. Today, all it takes is a click to open a social networking site and a few strokes of the keyboard to convey any message that you want to your family or friends. Take Facebook for example. The popularity of the site is increasing every day ( going by its membership figures of 300 million) and its youngest members are still in school. But is there really too much of a good thing? People often argue that while such sites have made staying in touch so much easier, we also pay a price in terms of privacy. Are we aware that a lot of information we thought was private is actually in the open for the entire world to see?

To Like or Not to Like
Think of Facebook as community where people in your friend list know what you’re up to, what you are doing and even what you think. If that wasn’t enough, your friends are free to comment on anything that appears in your Facebook page as well. That is because Facebook offers both a Live Feed and a News Feed. The Live Feed shows you everything that’s happening within your friends circle. For instance you will be notified when a friend comments on a photo or another updates her status. On the other hand the News Feed is filtered by Facebook and consists of stories or links that the website thinks a user would enjoy based on factors like your friends commenting on the story. Needless to say, many Facebook users are outraged at the idea of the website itself making certain decisions for them. And exactly why would people be keen to know every little thing their friends do?

This week, Facebook laid out the next phase in its plan to rule the Web when it introduced a “Like” button that will be embedded on sites accross the Internet. The little “thumbs up” icon that many Facebook users have used to show approval for their friends activities is already featured on sites like CNN, and expected to show up on shopping sites, entertainment sites and beyond. In the words of Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerburg, at the launch of this new feature, “We’re going to serve one billion ‘like’ buttons on the Web” in the first 24 hours.

Over-sharers Beware
Many users are also waking up to the fact that every time they click the ‘like’ feature on an application or news item, their ‘like’ and profile photo will appear on the page that has been flagged. In other words, this is akin to a Digg like function, where content can be flagged with the only difference being that the content immediately appears in the status feed. This is just the beginning because very soon Facebook will also give you the option to ‘ like’ content that appears on entertainment and news websites; the only hitch being that all will be revealed in your status feeds. In other words, your friends will know which sites you visited, what you read and so on. How many of us really want the world watching what we do?

The Facebook team justify that any new update made is always tested extensively keeping the user in mind, and that real close knit interaction has only just begun. Facebook users on the other hand are anything but happy. Many feel that every time Facebook makes changes to the site, they are only for the worse. Increasingly, the invasion of one’s privacy is a scary reality.

Facebook recently announced the introduction of a new type of page called a “community page”. Considering the fact that there are already “Facebook Groups” and “Facebook Pages (or Fan Pages),” this has left many businesses wondering whether or not a community page would be the right choice for them.

What is a Facebook Community page?

Facebook introduced community pages to people who want to rally around their favorite topics or causes. For instance, a possible community page would be “Bob’s Tacos Are the Best!” So that the multitudes of people that love Bob’s Tacos could join this page and proclaim this love to the world (or at least their Facebook friends). Community pages are typically unofficial so Bob never has to lift a finger.

Since these pages can get hundreds of thousands of fans, Facebook has said they will take away the creator’s publishing rights at an undisclosed point. This ensures that the members will not be spammed.

What is Facebook Fan page?

An Facebook Fan Page are created to represent a business, public figure, organization, brand or product. This page allows for communication with fans and customers. When starting this type of page, you must agree that you are the official representative of the person, business, band or product and you have all the proper permissions. So, Bob could start an official Facebook Fan Page for “Bob’s Tacos” and use it to publicize new menu items or weekly discounts.

Fan Pages operate very similar to a personal page. There is a wall where (depending on the page’s settings) fans and owners can post pictures, links or messages. There are also tabs that allow for discussions, reviews, photos and events to be posted by the owners. Whenever a status is posted in a fan page, it will show up in all the fans’ news streams. No matter how popular a fan page gets, the owner does not lose publishing rights. These fan pages are indexed and searchable through search engines.

What is a Facebook Group?

A Facebook Group is similar to a Fan Page. However, events can be handled differently in a group. The administrator can allow all the members of the group to send bulk invites to other members. So “Bob’s Tacos’ Monday Night Taco Club” could start a group, discuss the food and set up meetings. They can set up officers as well such as a President and Treasurer. These groups can also be hidden from unregistered users.

Which is best for my business?

Most businesses will find that an official Fan Page will best serve their needs. There will be no confusion on who is really running the page, or if its messages are company approved. Starting a Fan Page will allow a company to create a beneficial and long lasting relationship with their customer.

Is privacy in the age of social media just an illusion? Signs certainly seem to be pointing that way. Thanks to Google, anyone with access to the Web can quite easily draw an accurate profile of who I am, where I work and what I believe. With the aid of LinkedIn and Twitter, potential employers can form an opinion of recruits without even checking references. I don’t want to debate ethics or the legal implications of such phenomenon, but I just wonder how long it will be before the public starts looking for a way to get out from under the microscope. Or, if Facebook is correct, and we’ll accept that it is now normal for strangers to peer into our most personal space.

Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, received a fair amount of criticism when he said in a CNBC interview that, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” This is probably not what I want to here from the CEO of the company that stores my emails, voicemails, blogs, etc. But it doesn’t make me want to unplug from the web either. I’ve just come to accept the trade-off that balances the power of free-flowing information and our willingness to share what we know.

Popular social networks are literally banking on the fact that there are millions of other people who feel the same way and becoming increasingly lax about their privacy. While Facebook has lured us in with the promise of intimate networks and full privacy controls. Recent changes in their policies have shown that they would rather we opened up and made our lives searchable. After all, that is where the money is. Advertisers would love to know that I’m in the market for a new something-or-other so they can tell me just where to get it at the right price.

As social media develops, I believe the trend will continue towards people opening up and sharing, and over-sharing. It won’t all be bad, because I believe we all gain when ideas are shared and expanded. For now, I’ve drawn the line at geo-location (there’s something creepy about being tracked as a dot on a map). Besides, I still like the option of being fashionably late without my boss knowing that I stopped to get a donut. And it will be a long, long, long time before I’m willing to put my medical records online. Sorry, Google.

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Facebook put up a post on their blog yesterday on “What Happens If I Ignore a Friend Request?” This is a question that I’ve been asked about on several occasions, and even wondered about myself. Actually, I’ve wondered what happens if I decide that I don’t think this whole “friend” thing is working out.

Well, according to Facebook, if you receive a friend request that you would like to (politely) deny you can just choose to click on Ignore, and that person will not receive notification of your decision. They will still be able to send you another request later and maybe you’ll have warmed up to the idea by then. Of course you have the option to do neither and just leave the “Friend Request” in limbo.

But in the event that guilt or persistence gets the better of you and you do accept this “friend” into your inner circle, you can go to their profile and scroll down to the bottom of the left hand side column and click on Remove from Friends, and they will be none the wiser. Unless, you are one out of five of their only Facebook friends, in which case you’re on your own.

Facebook is following in the footsteps of Flickr and now allowing people to upload photos and video via email. Here’s how it works:

Go to the Facebook Mobile page, while you are logged in and click on the link “Send my upload email to me now”. Then facebook will email you confirmation plus the email address to use for email uploads. Make sure you save it to your addressbook.

After you attach your photos or videos to an email, you can include a subject line that will be used as the caption for the photos or videos you upload. If you’re uploading more than one photo or video in the email, the captions will be the same for all of them. You can always edit the captions later by logging into your Facebook account. You can send as many photos as you like in accordance with the size limits of your email provider.

Facebook already lets you post pictures and video clips by via their website, as well as a host of mobile applications like the Facebook app for the iPhone or Blackberry, among others. But with this new email uploads feature you can now just forward photos as attachments in an email. This is definitely a convenient feature.

In a nutshell

Facebook is a free social networking web site that lets users join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region connect and interact with other people. People can also search for and add friends who are already registered with the site. Key features on Facebook are the ability for people to send and receive public or private messages, update their personal profiles, and share photos, videos, news stories, as well as comment on them. Currently, Facebook has over 200 million users, worldwide, with an average of 120 people in their individual networks.

Why is it useful?

Businesses and organizations are increasingly using Facebook as a point of contact for customers by creating “fan pages.” When users choose to become fans of a particular product or brand, their entire network of friends is notified and thereby represents the holy grail of marketing: personal endorsement by trusted peers. According to Facebook, more than 6 million users become fans of pages each day.

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Top Alternatives

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The Social Media sphere has been abuzz with anticipation since word got out that Facebook would finally allow what many felt was an intuitive feature that was lacking on their site. Beginning at 9:00 pm PST on June 12th, Facebook began allowing the individuals to register vanity/custom URLs. Meaning that guy you once knew as http://www.facebook.com/pages/001234 is now simply http://www.facebook.com/joe. Apparently, over one million URLs were claimed within the first hour.

Of course, if you already use Twitter, you appreciate the fact that vanity URLs, or usernames, make it so much easier to find the businesses or individuals you want to follow. If you have not already registered your URL, I suggest you join the gold rush and do so now – especially if you are a brand owner or brand manager.

How do I get one?

There’s a couple of ways to register: Read the rest of this entry »

Are you Linked In to what’s happening in the Twitterverse today? Let’s face it, communication has never been faster, easier or more affordable. With the click of a mouse or th flick of a finger you are immersed in a constant stream of information. That space that you once had to yourself is now shared with millions, worldwide. People who freely blog about your product or service. Some see this as a scary thing, but you see this as an opportunity to get the word out and turn strangers into FANS and fans into loyal customers.

YourSocialMedia.com is an initiative by Wilson Monnig Creative to help businesses understand the effectiveness of the different social media tools available to them, and integrate them into their marketing plans.