Five Friday Facts #45
News
News
Videos hit the advertising sweet spot in China
Much has been written and said about economic powerhouse China and the promise its massive wired userbase holds for marketers. Here are some numbers that reflect the size of the potential market as at the end of 2011: 500 million internet users, 325 million online video viewers, 250 million microbloggers and 244 million social media users. User numbers only tell one part of the story; the demographics reveal that the average Chinese internet user is under 30 years of age with the most active online video viewers aged between 19 and 24, and coming from middle-class income households. The Chinese are prolific online video viewers and luxury brands have found videos to be the most effective way to engage the Chinese consumer.
Facebook sets sights on Japan’s advertising market
Dominant social network Facebook has added another feather to its cap after it overtook rival Mixi and hit 15 million active users in Japan. The company is looking to grow its share of Japan’s advertising market, ranked as the second largest advertising market in the world. Whilst Mixi has 26 million registered users, its active monthly userbase of 14.5 million users was surpassed by Facebook, which grew from 10 million to 15 million active users between March and August 2012. Data showed that 80% of Mixi’s traffic was from mobile devices, an area which Facebook is looking to tap on as it seeks to deepen engagement with users. With this rate of growth, Facebook could possibly wrest dominance from Twitter, which has 18 million registered users in Japan, in the near future.
Uber brands lead in social media conversations
Coke and Apple topped the charts in a report on social media impressions for the top 100 consumer brands during the month of July 2012. Coke registered 1.48 billion impressions, nearly 14% of the 10.6 billion generated by the top 100 brands and twice that of Apple at 761 million impressions. Although the U.S. accounts for about half of worldwide ad spending, the world’s largest advertising market only generated 44% of social media impressions. The reach offered by social media is especially noticeable outside of the U.S. with Coke generating 87% and Apple 72% of their impressions overseas.
Instagram passes 100 million users mark
Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg told CrunchFund that Instagram has just passed a major milestone of 100 million users. Instagram has been growing exponentially at a rate of more than 10 million users per month and passed its 5 billion photo milestone on 6 September 2012, when Facebook announced the success of its acquisition. What’s next for Instagram? Rumours are rife that Instagram will have a web presence and will be available on Windows Phone later this year.
Facebook Sponsored Results take off
Advertisers take note as the early results for Facebook’s Sponsored Results program look promising, according to Optimal. The product is meant to help marketers reach untapped potential customers. Optimal compared the number of people that would have been reached through targeting a designated search term against the brand’s Facebook fans (or those who could have been targeted with existing ads). During a seven-day period, “Facebook” turned up in 24,800 searches in the US out of which, only 21.9% were fans of Facebook’s page. The results were similar to searches for other top brands such as YouTube (20.8%), Coca-Cola (2.7%), Disney (22.3%) and MTV (17.4%). Optimal found that clickthrough rates ranged from 0.7% to 4.1% whilst on the lower-end of the scale, the campaigns outperformed Facebook Marketplace ads by 10x. The expectation is that the disparity will even out eventually though the initial data suggests that Facebook Sponsored Results can be a good tool to grow a brand’s audience quickly.