Five Friday Facts #30
News
News
Number of LinkedIn users in India
LinkedIn has now reached its 15 million user milestone in India. The professional networking site has increased its user base in India by over 300% within 3 years, and is LinkedIn’s largest market outside the US in terms of user numbers, accounting for 9.3% of the overall user base of 161 million. LinkedIn Country Manager for India Hari V. Krishnan said that a little over 20% of the users connect to LinkedIn through mobile devices, and “the number is only growing”.
Salesforce to purchase Buddy Media for more than $800 million
Enterprise cloud computing company Salesforce is close to a deal to acquire social enterprise software provider Buddy Media, best known for helping brands manage their Facebook presence, for more than US$800 million or S$1.02 billion. Buddy Media’s clients currently include well-known brands such as HP, Mattel, L’Oreal, and Virgin Mobile. There seems to be a spate of acquisitions lately, what with Salesforce’s rival Oracle having snapped up Vitrue for $300 million or S$386 million just last week. Similar to the services Buddy Media provides, Vitrue helps brands manage their social media presence through its CRM-like tools and dashboards.
LinkedIn is primary source of social media intelligence
Digimind‘s recent ‘State of Market Intelligence 2012’ survey reveals that 79.2% of market intelligence decision-makers monitor social media platforms to extract information related to their competitors, industry developments, consumer trends and more. 62.5% of companies surveyed monitor microblogging service Twitter while 69.4% monitor professional networking site LinkedIn as part of their day-to-day intelligence activities. Social networking sites Facebook and Google+ however are not as highly regarded as essential sources to monitor, with a lesser share of 47.2% and 35.2% of companies monitoring these two sites respectively. Even though companies see the benefits of social media intelligence, with 60.6% of respondents in the process of planning intelligence projects, 21% of companies surveyed are still not harnessing the benefits of social media as a source of valuable insight and intelligence.
More women use social media than men
A survey commissioned by BT of more than 2,000 British people revealed the differences between how men and women use the Internet. The study discovered that more than 50% of female Internet users used social networking platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, whilst only 34% of men surveyed admitted to doing so. In addition, 18% of women believed that they would miss social media websites most if the Internet were to cease exiting, whereas only 7% of men feel the same way. Most men said they would miss the ease of administration online such as web banking most. 13% of men surveyed were more likely to use content-sharing websites, such as Flickr, YouTube and Vimeo, compared to only 6% of women. The survey also revealed that while more women use the Internet for information-gathering and research, such as looking up shopping deals, more men use the Internet to supplement their learning and expand their knowledge.
Facebook’s loss of search engine referrals
Facebook analytics company PageLever has examined the impact ‘Search Plus Your World‘, which Google built to customise results to social networks, has had on traffic referrals to Facebook. Through analysing external referrals from Bing and Google across 500 Facebook pages, each with at least 10,000 likes, PageLever found that traffic referred from Google had dropped by 51% and that traffic referred from Bing had dropped by an even greater 59% year-on-year. Google led 9.25% of external traffic to Facebook pages before the launch of Search Plus Your World, which has since almost halved, leading 4.52% of external traffic to Facebook post-launch. The fall in traffic to Facebook pages from Google search could be due to the diversion of results to rival social network Google+, but this does not explain why Facebook is seeing falling referrals from Bing as well.