We Are Social's Monday Mashup #57
Spending on Facebook ads projected to grow hugely in 2011
A survey from eMarketer found that American marketers will spend over $3 billion advertising on social networking sites this year, a 55% increase year-on-year from 2011. The vast majority of that money will be spent with Facebook – the company is projected to bring in $2.2 billion of revenue from advertising in America alone this year.
But what’s more interesting is how much revenues are projected to grow in the rest of the world this year. As the graph shows, they are forecast to almost triple this year – and that’s where Facebook will really be bringing in far more money than ever before.
Twitter ad revenues also to explode this year
With the introduction of Promoted Tweets, Twitter started to properly monetise the site in 2010, and this has paid off with the projected figures for 2011 forecasting a tripling in ad revenues this year, and a first foray into the international market.
The graph shows a projected growth of over 400% between 2010 and 2012, which is very healthy indeed. As the graph below shows, Twitter’s revenues will still be far smaller than Facebook’s, but within a couple of years, it will be pulling in more ad dollars than MySpace – very healthy indeed!
Female bloggers are the new tastemakers
The female cosmetics industry is incredibly valuable (it’s worth $7 billion a year in the US alone) and it’s interesting to see just how influential bloggers are – according to a survey, 80% of women use blogs as a resource for beauty product recommendations. The telling conclusion from the study is that although women like free samples and discounts, the single biggest factor which makes women choose beauty products, is a recommendation from a friend or a blogger – showing just how influential an important blogger can be.
The internet makes people more social
There has long been a portrayal of active internet users sitting hunched in a dark bedroom rather than leaving the house or doing things with friends. New research from Pew firmly disproves this theory – according to their findings, four out of five internet users are part of a group in the real world, compared with only 56% for non-internet users. Whilst one could put this down to older people not using the internet and also not going out, that argument is disproved in that the more social people are on the internet, the more likely they are to be part of a real-life group: those who are in a group rise to 82% among social network users and 85% among Twitter users. In short, there’s no getting away from it – using the internet makes us more social.
Twitter focuses on global expansion for growth
According to Forbes, Twitter has 200 million registered accounts, who post over 110 million tweets a day – an increase from 95 million tweets a day in December, but hardly explosive growth. To counteract this, Twitter is trying to expand internationally – this week it launched in Korean, a sensible choice seeing as there had been a ten-fold increase in Korean users in the last year, with a 3400% increase in tweets. Expect to see Twitter launch in more languages in the months ahead.
Qype integrates Facebook Places
Qype has updated its Facebook app with Places functionality. With the ability to see where your friend’s have checked in – as well as who else is at different venues – it may well make choosing where to go easier…
Let’s buy MySpace
Adam Noakes, an online marketing strategist, has a big new idea. Following in the footsteps of myfootballclub, which managed to buy a football club through multiple investment from many users, Noakes is now trying to get the money together to buy MySpace – with his campaign called Let’s Buy MySpace. The trouble is, although MySpace is struggling, trying to buy an international website with millions of users is a little different from buying Ebbsfleet Town. Aside from anything else, myfootballclub struggled to raise even hundreds of thousands of pounds – with MySpace worth tens, if not hundreds of millions, it’s going to takes a lot of contributions to get the money together to buy it. It makes sense to be upset at how MySpace has gone downhill – but buying it, would only be the first stage – we just can’t see this working on any level.
US Army launches social media handbook
The US Army has launched a new social media handbook, with guidance for its soldiers on matters like privacy settings and turning geo-tagging off on smartphones. Unfortunately it doesn’t tell them how to play Farmville, which would be far more entertaining…
How social media has transformed protests
Clifford Singer wrote a very interesting article for The Guardian about how social media has transformed protests. There wasn’t quite the use of social media we were expecting in the General Election last year, but the cuts from the new government have sparked a lot of protests – and these protests have been backed up exceptionally well by social media. As well as real-time maps of where the police are, it’s been interesting to see protests planned day-to-day on Twitter and Facebook – and Singer is correct that social media, has allowed students to give two sides of every story.
Unilever gets involved in Facebook-commerce
Unilever has started selling products through the Dove Facebook page. It’s big rival P&G had already done this and it isn’t a great surprise to see it follow suit. What is interesting however, is how the store is Amazon branded – giving an easy user experience, which is very useful for a company with limited retail experience.
ASOS to launch a fully-stocked Facebook shop
The two problems with the Dove model is that first it still involves leaving Facebook, and second, only some products are listed on the page (although this can easily be changed). ASOS aim to do the whole thing better – they’re launching a fully-stocked shop on Facebook, and with people paying directly through the page, they’ll be able to easily monitor how successful the page is.
MTV aim to make Skins first a social hit, then a TV hit
MTV usually promote their programmes first on TV, and then once they air, they try and push them through social media channels. With the launch of Skins in America, they did things a little differently: rather than promoting it on TV, they promoted it on social channels. It brought about some impressive results:
Skins already counts over 5 million video streams and 700k unique views on the Skins.tv community site, while @skinsTV on Twitter has over 8,000 followers as of the morning before its debut. The show has also counted about 36,000 Facebook “likes” has 2,500 follows on Tumblr. In comparison, a week after it first aired, the network’s Jersey Shore had 1,500 Facebook fans and its other scripted show, RJ Berger had just 3,000 Facebook fans, and 5,000 Twitter followers.
Heineken’s tie-in with Foursquare
Heineken this week launched a tie-in with Foursquare, where by checking in at a bar or club which sells Heineken, users can redeem points they earn for tickets to concerts and parties. About Foursquare made the very salient point that this represents a big moment for Foursquare: “one of the biggest challenges for Foursquare is finding a way to work with companies that sell their product across a wide variety of businesses, but don’t have their own locations where they can offer specials”. This method – which is sure to be picked up by other brands – is one way to solve that problem.
Small Aussie town pledges to change name in return for Facebook ‘likes’
Speed, a little known town in Australia, has pledged to change it’s name to SpeedKills if enough people like its Facebook page. The campaign, run together with the Australian Transport Action Committee, has been highly effective. It asked for 10,000 likes to change the name – it got those on the day of launch, and currently stands at 27,125. Impressive stuff.
Expedia to give customers control of its Australian Facebook page
In what is a very cool competition, Expedia is to appoint several interim administrators to run its Australian Facebook page during February. With a $10,000 prize for the best administrator, there’ll probably be some great work going on by whoever gets chosen – and the exposure from the competition should also help to grow the page.
What’s your lamest excuse?
Eurostar have recently launched a new competition, “The Lamest Excuse”, where wannabe travellers can upload a 60 second video of their lamest excuse for wanting to explore one of Eurostar’s destinations, with those with the lamest excuse during each two-week window winning a pair of tickets.
A shooting on Oxford Street? Well, not quite…
Twitter was alive on Wednesday with talk of a shooting on Oxford Street in London. Fortunately, Exquisite Tweets put a lovely timeline together showing how it was all just a big mix-up.
The Pope is against fake social media profiles
In his annual World Communications Day message, the Pope has spoken of the danger of fake social media profiles – suggesting that ‘enclosing oneself in a sort of parallel existence’ is a very bad idea. He also warned against measures of false measures of influence (like Klout, one presumes):
We must be aware that the truth which we long to share does not derive its worth from its ‘popularity’ or from the amount of attention it receives