Posts Tagged ‘Facebook’

Shoe brands VANS and Converse along with Starbucks and Skittles were the four fastest growing Facebook brands this week, according to Inside Facebook, a blog that monitors fan pages.

While VANS and Converse may be benefiting from the consolidation of old Facebook fan pages into one main page, Skittles appears to be growing due to a voucher offer which allows registered fans to buy two packets of Skittles for the price of one (BOGOF).

Outside of consumer brands, the top twenty is dominated by pop stars, footballers and social media games. From a British perspective, good to see hit TV programme House, starring Hugh Laurie make an appearance at number 20 with a gain of 65,800 fans following its return to TV screens last week.

The overall rankings for brands’ fans on Facebook looks like this, Starbucks (6.1m) Coca-Cola (5.1m) Skittles (3.9m) Nutella (3.6m)  Pringles (3m).

This week’s fastest risers chart below. Read the rest of this entry »

According to estimates from blog Inside Facebook, revenue for the pre -eminent social network is expected to exceed $1bn in 2010.

Revenues have typically doubled each year, according to the research carried out amongst industry experts, from $150m in 2007, to $300m in 2008 and so on, with advertising revenue from fan pages believed to be the main driver.

2009 is seen as an important transitionary year for the site which grew to more than 350m monthly active users, from 150m at the beginning of the year. Of those, 100m were in the US and another 100m were in Europe - the two markets where brand advertising brings in the most money.

Brand advertising is estimated at $225m for 2010 and Inside Facebook predicts this stream could eventually grow to $20bn, taking share away from more established sites like Yahoo and MySpace. Read the rest of this entry »

Twitter has announced its number of daily status updates or tweets has now passed 50 million, closing in on Facebook’s claimed 60 million.

Announced on its blog, Twitter describes the exponential growth of the service since it began:

“Folks were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007. By 2008, that number was 300,000, and by 2009 it had grown to 2.5 million per day. Tweets grew 1,400% last year to 35 million per day. Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day—that’s an average of 600 tweets per second.”

According to a report by RJ Metrics last month, while Twitter is adding accounts at the rate of 6.2 million per month, only 17 percent of these are active each month.

For those indie-minded old grumps hiding in the home office, like me while the X Factor saga rumbled to its depressing conclusion last night, a last minute hero has emerged.

A self-described stay-at-home mum from Essex, Tracy Morter set up a Facebook group in mid November, proposing ‘Rage against the machine for Christmas No1′

By the magic of Facebook and an alignment of media interest around X Factor, Tracy Morter’s idea may now determine the outcome of the Christmas singles chart.

There are 714K members of the Facebook group at the time of writing and between 250K and 500K purchases of “Killing in the name of” are estimated to be needed to secure the spot. The song is already number one on iTunes.

No wonder Simon Cowell is coming over as a bit cross in interviews about the campaign he describes as ’silly’. With all his TV ratings power, it looks like he’s still no match for a mum with a social media platform. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s that time of year again when hundreds of thousands of children will be tracking Santa’s progress across the world courtesy of NORAD (North American Air Defence Command), a tradition that began in 1955 when calls to a misprinted telephone number in an advertisement for a Colorado store, from children invited to call Santa’s hotline, came through to Colonel Harry Shoup, NORAD’s Director of Operations.

Realising what was afoot, Colonel Shoup had his staff check the radar to see if Santa had started his journey South from the North Pole. Santa was located and a legend born, NORAD using the heat from Rudolph’s nose to track the sleigh.

For 2009, you can track Santa on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and Google Earth as well as visit his elf-staffed manufacturing facility at the North Pole www.noradsanta.org.

On Christmas Eve, Santa’s journey around the world will be revealed on the site. Here’s footage of the route he took last year QG55UH7B4WVA

IKEA launched their new Malmo store via  Facebook this autumn, setting up a profile for the store manager Gordon Gustavsson, who regularly uploaded images from the store. The clever part was that items of furniture were given free to the first person to tag their name to a product in the image. Created by Swedish agency Forsman and Bodenfors

Facebook's future by Holy Taco

Facebook users have conversations with just 4% of their Facebook friends, it was revealed at  The Local Social Summit in London yesterday.

In the  keynote presentation Bernie Hogan of the Oxford Internet Institute argued that Facebook and other large social networks are geared for quantity rather than quality, limiting the development of more meaningful relationships online.

Hogan talked about the potential of social media to introduce friends of friends to each other, but that networks like Facebook were not creating the right contexts for this to happen, failing the test of ‘triadic closure’ where people bond through agreement.

One of the side effects is that we move to other sites to manage different types of relationship, what Hogan describes as “the paradox of convenience, everyone is somewhere, no-one is everywhere.” Read the rest of this entry »