Facebook’s mobile advertising strategy may have yet to start up properly but the company can feel confident that their mobile sites is experiencing a rapid increase in the amount of traffic directed to mobile apps.
Announcing it on their developer blog, Facebook announced that it sent more than 160 million visitors to mobile apps in April, almost triple the number of visitors it sent back in late February (60 million). These mobile visitors were responsible for more than 1.1 billion visits to mobile apps in the same time frame, increasing from 320 million in late February.
Some of this traffic included social professional network BranchOut which has grown from 1 million monthly active users to over 12.5 million monthly active users 12 weeks after releasing their Facebook integrated mobile web app. Over 18 million people visited BranchOut from Facebook in the past 28 days. On the other side, video sharing site Viddy has grown to over 16 million registered users since it integrated with Facebook.
It was also revealed that seven of the top ten grossing iOS apps and six of the top ten grossing Android apps are integrated with Facebook, highlighting just how much developers of apps like Draw Something and Flixster are relying on the site to increase their audience.
Facebook’s Jonathan Matus said in the post ”As mentioned in previous highlights, features like Single Sign On and Open Graph increase installs, usage, and re-engagement for mobile apps, regardless of whether they are built for iOS, Android or the mobile web.”
When Facebookoffers started rolling out a couple of weeks ago, it didn’t make the huge impact on the industry that many thought that it would. However, it looks like those who didn’t take the feature seriously at first may begin to take notice.
A hotel in Ireland that has been testing the offer has been able to drive over $1 million of revenue in just 24 hours. As you can see from the offer itself, it has been claimed by 27,000 people at £42.50, which comes in well over a million and that number is rising fast. Now it’s important to note that no cash changes hands with these Facebook offers and it is up to the person who has claimed it to show the offer at the hotel in person or on their phone. As a proof of concept for Facebook deals and social commerce in general, this looks like it could be the start of something very, very big.
Viral Distribution
The reason this deal is spreading so fast is because of the huge viral reach of Facebook. I clicked on the deal because I noticed it popping up in my news feed and three of my other Irish friends had done the same. This is how close to 30,000 people have claimed the deal in such a short period of time and it acts in nearly the same way as sponsored stories do on Facebook.
Claiming The Deal
The real beauty of the Facebook offers service is that, unlike Groupon or other deals sites, you don’t have to sign up for anything and all it takes is one click to redeem the offer. The offer gets sent to your email address and to claim it, all you have to do is show up at the hotel and present your phone or print it out in advance. The email that you get looks like this:
Can They Even Handle The Business?
So when you consider that 30,000 people have signed up to claim that deal, that works out at a possible 3,500 people arriving every single month until the deal expires (Dec 31st 2012). That works out at about 850 rooms per week or 100 odd rooms per day from now until the end of the year. I’m guessing the hotel doesn’t have 100 rooms that they can give up daily and while not everybody will claim the deal, this could end up being a serious issue here. What the hotel didn’t realize was that they could cap the deal at a certain amount of people, which given its huge success would probably have been wise.
Social Commerce Has Arrived
This is the start of something really big. At the moment, only select partners can use these deals, but very soon they will be getting rolled out to all Facebook pages. The best part is that (for now) Facebook doesn’t take a cut from the deals as they expect to generate further advertising revenue from people wanting to push their deals to a larger audience. The only worry will be the balance that will need to be struck between having something useful and a news feed full of cheap and nasty deals. It is certainly very exciting though!
When people talk about the big social networks, they often neglect Youtube from the list, even though it is the second biggest search engine in the world and one of the most social sites on the web. It might not be as sexy as Facebook or Twitter, but it is a crucial hub for Google in their efforts to get into social and it has been a relative success since they bought it for $1.5 billion.
The videos on the site are, by their very nature, incredibly social and they get shared everywhere from Facebook, blogs, Twitter, news sites though to Linkedin. They also appear in search results and in recent months, Google has been trying to do everything they can to wrap their Google+ efforts into Youtube. There is one major problem on the horizon for Youtube though and as always, that problem is Facebook.
Frictionless Sharing
Just over six months ago, Facebook introduced frictionless sharing where apps share “actions” like what you are listening to and the movies you watch. It’s still very early days, but it is widely seen as a massive succes with over five billion songs shared on Spotify alone. The ticker also helps viral growth and has helped some of the apps on the platform explode in popularity.
Most people share videos on Facebook by copying a link from Youtube and pasting it onto their Facebook wall. That is the old way of sharing and it is starting to feel very cumbersome and slow. Youtube doesn’t have frictionless sharing and isn’t integrated with Facebook in any way. That is going to cause them a huge problem going forward.
The Competition Is Changing
A whole new breed of video services are starting to come along that are stating to leverage Facebook and its massive audience. Look at what Netflix have achieved with their timeline app integration. Also new services like Socialcam and Viddly are starting to appear more and more often on my timeline through frictionless sharing. These services are absolutely tiny when compared to Youtube, but every single time a friend watches a video on one of them, that video is shared on my news feed. That is massively powerful and negates one of Youtube’s biggest issues: Discovery.
How Big Is The Threat To Youtube?
You only have to look at the Youtube fan page on Facebook – the third biggest in the world with 56 million users – to see how the sites are linked. Sharing videos and Facebook go hand in hand. Open your Facebook feed and at the very least, you’ll certainly see a couple of videos that people have shared. The problem for Youtube is that a whole host of new apps and services will share those videos automatically via the ticker and the world is moving to a place where people don’t want to copy and paste links anymore.
Youtube will, of course, remain a huge destination site, but the simple fact is they rely on Facebook massively as a distribution channel. I don’t think their traffic is going to come under pressure overnight or even this year, but in the long run, they’ll need to integrate with the ticker and become an app on Facebook. The big question is whether Facebook and Google allow that to happen?
Kraft is going all out on their Facebook promotion these days and they have come up with a unique and innovative way of thanking their fans. When they posted the following message a couple of days ago, nobody knew what was going to happen: “”LIKE this post, and you never know what may happen.” Just 48 hours later, they all got their answer as Kraft launched what they called a Likeapella. As they say themselves:
You LIKE a brand and its posts. But does it ever LIKE you back? KRAFT Macaroni & Cheese does. That’s why, with the help of The YellowJackets a capella group, we’re personally thanking our fans who showed us love by “liking” our Facebook posts.
This really is a brilliant stunt and it shows the fans that the brand is listening to them and really cares about what they think rather than just pushing out meaningless branded content. Most of all this is an incredibly shareable piece of content (if you were one of the names on this you would totally post it to your Facebook and Twitter meaning an automatic 4,600 shares) that is going to be picked up by marketing and social media blogs all over the world. It is incredibly smart and we take our hats off to the marketing team behind this, although we have to admit 45 seconds of the video was all we could listen to!
Considering it’s become a massive part of their overall strategy, sponsored stories are slowly beginning to make their way onto the Facebook platform after they were announced at fMC back in February. Now after much waiting, it seems that Facebook is ready to introduce the advertising platform onto mobile if their latest announcement is anything to go by.
On the Facebook studio blog, the company has announced that sponsored stories will now appear on mobile phones and is currently available in all global regions. As there’s over 480 million people accessing Facebook monthly on mobile platforms, it was always a case of when they would get round to introducing sponsored stories. Sponsored stories on mobile are available through Premium on Facebook, which offers distribution on the right hand side of the homepage and in the news feeds on both desktop and mobile platforms.
The fact that’s you can’t purchase Sponsored Stories on mobile separately means that the format will perhaps only be used by the brands who have a bigger advertising budget. Although this pairing isn’t a surprise as Facebook did release a demo app offering examples of how the ads will be displayed on desktop and phone.
Also featured articles have recently appeared in the news feed. The section chooses articles that have been read by your friends and only features those media outlets who have a dedicated Facebook app like Yahoo! News, The Washington Post and The Guardian. Whether there are other factors that contribue to what articles start trending or not is unclear but the number of times an article has been read and which of your friends has read it would be the two obvious factors in determining this.
Anybody who follows the online world closely will notice that the sentiment towards Google as a company has shifted massively in the last six months. Once the darlings of the online world with their quirky offices, brilliant products and “Don’t be evil” motto, it’s suddenly coming under pressure from commentators who were once their biggest supporters. So what has changed? How could a company once so lauded suddenly be coming under pressure from all sides?
There are a number of factors. The biggest is that they are getting bigger and when you get to 20,000 employees, you can still offer free food and portray and image of fun, but the reality is you become focused on growth. Being a public company means you are ultimately answerable to the shareholders and all they really care about is making money. In fact, one of the recent moves that Google has been lambasted for is Larry, Sergey and Eric trying wrestle control of the company back so as they can make more decisions themselves.
If you ask me though the real shift has started to happen with the pressure being heaped on by Facebook. Not only is Facebook starting to dominate the web, but they are also moving into a position where they can start to threaten Google’s core revenue stream: Advertising. Facebook has more info on all of us than Google has and we continue to add to it on a daily basis by telling them our likes, interests, location, friends, brands we like and every other piece of our personal lives. Google didn’t need this information to dominate the web in the early days, but as the internet becomes more social, personal data is becoming more important and Google is increasingly locked out. Enter Google+ which is Google’s hail Mary attempt at getting into the game.
Google On The Back Foot
Google has to be admired for recognizing (albeit slightly late) the threat posed by Facebook and putting such a big team, marketing budget and financial backing into Google+, but it’s too late. The social graph and the social plumbing of the web are already built and they are owned by Facebook. The public just won’t move. The game is over. With Google coming under pressure in this way, they are starting to change their business policy and ethics. They are on the back foot and it is starting to show.
The company is making strange decisions like forcing social into their search results and I haven’t heard one person find those useful yet. They are advertising Google+ on television, which any layman could tell you is not the way to grow a social network. Their “Search Plus Your World” implicitly puts their results ahead of others, penalised Twitter and Facebook and upset the blogosphere. None of these things are moves that Google would have done three or four years ago and this all stems from the pressure they are coming under from Facebook.
In some ways, Google suffer from their own high standards and coming up with the motto “Don’t Be Evil”. I certainly don’t think they are evil and I think like most companies, they are well meaning about 90 per cent of the time, but they will test the limits to gain a competitive advantage. Facebook is a master of pushing the line between gathering private data and not upsetting users. They constantly get called out, but they pull it back just as the press backlash gets really bad. This adds more pressure to Google and in a desperate attempt to catch up, they are starting to make sloppy mistakes and upsetting people. If anything, this is only going to get worse as Google continues to lose at social and Facebook continues to invade their properties even further.
In preparation for its forthcoming IPO, Facebook will be listing its shares on the Nasdaq Stock Market, the waiting period for entry into one of the best known stock indexes factored in as a negotiating point when Facebook was considering its options, Bloomberg reports.
According to a person with direct knowledge on the matter said that Facebook had decided to list on the second-biggest U.S. stock exchange back in April 5th. Eight days later, Nasdaq shortened the time a company must be listed on a ‘recognised market’ before becoming eligible for the Nasdaq-100.
Before the rule change, it used to be at least two years before a company could be made eligible, or one if a stock would be among the top 25 shares in the index by market value. Now this ’seasoning period’ has been reduced from at least one year to three months. Facebook had confirmed this week that it would be listing on Nasdaq instead of the New York Stock Exchange, the same time the rule change was implemented. The change also applied to the Nasdaq Financial-100 Index and Nasdaq Biotechnology Index.
Facebook’s IPO is expected to happen in May, but Venturebeat is saying that, after analysing the major stocks over the past month, there’s a very real possibility that this will be delayed. It cites that the majority of tech stocks have experienced a 15-30 per cent drop over the last month, coinciding with the major markets experiencing a drop in stock prices too. The consensus is that unless there’s recently IPO’d stocks in the tech sector rise drastically very soon, the chances of seeing a Facebook IPO in May is very slim.
To be honest, although having the IPO happening sooner would mean more revenue coming in for the rest of the year – a drop in profits for Q1 2012 could suggest that it might lean towards this approach – it could potentially do more harm than good if it launches during what’s a turbulent period. The massive hype that has surrounded Facebook’s IPO since was first announced could give them an immediate boost in revenue, but that may be short lived if the markets continue to decline.
One of those rumours that emerges every now and again is that Facebook is working on a specialised smartphone. The latest one was said to be in development last year and was codenamed Buffy, which the company was developing in partnership with technology manufacturer HTC. However it seems that these rumours will come to an end as the company prepares to release its first specialised smartphone in the third quarter of 2012 at the earliest.
Digitimes is now reporting that this customised smartphone is being developed by HTC and is aiming for a Q3 release, according to industry insiders. The smartphone will run on a modified version of Android, but is naturally expected to make the social network the centre of its experience. The platform will be exclusive to Facebook and will enable and integrate all functions available on the social networking site.
HTC used to develop smartphone with Google when they released their first generation smartphones, the Nexus One. However, Google then switched over to Samsung as its primary production partner for the launch of its second and third own-brand smartphones.
The development is being led by Facebook’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Bret Taylor and the site is in a stronger position with regards to mobile than it was last year when the project was first announced. For one, the site has access to a number of different apps and features thanks to its open graph service. Also the purchase of Instagram would helps the site develop its mobile strategy and even improve its native mobile site.
Back in November, a Facebook spokesperson told AllThingsD that:
“Our mobile strategy is simple: We think every mobile device is better if it is deeply social. We’re working across the entire mobile industry; with operators, hardware, manufacturers, OS providers, and application developers to bring powerful social experiences to more people around the world”
This philosophy hasn’t changed over the last few months and Facebook mobile strategy is increasing in importance, for both smartphone apps on iOS and Android as well as the development of their own smartphone brand.
After Smart Argentina fitted a car into 140 characters and created a scrolling cartoon using only tweets, it was perhaps inevitable that other brands would try to recreate what is an inspired and creative idea. It turns out that the next logical step is to create a similar campaign on Facebook and take advantage of what is by far a more visual medium.
By using the photo viewer, Volkswagen Ticari Araç has created a photo album which doubles up as a flipbook. By clicking onto the album and holding down the ‘right’ button on the keyboard, you can watch the Ticari Araç drive through a desert and urban area, creating a never ending loop. With 200 photos in the album (the max amount of photos Facebook allows per album), you’ll scroll through it a lot faster than you’d expect, but it’s such a simple idea and it lends itself to Facebook so well, you have to wonder how it’s taken so long for someone to come up with this idea.
Either way, it’s a brilliant advertisement and an original way of getting a message out there. No doubt many other brands will start coming up with their own versions and those who want to see it for themselves can find it here.
After recently purchasing a number of patents from IBM, Facebook has further strengthened its stance after striking a deal with Microsoft to purchase a portion of the patent portfolio it acquired from AOL recently for $550 million.
Microsoft only recently purchased 925 patents and patent applications from AOL as well as a license to AOL’s remaining patent portfolio, which contains around 300 additional patents that were not for sale. The agreement today means that Facebook will obtain ownership of approximately 650 AOL patents and patent applications, as well as a license to the patents and applications that Microsoft will purchase and own.
Microsoft will still own roughly 275 AOL patents and applications, a license to the 650 AOL patents and applications that Facebook now owns and a license to approximately 300 patents that AOL did not sell in its patents auction originally.
In a announcement made on the Facebook site, the executive vice president and general counsel of Microsoft Brad Smith said that the deal “enables us to recoup half of our costs while achieving our goals from the AOL auction.”
The spending spree from Facebook comes after Yahoo! sued Facebook for 10 patent infringement back in March. The move is a case of Facebook wanting to cement their position and ensure that a similar scenario won’t occur in the future. Their upcoming IPO, which could see the company valued up to $100 billion, is also a reason for the purchases; the additional patents may make investors feel reassured if they want to buy shares from the company.
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Facebook’s mobile advertising strategy may have yet to start up properly but the company can feel confident that their mobile sites is experiencing a rapid increase in the amount of traffic directed to mobile apps.
