With More Mobile Users Will Facebook Ad Revenue Survive Post-IPO?

Posted on May 16, 2012 by

There’s been an awful lot of talk recently about the Facebook IPO and what the future will hold for Mark Zuckerberg’s social creation. While many are sure that the behemoth network will continue to grow and share prices will soar, there are also those who are beginning to see cracks appear that might well lead to some serious problems.

It’s been argued that there is too much tinkering with the original layout and functionality that will cause some users to pack up and leave. The quiet grunts of discontent when Facebook Timelines first reared its head are turning into louder protests with each poll on the issue, and according to some research, 88% of users are concerned about the privacy implications of all the data that Timeline aggregates.

Ad revenues are the lifeblood of Facebook, yet not all companies are that enamoured with the ROI that Facebook has given them. General Motors – one of the three biggest advertisers in the US – is pulling all of its Facebook ads due to lack of effectiveness. But why is this happening?

People primarily use Facebook to ‘hang out’ and interact with friends. You just don’t want to be bombarded with adverts when you’re commenting on a photo or replying to a message, the same way that you don’t want someone to come up to you and reel off a sales pitch while you’ve out for coffee with a friend. Services such as Google’s AdSense have proven to be more affective as it actually targets people who are looking to buy – or at least research – a product.

Another contributing factor to the apparent decline of Facebook’s average revenue per user is the increased access from mobile devices. There simply aren’t any adverts on the mobile apps, so that’s a whole chunk of the target market taken out right there. Facebook even admitted as much during its S-1 filing, by saying that more people were using the mobile apps than originally thought, and revenue was going down.

Please be clear - I don’t see this as the death knell for Facebook – it’s still head and shoulders above the competition in terms of user base and reach. There simply isn’t another service out there that can connect you with as many people and on as many levels as Facebook does. However, everyone thought MySpace was going to rule the world, and then Facebook came along.

So the questions are these… What must Facebook do in order to keep its revenues climbing, and what would need to come along to cause a wholesale exodus from the world’s largest social network?

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Facebook Blog About Privacy Re. 3rd Party Apps

Posted on May 15, 2012 by

In a blog post last Friday, Facebook went into quite some depth about the privacy of your data when it comes to connecting with third-party apps, and when users you are friends with connect with them. You can read the whole entry on the Facebook Privacy blog, but we’ll just cover a couple of points here.

Somewhat worryingly, it appears that even if you remove an app from your profile, they will still have all the data that you initially granted them access to, and they will only delete it if you contact them directly and explicitly ask them to do so. While Facebook can’t help you with this by asking them to delete it for you, they do ensure that apps are contractually obliged to delete data when requested.

However, it’s not just your own actions that you might want to be mindful of, as the Facebook Privacy blog explains:

“Your friend might also want to share the music you “like” on Facebook. If you have made that information public, then the application can access it just like anyone else. But if you’ve shared your likes with just your friends, the application could ask your friend for permission to share them.”

So essentially any information on your own profile that a friend can view is also accessible to any third-party apps that they use. Even though we’ve made this point recently, we’d just like to remind you that while SocialSafe allows you to backup your Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and other social media accounts, we never actually see nor store any of your data. There’s more about this in a separate blog that you can read here.

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Use SocialSafe To Unite Your Social Networks

Posted on May 14, 2012 by

These days more and more of our time is spent online, and an increasing amount of our output is held in the cloud, with social networks accounting for a large proportion of this content.

At times it can be hard to keep track of your various activities, especially when you are connected with an individual on more than one social network. Trying to remember when and indeed where you spoke with someone or received a message or link can be an arduous task.

SocialSafe allows you to unite your social networks, creating a searchable offline journal populated by your Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, LinkedIn and Viadeo accounts. You can select which aspects of each service that you’d like to backup from the cloud, and aggregate all of them into one place that you can browse or search.

For example if you are someone who does a lot of communicating through Twitter, you can search your SocialSafe journal to find all mentions, DMs and tweets to or from a certain person. But say you are connected with someone on Facebook and LinkedIn as well as Twitter, you can simply incorporate those networks into your search parameters within SocialSafe to see all interactions that have previously occurred with that person.

If you were trying to find a particular tweet or Facebook timeline post but you can’t remember who said it or the exact date, it’s as easy as going to the Calendar view in the app and setting a range of dates to then browse all of your activities across your networks to find what you are looking for.

So if you want to unite your social networks, start using SocialSafe now to backup your Facebook Timeline, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Instagram and Viadeo accounts to create a beautiful, searchable, digital journal. You can find out more information about SocialSafe and download the free version on our website.

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Twitter Makes Subtle Changes To UI And Discover Tab

Posted on May 10, 2012 by

The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that there have been some subtle changes to Twitter’s UI in recent days, but if you haven’t, we’ll run through a couple of them now.

The standard Reply/Retweet/Favourite options that used to reside beneath the content of a tweet have vanished from initial view, but simply move the cursor over a tweet and they magically reappear. The top two tweets in the image below illustrate this change to the UI:

twitter UI changes

As you can also see, further information on a tweet such as retweets, favourites, replies etc can again be viewed by clicking on the ‘Expand’ option. If you were wondering about tweets containing media such as photos or videos, Twitter has this to say:

“If the tweet contains media, you’ll also see specific options like “View photo” or “View video”; otherwise, you’ll see the option to “Expand”. You can expand any Tweet in your timeline to see inline context like favorites or retweets from other people, or additional Tweets from that same conversation.”

The driving force behind this for Twitter will be to increase engagement, and having options that appear when a user casually moves their mouse over the screen is one way of grabbing their attention.

There were also some changes to the Discover tab, which do a good job in aggregating tweets about the same news stories so that you don’t have to see scores of updates all containing the same link. You can read more about the Discover tab at TheNextWeb.

What do you think of the changes? Love them? Hate them? Fee free to voice your opinion by leaving a comment below.

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Victory For Washington State AG Over Facebook Scammers

Posted on May 9, 2012 by

Facebook users might well celebrate the outcome of a lawsuit brought by Washington State officials against a US-based advertising firm.

Adscend Media have promised to stop littering news feeds with fraudulent messages that often appear to have been posted by a Facebook user’s friends. The company also agreed to pay $100,000 in attorneys’ fees to put an end to the dispute.

The practice of ‘Likejacking‘ is surely one that you have either seen or succumbed to. Links supposedly posted by Facebook friends generally contain an enticing link such as a funny video or incredible offer. In this case a user would be required to click buttons disguised as age verification checks in order to view the content, when in actual fact the buttons would cause the messages to be posted on a user’s news feed, and then redirect them to the websites of Adscend Media’s customers in order to boost traffic.

The Washington state attorney general brought the charge against Adscend Media in January, claiming that these misleading messages violated the federal law known as CAN-SPAM (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing).

In addition to stopping ‘Likejacking’ and coughing up $100,000 in attorneys’ fees, Adscend Media agreed to regularly monitor its affiliate partners to make sure they are in compliance with the ruling.

So will we start to see less of this practice that fills up everyone’s news feed with ‘offers’ for bogus Tesco vouchers, HCG diet drops and the like? Adscend Media can’t be the only company who have been employing such marketing tactics, but hopefully this will act as a deterrent to others.

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Bouncers Asking To See Facebook Profiles To Verify ID

Posted on May 8, 2012 by

I read an article over the weekend that talked about some bouncers and doormen in the UK requesting people to show them their Facebook accounts on their smartphones as a means of verifying ID.

facebook ID

Defending the actions of bouncers, a bar owner from Folkstone told BBC Newsbeat that because convincing fake IDs are easy to obtain, “checking phones with consent is at least a more certain way.” Really? As if checking a person’s Facebook account on their phone somehow means everything that they have told you about their name and age is gospel?

The fact is, within minutes I could set up a Facebook account under feasibly any name I wanted and set my date of birth to make me older than any legal drinking age in the world. There’s no regulatory body that administers Facebook accounts in the same way that the DVLA and UK Home Office scrutinise the supply of a driver’s licence or a passport.

Also, a common Facebook prank upon finding that a friend has forgotten to sign out is to change their birthday to today, and watch with delight as the well-wishers start posting on that person’s wall in droves. So you don’t even have to create a new profile – just tweak your current one before you go out.

Some people who have been asked to show their phones are puzzled by the fact that they have legitimate ID, yet the bouncers aren’t happy with a driver’s licence or passport. 20 year-old Charlotte Neal had this to say:

“I thought, ‘Hang on, is this really how you’re supposed to check how old I am?’ But I was out and I wanted to get in the club so I just agreed… I do understand why they want to verify it, but at the same time if you’ve got an ID in front of you, why isn’t that good enough?”

Others to voice their concerns over this practice include Nick Pickles, from the campaign group Big Brother Watch, who said:

“Not only is it ridiculous from a security point of view, it’s an affront to the basic rights of people to be able to live their lives in private… If the problem is that people haven’t got good enough quality IDs, then let’s make sure they do have good enough quality IDs. This shouldn’t be an excuse for nightclubs to snoop and pry into people’s private lives.”

Have you ever been asked to show a Facebook account to prove your identity? Do you think that it is an effective method of verifying potentially fake IDs, or is it a breach of personal privacy?

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Yet Another New Facebook Feature – Photo-Filtering

Posted on May 4, 2012 by

This is just a short follow-up on a blog from last month about the lastest Facebook hackathon. We pondered what new ideas might be put into practice during the event and whether or not any of them would ever see the light of day. It turns out that Facebook’s latest feature announced this week was born from one such hackathon.

Facebook Organ Donors came from a hackathon? No, the other new feature this week… Action Links?? No no, the other new feature… Wow, what with the IPO getting a firm date and share prices announced, it’s been somewhat of a busy week for Zuckerberg & co.

The new feature we’re talking about here is a new photo-filter for Facebook‘s non-smartphone app, Facebook for Every Phone. In truth, it’s quite basic and very similar to Instagram, but obviously if you’re a user of Facebook for Every Phone then you probably won’t be able to use Instagram.

Users of Facebook for Every Phone can now apply a Sepia or Grayscale filter to their photos. So maybe this is Facebook’s way of allowing those who aren’t smartphone users to keep up with the Joneses when it comes to posting visual content to their timelines while on the move. Or, it could be a subtle way of getting people hooked on the idea of Instagram, which they will then start to use if/when they get a smartphone.

And who just bought Instagram? Oh yeah, that’s right… It was Facebook.

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New ‘Action Links’ Feature For Facebook

Posted on May 3, 2012 by

The ‘Facebook Organ Donor‘ feature wasn’t the only update to hit the world’s largest social network this week. On Wednesday Facebook announced another way for users to interact with their friends and contacts by rolling out “action links“.

Open Graph apps now have the wherewithal to customise links so that instead of just being able to Like or Comment on a post, users can now take a relevant action depending on the type of content they are seeing. For example, if someone posted a recipe from somewhere that you liked the look of, you can now click “Save this Recipe”, or if someone checks in on FourSquare at a place you’d like to go, you can hit “Save this Place”.

Writing on Facebook’s developer blog, Alex Wyler said this of action links:

“These customizable links provide another way for people to do something within your app when your Open Graph stories appear in news feed, timeline or ticker.”

To me this seems like a good idea. Think of all the times you’ve been scrolling through your news feed – increasingly on a mobile device – and seen something that you’d like to follow-up on, but simply don’t have the time to pursue it there and then. It can be hard remembering all the things you have Liked and who the original poster was, so tracking down that thing you thought was really cool can become increasingly difficult.

With more and more people posting more and more content, trying to find one particular link or photo on Facebook can be like searching for a needle in a haystack. If you’re finding it difficult to keep track of all your various social media activities, use SocialSafe to download your content from numerous services and create a searchable, offline, social journal.

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Jennifer Lopez To Use Twitter To Premiere New Video

Posted on May 2, 2012 by

Video killed the radio star… Twitter killed the video star? Well, not quite, but it seems that social networks and in particular Twitter are fast becoming the weapon of choice for launching and promoting music videos.

Jennifer Lopez has announced that on Thursday she’ll be premiering her new music video “Follow The Leader” exclusively on Twitter. Writing on her Facebook page, Lopez said:

“Become a part of history – follow me @JLo on Thursday for the first ever video premiere of “Follow the Leader” on Twitter. Look for my tweet at 7am PT/10am ET.”

There’s a saying in marketing that goes “fish where the fish are.” In other words, place your product where it will get exposure to the maximum number of people who are likely to react to it or buy it. If more than 6 million people who have actively chosen to follow updates from you is not a rich enough pond to fish in, then I don’t know what is.

It seems that the days of MTV being the place where you would go to to get the first look at an artist’s new video are behind us, with the music channel broadcasting an increasing number of reality TV shows and less actual music. Social media now looks to be the go-to platform for quick, easy, cheap and perhaps more importantly, mass communication with a potential fan-base or marketplace. Is it any wonder that even Presidential candidates are looking online for their ticket to office?

The line between our online and offline persona is becoming increasingly blurred to the point where people can actually display clinical withdrawal symptoms if they are away from their social networks for even as little as a few hours. If your online activities are so much a part of your life that you can’t bear the thought of losing your wall posts, tweets or photos, then make sure that you keep a continuous backup of all your activities.

SocialSafe can backup your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google+ and Viadeo accounts into a searchable offline journal, keeping your treasured online memories safe forever.

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