Facebook Adds “Social Context” Metric For Advertisers

Yesterday, Facebook began displaying a new metric for advertisers called “Social Context”, which “tells you the percentage of your ad’s impressions where the viewer saw at least one friend who liked your Page, event, application, or ad.” It’s a valuable metric, however based on our tests, the correlation between a high “social context” and high click through rates are strong, yet not perfect. For example, we were able to find ad campaigns which had very low social context, but extremely high click through rates due to effective targeting.

Facebook has let Page administrators (as well as event admins and application developers) target the friends of those people who are already “connected” to their Page, event, or application when creating ads for a while now. You can do so by using the connection targeting when creating ads, as pictured in the image below.

For example, at AllFacebook, we could develop a set of ads which targets the friends of all those people who are connected to AllFacebook.com. If we promote something that’s on Facebook, there will be a “Like” link and a list of the user’s names included since we decided to take advantage of Facebook’s connections feature. We can then develop ad copy which takes advantage of this feature and looks to improve the performance of those advertisements since we know their friends are listed below.

While “social context” has mixed results, leveraging copy that takes advantage of the social aspect of the ads will most likely increase performance. This could be effectively determined through some basic split testing, however we’ll wait to post the results until after we perform a more exhaustive study of this new metric. Nielsen has already performed their own analysis and have concluded that “social context” (having a user’s friends’ names included) boosts ad recall by 10 percent, awareness by 4 percent, and purchase intent by 2 percent.

While we personally don’t measure our own ads based on “awareness” and “ad recall”, we’ll now be able to more effectively determine how social context impacts overall ad performance.

This article is published by AllFacebook, click here to read the original article.

Mobile Twitter Use Explodes

Mobile usage of the Twitter social network has increased more than 60% in the past five months, according to data from Twitter.

Mobile Twitter Usage Grows
The total number of mobile Twitter users grew 62% between April and September 2010, according to statistics compiled by Twitter. In addition, since that time, the number of Twitter users who start out using Twitter via mobile device has risen from 5% to 16%. Furthermore, close to half (46%) of all Twitter users at least occasionally access the network via mobile device.

Twitter cites its April 2010 purchase of the Tweetie iPhone application, which it turned into the Twitter for iPhone app, as the catalyst for this explosive growth. In addition, Twitter has partnered with mobile OEM RIM on a BlackBerry app and also developed an Android app since that time.

Twitter.com Remains Top App
Tracking log-ins by unique Twitter visitors in the past 30 days, Twitter finds that the main Twitter.com site is still by far the most popular Twitter application, used by 78% of visitors (percentages add up to more than 100% because a single visitor may use multiple log-in methods).

The mobile m.twitter.com site followed with 14% usage. Other popular mobile means of accessing Twitter included SMS and Twitter for iPhone (8% each) and Twitter for BlackBerry (7%).

Mobile Website, SMS Beat Smartphones
As this data shows, while smartphone clients are important, there are even more people who use the mobile Twitter web site and/or SMS for mobile Twitter access. In addition, third-party clients continue to play an important role for many people, with what Twitter terms a “disproportionate” amount of the traffic from Twitter running through such tools.

Smartphones Drive Twitter Adoption in US and Europe
An analysis of Twitter usage via mobile for the six mobile markets currently reported by comScore (U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Spain and Italy) revealed that Twitter is gaining adoption among smartphone users.

In the US, 8.3% of smartphone users (4.2 million people) accessed Twitter.com in a month via the browser on their mobile devices, outpacing each of the European markets. In Europe, 2.8% of smartphone users overall accessed Twitter.com (1.7 million users), with the UK experiencing the strongest penetration in the region at 5.8%, followed by Germany with 3.1% and France with 2.1%.

This article is published by marketingcharts.com, click here to read the original article.

A Collection of Social Network Stats for 2010

Stats are important –but on their own, they don’t tell us much
Stats on social networks are important, but don’t rely on them alone. Data is like fire, it can be used for good and bad, proper insight and analysis is always required. Beyond that, you’ll often see conflicting stats across the industry as everyone has different methodologies, as a result, this listing will help you to see the greater trends –not numbers without context.

How to interpret stats
Numbers don’t tell us much without insight and interpretation, in fact, you’re going to see conflicting numbers of usage from many of the agencies and social networks themselves. The key is to look at trend movements, don’t focus on the specific numbers but the changes to them over time. Put more weight on active unique users in the last 30 days vs overall registered, in fact, the actual active conversion rate will often range from 10-40% of actual users sticking around and using the social network, so don’t be fooled by puffed numbers. No single metric is a good indicator, you have to evaluate the usage from multiple dimensions, so you also have to factor in what are users doing, time on site, interaction, and of course, did they end up buying, recommending products, or improving their lives.

This article is published by web-strategist, click here to read the whole article.

Facebook Will Remove Sidebar Boxes From Facebook Pages

Facebook has confirmed that the removal of the boxes tab is a sweeping change that will see the disappearance of all profile boxes on the left-hand side of Facebook Pages.

A Facebook spokeswoman told AllFacebook.com: “These boxes will be removed, just as they will be from profiles, and so the page owners will need to move that info to the info page or a custom tab.”

The changes are to take effect the week commencing August 23, along with a new tab width limit if 520 pixels. However, the Facebook Developer Blog and Developer Roadmap were not explicit on the details, so we asked Facebook for some clarification.

This article is published by AllFacebook, click here to get more information and some examples and read the original article.