Tag: facebook
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Friday 5 — 2.28.2014
- Pew released a report on the Web at 25 — and how Americans have adopted and are affected by the internet usage. A full 87% of us now use the internet, 90% have cell phones, and 58% have smartphones. And as you can see from the chart above, many report it would be very hard to give some of these behaviors up. Interesting to see that while 71% of Americans online report using Facebook, and 40% do so several times a day, only 11% reported social media would be hard to give up. Hmmm.
- Here’s an unscientific yet thoroughly enjoyable analysis of what people have on their homescreens, as self-reported on Twitter. Lots of texting, news, and social apps win top spots on homescreens, compared to gaming and payment apps.
- Self-confessed map geeks might enjoy browsing Google Maps’ new gallery. Google partners like National Geographic have provided maps and geospatial information which the gallery aims to make more visible and usable. Google sorts them into handy categories, like Historical and Infrastructure and Space.
- Many who shake their heads at Google+ have a soft spot for Hangouts. Today Google released a redesign of Hangouts for iOS, with the ability to attach a map, add animated stickers, and record a short clip. It makes sense that Google would invest more in the product given Facebook’s aggressive move into social messaging with WhatsApp purchase.
- If you think people smile a lots less in Moscow than Sao Paulo, you’d be right — at least according to their selfies. Selfiecity analyzed over 120,000 images from Instagram and found that only about 3-5% of pictures posted were selfies, and that women take far more than men. See the site for more interesting findings, and visualizations by city.
Weekend fun: Getting ready for your Oscar party on Sunday? Challenge your guests to identify every single Best Picture winner from these gorgeous and clever icons designed by Beutler Ink.
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5 lessons from Buzzfeed @ Harvard
Today, BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith spoke to fellows, students, and a few curious onlookers at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center (Storify recap). Listen to the full audio above; below are my top five takeaways from the discussion:
- Headlines definitely matter — and if you’re writing headlines for catchy listicles, be sure to lead with the number. Headlines at BuzzFeed are a collaborative effort among writers and editors, and employ rigorous A/B testing alongside a custom analytics platform and Google Analytics to measure performance. Also, headlines sure look a lot like tweets these days.
- With the right headlines, clicks can be easy to elicit. For optimal social growth, publishers must entice users to share their content. With 75% of traffic referrers from social media, and the bulk of that from Facebook, BuzzFeed has succeeded in creating content compelling enough to drive social sharing.
- BuzzFeed’s partnership with duolingo helps address the challenge of publishing in multiple languages. Duolingo, which recently secured another $20M in series C, gives BuzzFeed a smart algorithm + human equation to scale and boost international growth.
- The viral web can be put to work for serious news as well as cat memes. Smith wrote a compelling piece to this effect in Foreign Policy back in April 2013. Today, Smith cited a recent interview with Shimon Peres and a gimlet-eyed profile of Donald Trump as evidence of serious journalism residing comfortably in the same viral wrapper as lighter fare.
- 99% of success is hiring and retaining amazing people. One example: video innovator and rockstar Ze Frank who built and staffed the BuzzFeed studio in Los Angeles. Great reporters are always hard to find, and competition for the best is getting tougher as both traditional and newly-monetized internet media compete for top talent.
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Friday 5 — 2.21.2014
Facebook forked over $19 billion for WhatsApp, and the internet is full of articles explaining why. Among the most compelling is Buzzfeed’s take that WhatsApp posed a significant threat. WhatsApp is growing fast globally, consumes a great deal of young users’ smartphone time, and fills that critical “staying in touch” niche that Facebook would like to own.- The visual social network Instagram, another Facebook purchase, is looking like it might be living up to its relatively modest $1 billion price tag. Explosive growth and high engagement mean that Instagram is increasingly attractive to brands. It has exceptionally high engagement with affluent, young women — a demographic particularly attractive for retail.
- If you’re an online publisher — and pretty much all brands are these days — you might be interested in Echobox. This analytics package offers data-driven insights about your content’s performance both on site and as shared across social channels. The end result is fewer charts and numbers, and more specific recommendations for your content.
- LinkedIn this week entered the realm of “platisher” — the dreadful coinage for part platform and part publisher — as it opened up its content marketing Influencers program to everyone. Like Medium, LinkedIn will cultivate brand names and high-quality submissions, but sees value in building a broad-based content empire.
- Just where will we wear the internet of things? We’re easing in with wristbands and the stunningly awkward Google Glass, but there’s more to come. Quartz provides a list of body parts likely to be adorned with tech in the near future.
Weekend fun: Jimmy Fallon took over The Tonight Show this week with a celebrity-studded vengeance, but the #hashtag2 performance sealed the deal.
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On jazz hands and ad networks
Everybody is very enamored by Google’s self-driving cars, you know, Google making glasses. That’s all jazz hands. It’s a big, huge distraction. They’re an advertising network. They’re putting a 25 to 50 percent advertising tax on everything created in the world. That’s all their doing. It’s a huge ad network. They’re going to subsume all advertising into their network.
And that’s what Facebook is building. That’s why Sheryl Sandberg, who was at Google and helped build that advertising business, was brought into Facebook by Zuckerberg. It’s to re-create that playbook. They’re all huge advertising marketing firms. All they’re doing is collecting data and then selling it, and they have an interface that’s wildly efficient, wildly efficient — unprecedented in its efficientness. …
— Insightful interview with Jason Calicanis on the digital landscape for brands touches on content marketing, advertising networks, the role of data, and the importance of social media profiles. Read the whole interview on PBS Frontline.
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Friday 5 — 2.14.2014
- Does it seem like you’re spending more time on your smartphone than you used to? If you’re anything like the U.S. digital consumers in this Nielsen survey, you’re spending 9 hours and 52 minutes more each month. Smartphone time spent on social media rose rapidly, with 37% year-over-year growth in use of social media apps. Download the report for useful updates on mobile, social, and streaming behaviors, as well as observations about Hispanic populations on the forefront of the digital curve.
- Facebook is a strong driver of outbound clicks to news sites, and today drives 3.5 times more traffic to Buzzfeed than Google does. But what kind of news stories do Facebook users favor? The Atlantic took a close look, and concluded Facebook users are more likely to click on stories that are more geared toward entertainment, while Twitter or search users seek out breaking news.
- If you create content in any form — words, graphics, photos, multimedia — where do you put it online? Is it your own blog, a social network, a semi-curated platform like Medium, or a full-on edited media site like Slate? As these outlets proliferate and the lines get blurry, it’s worth considering the broad continuum from open platform to publisher.
- You’ve likely heard of bitcoin, an alternative currency created online (“mined” through complex algorithms) now being used as payment for goods and services at places as mainstream as Overstock.com. It got hacked yesterday, to the tune of several million dollars.
- Just in time for Valentine’s Day, Pew this week released a report on couples, the internet, and social media. 45% of younger couples acknowledge the internet’s impact on their relationship — good and bad. Something I never would have guessed: 27% of internet users in a marriage or committed relationship have an email account shared with their partner.
Weekend fun: Are you battling the cold this weekend? Then you might appreciate seeing the Durham Academy head of school announcing a closure with an equal parts painful and adorable cover of Ice, Ice, Baby.
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On death and online culture
As Facebook knows, a digital world raises new problems. To be sure, Facebook made a mistake not considering enough the mortality of those who would use their product. But to be fair, when have inventors or designers ever had to before? Think of other classic American brands—Ford or Coca-Cola, for example—whose products are not so intimately linked with their customers’ fates. Cokes and cars are disposable or easily transferable after death. But Facebook, whose product is your own identity, deals in an individualized item that’s nontransferable after death.
— Alexander Landfair in the Missouri Review, discussing the emerging and problematic ways we acknowledge death through social media
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Friday 5 — 1.31.2014
新年快乐 — or, Happy New Year! Tencent’s WeChat has greeted the year of the horse by allowing users to send lucky money via mobile. This smart marketing move is aimed to inspire transaction among WeChat’s nearly 300 million global active users, and perhaps lure new users drawn by the feature.- In another nod to the increasingly visual nature of social engagement, Twitter has released new mobile photo sharing capabilities this week. It’s a move to keep people in the app, and drive engagement by issuing a reminder to @ mention others when you upload a photo containing people.
- Facebook takes a crack at a “distraction-free” newsreading experience with the launch of Paper. It’s a definite upgrade from its Android Home experience and more like Flipboard — but will it offer too much competition with its own app?
- Blogging is dead — long live collaborative publishing. Medium, the originally invitation-only content platform has announced a $25M round of investment. Medium pays some of its writers to attract quality content, and provides a lovely admin user experience for all. There are still some questions about Medium’s overall direction — how much is it a curated magazine versus a place for all storytellers?
- How do you make sense of all the social media noise to inform the news? CNN and Twitter announced a partnership with a new tool aimed at journalists. Dataminr, a firm better known for financial services products, is shifting to help CNN use algorithms to identify accurate, breaking news stories from Twitter.
Weekend fun: Before all those SuperBowl ads go live on YouTube, amuse yourselves with this penguin dance-off. (h/t The Dodo, my new go-to source for all things animal-related).
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Friday 5 — 1.24.2014
Google knowledge graph, which seeks to represent “real world things and their connections,” surfaces the relevant content you see on Google search results pages, like movie times. This week Google added to their results a short description of websites that are “widely recognized as notable online, when there is enough information to show.” There’s a lot of content creep from destination pages into search results, presumably to keep people on site for ad impressions on the Google domain.- There’s a lot of credit for brands moving fast in social media — here’s a terrific insight on the value of social media restraint for brands. Now that news travels with us everywhere on our mobile devices, there’s a feeding frenzy quality to breaking news. Brands dive in to add context to the news — whether it’s an earthquake or a Bieber peccadillo. This article points out the value in recognizing that just because you can find an angle for your brand, it doesn’t mean you should.
- On February 4, a whole bunch of new generic top level domains (.gTLDs) will go live on the internet. Some feel this is just a clever way to part marketers from their money, with a hefty 185K price tag for each top level domain. Let the land grab begin.
- Every exec who’s ordered an agency team to deliver a viral video should check out this New Yorker piece of research that finds six elements of avidly shared content. They include emotion and an element of social currency that translates into the insider handshake. Miraculously, quality storytelling makes the list: apparently some cat videos are more equal than others.
- What do the Facebook news feed changes mean for brands? The updated algorithms will downplay text posts from brands in favor of more organic visual shares. This shift marks another way the visual web is raising the bar for content creators.
Weekend fun: At the risk of becoming a character in this New Yorker cartoon, I still have to recommend you waste three minutes over the weekend watching this 8-bit version of The Big Lebowski.
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Friday 5 — 1.3.2014
73% of online adults now use social networking sites, per this year-end report from Pew. And more adults are diversifying their online social networking — 42% report using more than one service. Facebook and Instagram boast particularly strong daily engagement. 63% of Facebook users using the site daily, and 40% say they log in multiple times per day.- Facebook itself has released a comprehensive (and highly visual) report for partners with aggregated international and mobile data. After its early bad bet on HTML5, Facebook’s 2012 pivot to mobile has been effective: roughly a third of German, Spanish, French, and Italian mobile phone users using Facebook.
- Reddit released its own 2013 year-end numbers — 56 billion pageviews is impressive, and nearly 16 minutes per visit is staggering. From the top ten threads it’s clear that laughter sells and that Reddit was, for good and for ill, a go-to source in the murkiness around the Boston bombings. One question: With 21% of Canadians on Reddit, why isn’t it a nicer place?
- In the U.S. and frustrated with your internet service? It’s likely you’re paying more and that your internet speed is lagging behind the rest of the developed world. The impact of faster speeds on productivity, the article points out, is the “the difference between thriving and surviving.”
- Wondering how to make sense of all this digital, social, and mobile activity? See this roundup of 2013 digital media scholarship from John Wihbey. One article examines gender and language use on Twitter, and finds that women use higher levels of first person plural and first person singular pronouns, intensifiers, and emoticons in their speech.
Weekend fun: Have 23 minutes to avoid your in-laws if you’re at home or avoid your work if you’re stuck in the office? Try this compilation of ridiculous/hilarious/profane Vine videos.
