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facebook addiction or merely an obsession?

Are you addicted to facebook? Have you shared and liked yourself into obsession? A recent study by comScore, shows that social networking is one of the top online activities worldwide, with facebook dominating minutes of use.

The recent comScore report finds social networking accounts for 1 in 5 minutes spent online. Facebook dominates consuming 3 out of 4 social networking minutes. A complimentary copy of the report, is available from comScore at: http://www.comscore.com/it_is_a_social_world

According to the comScore study:

• One in every five minutes online minutes is spent on the social web
• Three out of every four minutes on the social web is spent on facebook
• Twitter grew by 59% over the past year in terms of number of users
• Twitter usage trends along with events of national significance or of pop culture interest
• People spent 35% more time on social networking sites this year (2011) than last year

“The emergence and widespread global adoption of social networks has vastly influenced human interaction on an individual, community and larger societal level, and underscores the convergence of the online and offline worlds,” said Linda Boland Abraham, comScore CMO and EVP of global development.”

“Regardless of geography, social networks are weaving themselves ever more intricately into the fabric of the digital experience, opening a world of new opportunity for business and technology.”

The most popular social networking site by a good margin was facebook, which was incredibly visited by over 50% of all web users in the world based on analysis of October data. Twitter now reaches about 10% of off web users worldwide.

Broad smartphone adoption is driving social activity online with the study citing nearly 40% of users access the social web via smartphone.

See video featuring Adam Faulk of Mashable reviewing some of the comScore study highlights:

UPDATE: 2 Jan 2012 – Relavent YouTube Video from 2009 with interviews from facebook addicts

Are you Addicted to Facebook?

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facebook business boost program

Facebook is promoting it’s Business Boost program in partnership with the National Federation of Independent Business and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The Business Boost program is expected  to be rolled out in efforts to promote facebook marketing solutions to small US business. According to facebook, the Business Boost program will  to invest, educate, and connect with small businesses. Like LinkedIn hosting a town hall style meeting with President Obama, it appears that facebook too wants to take an active, visible role in stimulating the US economy and, let’s not be naive, drive advertising revenue.

Facebook references $10M in their Facebook Marketing Solutions - Business Boost  program page . If you think about how many Google AdSense users opened their Google Adsense accounts in the last 90 days using any one of a gazillion available coupons offered by Google ranging from $25 to over $100 of free advertising to get started, $10M doesn’t seem like that much (like 200k $50 coupons that Google probably does honors each month).

What makes the facebook Business Boost program unique is their partnering with National Federation of Independent Business and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to roll out the program as well as tying it to some of the national economic stimulus sentiment. I think the PR around this campaign if brilliant in targeting it to “American Small Business Owners”  who facebook references as the “backbone of the largest economy in the world, and at Facebook, we’re excited about helping you grow.”

The Benefits

facebook business boost program benefits

Another aspect of the facebook business boost program that is interesting is that facebook appears to be taking a more hands on approach, claiming to engage with small businesses directly by ”hitting the road to meet small businesses like yours, so please join us when we’re in town. We’d like to share with you the benefits of using Facebook for marketing your business.”  The Business Boost page indicates that schedules with and locations will be ”coming soon.”

The facebook approach of using roadshows to promote its Business Boost program could be unique if they extend beyond the obvious urban centers (NY, LA, Miami, Chicago, etc.). Hopefully facebook roadshows cover tier 2 markets such as Albany, NY area but not sure if population centers of ~1M or less are going to get any real focus from facebook in efforts to engage small businesses. We’ll see.

As a small business, why not take the $50 (minimum, hopefully some of us get more) test drive using the facebook Business Boost program? You have nothing to lose and conversions to gain! With an audience of 800M users, you can’t beat the reach and targeting opportunities that the facebook self-serve advertising program brings, with the exception of Google that is. just bear in mind that one is an audience in social context while the other is an audience in search context. By what the hay, free is free!

Maybe you’ve noticed on one of your recent facebook logins that there’s been some changes, most notably to the news feed status share feature which has been updated by facebook. You’ll notice some new buttons across the top of the news feed status share window. I’ve created a quick tour based on the one that is now being offered by facebook to its users to introduce the new share feature.

For those readers here that always forego the book to wait for the movie, this new facebook share feature tour video is dedicated to you:

The tour covers three aspects the new facebook share feature:

The first feature of the new facebook share is the ability to tag other facebook users. In fact, users can click this button to add tags of your friends or anyone else on facebook. Adding a tag instantly creates a link to the person’s profile and may share your post with their friends. This is similar in concept and application to how you could tag friends in status updates and comments in the previous facebook share. You might have experienced where facebook would type ahead matching names in your facebook network when typing status or comments.

The second feature of the new facebook share allows users to add location information to their facebook status. In essence, enabling facebook users to geo-code their status updates. Using this new location-based share feature, users can easily share what city or neighborhood they’re in with each post, or share a particular place, like an attraction, business, park or pub.

The third feature of the new facebook share enables users to manage privacy settings of their status at an individual status-level right where they post without having to navigate to another page to set or reset privacy settings. Users can choose who sees their status updates, photos and profile information using the inline audience selector when you share. If mistakes need to be corrected after sharing, users can change the privacy settings using this new feature.

Facebook positions its new share feature as a user benefit by proving privacy controls closer to the front line, where users share information and content, claiming to simplify the user experience and management of privacy settings.

Facebook users will also notice that the new facebook share feature does not include the share link capability that existed in the prior facebook share functionality. If you’re a frequent link poster on facebook like many of us are, this is probably the first thing that you noticed even, before the facebook tour was offered.

Now, if a user wants to post a link using the new facebook share, they must post the link in the body of the status update and then facebook will interpret that as a link as facebook deems appropriate when displaying in the news feeds of other facebook users and in your profile.

The optimist in me says that there could be interesting applications of associating location and people tagging right in the context of a facebook status update while also setting privacy at a post-level right from the share interface. The pessimist in me however, says that facebook is pushing this functionality on users to drive tighter control over link
sharing in an effort to combat link spam which no doubt plagues many facebook users impacting their personal facebook experience.

Regardless of the driver for the new share feature, users were not asked by facebook whether or not they wanted to adopt this new feature so therefore the only logical choice is to not use facebook if you don’t like the new share feature, or at least not share anything else on facebook (don’t bet on it!).

eBiz ROI is interested in your feedback of whether or not the new facebook share feature has been rolled out to your facebook profile and if so what you think of it so far. It will be interesting to see how users adopt and use the new share features. It will also be interesting to see whether or not facebook sharing, in aggregate, is positively or negatively impacted by this new “sharing enhancement”.

As always, if you have any questions about facebook and how to use it to effectively promote your business online, you can contact an eBiz ROI, Inc. representative at sales@eBizROI.com, +1 (518) 557-3052 or online at www.eBizROI.com. We look forward to hearing from you.

Facebook like buttons are a great mechanism for sharing your content with friends, family, prospects and clients. What many may not know is that businesses without a facebook fan page can still benefit from having a Facebook like button and on their business website and associated with their content.

The reason that all businesses should have a Facebook like button on their website is quite simple really.
With over 750 million active users on facebook today (source: http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics ) and widespread adoption of facebook by many US-based Internet users, facebook like buttons make the ideal mechanism to enable your website visitors to share content with their friends, all with very little effort.

According to facebook (see above reference), at the time of this writing, on average, each facebook user has 130 facebook friends. A facebook like button enables any facebook user who visits your website to simply click the like button and without any further action, share a link to your website, with a rich text snippet generated by facebook, with all their facebook friends, which, as previously mentioned, is on average 130 other people. The friends of the facebook like button clicker will see a link to your content in their facebook newsfeed. Given that the average facebook user logs in once every other day on average, there is a good chance that by adding a facebook like button collocated with your content will result in broad distribution and visibility, all with little effort or cost. Pretty cool! Now that Facebook has surpassed Google as the most visited site from US Internet users, businesses should take note.

Integrating a Facebook like button into your website could not be easier. Simply go to the following webpage: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/ and enter a few fields in the create a button form , then click create code to generate the html code to place on your website.

The following video demonstrates how just how quick and easy it is to integrate a facebook like button into your website, all in under 4 minutes. This educational video does assume a basic working knowledge of html, but if you prefer, this kind of effort can be outsourced for ~$100. (pst… eBiz ROI can do this for you

If you’d be interested in learning more about how adding a Facebook like button to your website can add significant benefits and ROI to your Internet marketing investments, we encourage you to contact eBiz ROI to find out how easy and affordable it is to install a Facebook like button on your business website.

Setting up a Facebook page as a Facebook user is a required pre-requisite for setting up a Facebook company page use to build a Facebook fan base that can be nurtured into brand loyalists and outspoken advocates of your company and brand. With over 600 million Facebook users, businesses that ignore Facebook are at a disadvantage to their competition that likely is on Facebook.

Instead of creating a video from scratch, embed below for your knowledge enrichment, is a popular YouTube video from Keith Dougherty of www.keithdougherty.com.

Now that you have created your Facebook Page and associated Facebook user account, you are now able to create your Free Facebook Company Page using the Facebook account just created.

Stay tuned for a follow-up post on how to build a Facebook Company page. If you would like assistance with setting up a company page for your business, contact eBiz ROI, Inc. today at + 1 (518) 557-3502 or email us at sales@ebizroi.com