2009 will be remembered as the year of social media growth. Recently, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the social network had reached more than 350 Million users. Facebook is not alone, phenomenon like Twitter, Youtube, Linkedin among others have established as a key media component in our daily life.
Taking in consideration the value social networking add to business, entertainment, lifestyle and communication areas: Are users willing to pay to stay connected with friends on sites like Facebook or MySpace? And if they don’t want to pay for any of it, what would they be willing to “give away” in order to keep these sites free?
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Some days back eMarketer released their latest forecast for social networking ad spending. According to them, advertisers will spend $435 million on Facebook this year and $605 million on 2010. Even do these figures implies 39% increase, they are quite below the $1 billion in revenue for 2010 TBI Research’s forecast .
It also interesting to see that Myspace outlook for next year is quite pessimistic. First of all, advertisers will reduce their ad spending from $490 million this year to $385 million. Secondly, their growth outside U.S. market will be close to zero, staying at $25 million
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Since some weeks ago, the music industry looks quite busy due to Christmas single charts competition. In UK, for the last four years the Christmas number one position in the UK Singles Chart has been occupied by the winner of The X Factor TV show. But this year things were different for the successful talent hunting show.
But once again, social networking managed to change the rules of the game in the music industry and driven by thousands of downloads and Facebook group campaigning “Killing in the name” reached number one UK single chart list again.
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Predicting the future is always a rather challenging task. There is one thing about predicting the future….it is so hard to predict.
Mike Elgan makes a great top ten list with the worst predictions by technology pundits for this 2009. Most of them where too vague considering the existing trends happening at the end of this year.
Check the top ten list below
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As Web 2.0 becomes more and more a mainstream media and a essential communication tool for everyone, new segments start entering this space creating disruption. For instance, during the past few months a massive amount of seniors have joined social networking sites like facebook, becoming the fastest growing segment according to Comscore report.
Now social media is becoming a common place for the so-called “digital moms” segment, which is showing a very intensive and unique usage pattern across social media.
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Sharing small pieces of information about your daily life is a key feature of today’s social networking features. From Facebook to Twitter, answering the question about what are you doing is the most important activity done by roughly 500 Million social networkers.
But in the future technology will enable your status updates and other social information to be generated automatically from the enviroment.
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Pingdom released a new study showing the ratio between men and women on top 19 social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, Slashdot, Reddit, Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, FriendFeed, Last.fm, Friendster, LiveJournal, Hi5, Imeem, Ning, Xanga, Classmates.com and Bebo.
The research reveals that women rules the social networking space with a higher proportion of users in most of the sites.
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Some few weeks back my mother, which is 70 years old, started her own Facebook account. As a new social media user it took her sometime before she really understood the concept of social networks, but after three weeks she started uploading pictures, tagging people, commenting on walls (sometimes without distinguishing between walls and direct messages) and increasing her network by adding all our extended family.
Maybe this is good reflection on how Social media sites are becoming a mainstream channel for communication. And in the case of Facebook, it looks like its attracting a bigger amount of old users meanwhile younger users are focusing more on microblogging.
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Oneupweb just came with an exciting study about how we behave on social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Youtube especially when it comes to advertising.
There is a strong belief among analysts that most people don’t look ads when they are on social networking sites. This belief was built some years back when a controversial study so called “banner blindness” reported a growing trend of users ignoring banners. Still, experts haven’t reach consensus about the soundness of this study.
But now with the fast improvement on eye tracking technology is possible to better understand the behavior of users on these sites. Eye Tracking technologies can reveal how user’s attention is allocated across specific Areas Of Interest. Oneupweb used these techniques to investigate how users interact with sponsored ads while conducting search tasks on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
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Is important for companies planning their social media strategy to understand the demographics of social graph, especially in the case of social networking sites like Facebook that are changing their user composition and segment penetration extremely fast.
The last report from Emarketer can give us some interesting new facts about the dramatic change of Facebook’s user groups in the last months.
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