Tag: Facebook

Visits to Facebook fell in Europe – February may be even worse

According to data released yesterday by Nielsen Online, the number of unique visitors in the UK visiting Facebook fell in January. The tremendous growth of the social networking site has come to a halt, and the question is whether this is a temporary hiccup or a sign that the glory days are over.

Nielsen Online says that 8.5 million unique users in Britain spent time on Facebook in January, down from 8.9 million in December. MySpace and Bebo are also seeing declining stats.

Alex Burmaster at Nielsen Online says:
– MySpace peaked in April 2007, with 6.8 million unique users, while Bebo peaked in July with 4.6 million.

The number of unique users also fell slightly in other European countries, but Facebook is still growing in the U.S. However, the numbers for February do not look promising. Not that I trust data from Alexa to be 100% accurate, but a graph of the daily pageviews of Facebook show a dramatic drop during the first days of February, a drop that is in the 20-25% range which is very high. It will be very interesting to study Nielsen’s data for February. [Alexa graph here]

UPDATE: Facebook sees decline in the U.S. as well. According to comScore, Facebook attracted 33.9 million unique visitors in January, 2008, down 2 percent from 34.7 million in December, 2007.

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U2 talk directly to fans on Facebook

I like the way U2 are talking directly to their fans via Facebook. All users that have listed the band as favourites on their Facebook profile got a video message from Bono yesterday. Bono wants to get feedback from fans on a sneak preview from the upcoming re-release of The Joshua Tree album. Bono sings and explains Wave of Sorrow, a previously unreleased song.

By the looks of the clip, even the rest of the band haven’t heard the current version of the song. The interview has a very spontaneous and genuine feel and it is a good example of how to build a hype around the release of an album with a minimal budget.

The video was posted late last night and has already attracted more than 2,000 comments on Facebook.

http://s.ilike.com/swfs/rssPlayer.swf

Update: TechCrunch has more details. “1.2 million fans have signed up specifically to get new U2 news and were notified as soon as the video went up two days ago. So far, over 2,000 fan messages have been left on the video.

This was an experiment, says a representative of the company. No press was notified when the video went live – they wanted to see how fast it spread virally and without any promotion.”

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62% of Facebook users are on MySpace

Read/Write Web has some interesting statistics from Rapleaf about Facebook users compared to users of five social networking sites on the OpenSocial platform. Turns out that 62% of Facebook users are on MySpace. Other intersting stats include:

– The greatest overlap between OpenSocial container sites exists between Myspace and Hi5, in which 43% of Hi5 users also use Myspace.

– Facebook users are 63% female and 36% male whereas the sites integrated with the OpenSocial platform are 61% female and 38% male.

– 52% of Facebook users are 18-25, whereas 40% of the users are 18-25 for the five container sites on the OpenSocial platform.

– Facebook users tend to use 2.9 major social networking sites on average whereas users of OpenSocial container sites tend to use 2.7 major social networking sites.

It was quite interesting to see that Facebook and Plaxo users are far more often also users of the other social networks listed in the research, than MySpace users. Although MySpace users on average are using 2.4 major social networking sites, they are not keen on using Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendster, Plaxo or Hi5 (see graph below).

Read the graph like this: the horizontal axis are users of the respective site, the graph shows how many percent of them are also using other social networks. 20% of Plaxo users are also on Facebook for example.

So does that mean that you can cover most Facebook users if you are on the OpenSocial platform? I don’t know, you would probably need to ask whether or not they are really active or just passive members.

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Locking in articles about social networks is crazy

The Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet has been very successful in attracting visitors to its website. Aftonbladet.se is Sweden’s second largest website, second only to MSN.se. It was one of the first papers (although not the first) to take blogging seriously, both with their own blog service and the acquisition of the blog portal Bloggportalen.se. But when other major media sites like the New York Times are unlocking content that was previously subscription only, Aftonbladet.se has chosen the opposite direction.

“What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYTimes.com. These indirect readers, unable to get access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.

“What wasn’t anticipated was the explosion in how much of our traffic would be generated by Google, by Yahoo and some others,” Ms. Schiller said.”

Today, Anders Westgårdh writes a column on Aftonbladet.se in which he states that Facebook is a fad that will soon disappear. Quite obviously, this is the kind of article that readers would blog about, comment, post to social networks etc etc which will attract new readers. But the article is behind a pay wall so none of that will happen.

Sure, its just one article, but to me it indicates that Aftonbladet is determined not to follow the path of the New York Times and the others. Personally I am not convinced that it is the correct thing to do, but then again I don’t have access to Aftonbladet’s site statistics.

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Join the Media Culpa group on Facebook

media-culpa Just a quick note to those who might be interested. Media Culpa now has its own Facebook group and you are more than welcome to join and discuss how digital media affect traditional media and public relations. Posts have so far just been in Swedish but the aim is to expand the dialogue to English as well. Welcome.

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Add Media Culpa as a widget to Facebook or your blog

At Widgetbox.com it is pretty easy to turn your blog into a widget that readers can install on their MySpace/Facebook profile or to their own blog. Media Culpa’s widget can be seen above. To add it to your profile or blog, just visit Widgetbox to get the code.

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