Tag: Facebook

Oreo Pride cookie receives 250,000 likes on Facebook

In celebration of LGBT Pride Month, Nabisco owned cookie brand Oreo posted an image of a rainbow coloured cookie on its Facebook page earlier this week, with the caption “Proudly support love!”. An incredibly simple, but yet smart move to generate a lot of buzz. The image has currently generated 256,000 likes, 47,000 comments and 81,000 shares. The image was also tweeted and has been retweeted 3,100 times at the moment.

Oreo Pride cookie

Of course, this is a calculated move by Oreo and they are certainly aware that the image will stir up some controversy. Some media reports are talking about boycotts against Oreo, but that news angle seems grossly exaggerated. In fact, most comments seem to be supportive, so digging up a few negative comments just seems sensationalist on the part of the traditional media.

A few boycott pages have been launched on Facebook but they have about 20-30 likes, so in comparison with the quarter of a million likes and more than 80,000 shares, it is nothing.

It is a bold move and by the looks of it, Oreo is getting deserved praise for it.

Are young Australians getting bored with Facebook?

The recent IPO of social network giant Facebook is as most of you know, not going too well. The stock has dropped considerably during its first days of trading, which is also negatively affecting other listed social media brands such as Zynga. To add insult to injury, a new report from Australia reveals that young people who are on social networks are spending less time on them in 2012 than they did a year before. Average time spent on Facebook is lower this year than it was in 2011. Furthermore, more social network users predict they will decrease time spent on social media in the near future.

The report called The 2012 Yellow Social Media Report has surveyed Australian consumers and business to understand how they use social media. The figures below indicate that the two age groups that are the most frequent users of social networks (14-19 and 20-29), have already decreased their usage and feel they need to decrease even more.

australia-social-networks-graph

The overall numbers also show that average time spent on social networks by Austalians is far less in 2012 than in 2011.

australia-social-networks-time-spent

This is of course not a good sign for Facebook. Of course, total time spent on Facebook could still increase, but as markets mature and penetration levels out, it is vital that the average time spent on the site is not decreasing. It would be interesting to see if the pattern from Australia can be observed also in other countries. If you know of any more surveys, please post it in the comments.

Another interesting statistic from the survey is that among users age 20-29 in Australia, the smart phone is now the number one device for accessing the social networks.

australia-social-networks device used access internet

Full report here in pdf. Bonus stat: 5% of social media users access social media on the toilet.

Predicting the Eurovision Song Contest with Facebook likes

On the Eurovision.tv page, each of the participants in the Eurovision Song Contest is presented with videos, images and more. Readers can share each participant’s page on social networks such as Facebook. In an attempt to predict the outcome of the first semi-final I have looked at how many times each country page has been shared on Facebook and how many times each official video has been viewed.

russia eurovison song contest photo: Thomas Hanses (EBU)

The overall score shows that Russia and Cyprus are huge favourites, while Switzerland and Belgium may not make it to the final. Late tonight, we will see how accurate these predictions are (I am aware that it is not fool proof, since you are not allowed to vote for your own country for example).

Facebook likes.

Russia: 3300
Cyprus: 2700
Greece: 2400
Romania: 2400
Ireland: 1500
Albania: 1400
Iceland: 1300
Finland: 1200
Moldova: 1000
Austria: 984
Hungary: 942
Denmark: 884
Latvia: 871
Israel: 827
Montenegro: 773
Switzerland: 629
San Marino: 553
Belgium: 275

YouTube views:

Russia: 2189000
Cyprus: 1673000
Greece: 629000
Romania: 603000
Montenegro: 598000
Albania: 464000
Austria: 454000
Iceland: 449000
Ireland: 405000
Israel: 306000
Finland: 302000
Latvia: 269000
San Marino: 258000
Hungary: 254000
Belgium: 247000
Denmark: 236000
Moldova: 183000
Switzerland: 161000

Overall rank, Facebook and YouTube:

Russia: 1
Cyprus: 2
Greece: 3
Romania: 4
Albania: 5
Ireland: 6
Iceland: 7
Austria: 8
Finland: 9
Montenegro: 10
Israel: 11
Latvia: 12
Hungary: 13
Moldova: 14
Denmark: 15
San Marino: 16
Belgium: 17
Switzerland: 18

Countries placed 1-10 will make it to the final, 11-18 are out of the competition.

Lawyers use Facebook to serve court claim

People move, but their Facebook profiles stay the same. So if you are a lawyer that need to serve a court claim to an individual, Facebook may just be a good alternative to sending a letter. A lawyer at the law firm Stephenson Harwood has convinced the High Court in the UK to let him serve a court claim via Facebook to an individual that they could not locate the postal address of.

Jenni Jenkins, an associate at the law firm Memery Crystal, commented:

“The courts recognise the increasing power of social networking sites like Facebook. It’s all very well serving proceedings at a last known residential address, but people move house all the time. Your email or Facebook account moves with you.

“If a claimant can identify the defendant from their photo and establish that the Facebook account is active, this is a perfectly sensible way of serving a claim and giving the defendant an opportunity to respond.”

There are two key elements that make this practice possible. First, that you are able to convince the court that you have found the right Facebook profile and that it is active. Second, that this person lets anyone send him or her messages on Facebook (this is something that you manage in your security settings on Facebook).

Facebook is really becoming the number one means of connecting people with each other.

Facebook is driving more traffic to Pinterest than to Instagram

There’s been a lot of buzz lately about the new social media darling Pinterest. The online pinboard is growing quickly and according to a new report from Compete, Pinterest is also driving a lot of traffic to other social networks. People are sharing images and videos on Pinterest which in turn drive traffic to sites like Facebook. According to the State of Social Media report from Compete, Pinterest delivered 1.7 million visits to Facebook in November 2011, an increase by 62%. As a comparison, that is almost double the amount of referrals from an established site like Yellowpages.com.

In this social ecosystem, social networks in turn drive traffic back to Pinterest. It is quite interesting to see that Facebook is already driving more traffic to Pinterest than to Instagram (0.16% share vs 0.06%). And this was before it was announced in January that Pinterest was among the sites that could start auto-update to the Facebook timeline, which possibly means that more images are now shared on Facebook than in November.

visits-from-facebook

Twitter on the other hand is still driving more referrals to Instagram than to Pinterest.

visits-from-twitter

The difference between how Facebook and Twitter drive referrals to Pinterest and Instagram is interesting. I don’t have an explanation to why this is, but one theory could be that the demographics of Pinterest users better match Facebook users while Instagram users are more like Twitter users. Says TechCrunch:

“Unlike most web startups, Pinterest’s core user base is not the typical early adopter set from the west and east coasts of the United States. While the Pacific and North East regions contained the most Pinterest users in May, now its strongholds are in the East South Central and West North Central States, such as Kansas, Missouri, Minnesota, and Mississippi.”

According to TechCrunch, a large portion of Pinterest users in the US are 18-34 year old upper income women from the American heartland which may explain why some of the more popular categories on Pinterest are food, pets, hair & beauty and travel.

Another explanation can of course be that Instagram mainly is an app and that its web presence is not very good. When you click on an Instagram photo there’s hardly no way to get that user to keep on browsing on the site. You can’t even click on my name and explore more of my photos, so visits to www.instagr.am is not at all encouraged. On Twitter, Instagram photos are viewable within the site and in for example TweetDeck (but I don’t know if that counts as a “visit”).

Also, a tiny but important detail. When you tweet a photo from Pinterest, it doesn’t include the caption in the tweet, which might reduce the willingness to push the send button. Fix that, and I am sure more people will share pinned images on Twitter.

Note: Swedish readers may want to read this story about how Pinterest is driving millions of visits to a blogger.

Socialbakers Facebook report for Sweden – Jan 2012

Just like in the last report (Nov 2011) from Socialbakers, the Body Shop is the brand page in Sweden with the highest level of engagement. OKQ8 is the page with the highes response rate, followed by two Telia pages. In fact, half of the top 10 pages in regards to response rate, are telecom operators.

Vakna! med the Voice is the media page with most fans.

socialbakers-facebook-stats-sweden-jan-2012

In case you are missing a page that would qualify in the top 10 lists above, please suggest it here.