What is Facebook’s ‘People Talking About This?’
From ‘People Talking About This’ defined @ InsideFacebook.com:
People Talking About This is the number of unique users who have created a “story” about a page in a seven-day period. On Facebook, stories are items that display in News Feed. Users create stories when they:
- like a page
- post on the page wall
- like a post
- comment on a post
- share a post
- answer a question
- RSVP to a page’s event
- mention the page in a post
- tag the page in a photo
- check in at a place
- share a check-in deal
- like a check-in deal
- write a recommendation
Whenever a person takes one of these actions, it counts toward People Talking About This.
AddThis: Facebook most often used to share content
AddThis is a widely used social bookmarking service. They've recently published an infographic with some of the most striking trends in sharing over 2011.
Timeline of the most shared events in 2011
Some highlights:
- Facebook makes up 52.1% of sharing on the web
- Twitter makes up 13.5% of sharing (still less than email, print and favorites) but grows 576.9%. In Japan, Twitter makes up 52% of sharing.
- Tumblr sharing grows by 1299.5% and is accelerating
- Address bar sharing creates 1600% viral lift.
ComScore: In Belgium 93% of online population uses social media
In their annual report global management firm comScore released some striking stats on the penetration and usage of social media platforms throughout the world.
Regardless of how open or closed a society may be, it is safe to assume that more than half of local online populations are engaging in online social networking, making the practice comparatively ubiquitous around the world.
In Europe, for example, 98% of the online population in the U.K. is active on social networks.
Further reading:
- It’s a Social World: Top 10 Need-to-Knows About Social Networking and Where It’s Headed @ comscore.com
- ComScore’s 2011 Social Report: Facebook Leading, Microblogging Growing, World Connecting @ techcrunch.com
Top 10 Belgian Google+ Pages
Czech tech start-up ZoomSphere just published detailed statistics for major social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus or LinkedIn. They also compile the rankings of the most popular sites for each country. It's still too early to draw any conclusions - especially if being "circled" by a few hundred Google+ users already lands you in the Belgian Top10. But it's interesting to see how mainly geeky topics get most attention on Google+.
By the way: if you're on Google+, make sure to check out Conversity.be Google+ Page, sharing information, best practices and news about businesses and organisations on Google+.
Google+ Belgian Top 10 pages
Source: ZoomSphere - local social statistics for Belgium.
- Mobile internet provider Mobile Vikings
- Community based Linux Enterprise Computing Centos
- Daily electro, industrial music news magazine Side-Line Magazine
- United Nations Information Centre Pretoria (in South Africa)
- Open source content management framework Drupal
- Site francophone d'information en BelgiqueLesoir.be
- Travels, pictures and experiences website TravelWithUs.be
- Terminal based IRC client for UNIX systems Irssi
- iPhone info site belgium-iphone.lesoir.be
- caregraphic // graphiste web & print
Facebook Belgian Top 10 pages
For the sake of completion: ZoomSphere also has a top 10 of Belgian Facebook Pages. I left out Ferrero Rocher (is Italian) and MPokora from the list (he's French). And here, too, Jean-Claude Van Damme is the top Belgian brand on Facebook in terms of Likes.
- Actor/director Jean-Claude Van Damme
- I Love Techno festival
- Cartoon character TinTin
- Shoppingville.be's Shoppen Page
- Tomorrowland festival
- Brewery Stella Artois
- Jewellery/watches Ice Watch
- Stand-up comedian Philippe Geubels
- Actor and comedian Benoît Poelvoorde
- D&B producer and dj Netsky
Study: Facebook friends are your age and from where you live
There are currently 721 million active Facebook users (more than 10% of the global population), with 69 billion friendships among them. The Laboratory for Web Algorithmics of the Università degli Studi di Milano just published a study of how these friends' age distribute. In short: Facebook users tend to have friends of about the same age, a pattern that holds true even for users aged 60.
Chart from Marketingscharts.com:
Data from the study indicates that Facebook friends are also very locally clustered, with 84% of all connections being between users in the same country.
Also from the research: the median friend count on Facebook is 100, while the average friend count is 190 - which is awfully close to Dunbar's number.
5 Belgian Facebook Pages worth looking at
Sometimes it's hard to distinguish whether a Fan Page is linked to a Belgian company, product or service. But based on our own metrics, these are the Top Pop charts for today.
Most liked Belgian page: Tomorrowland
Tomorrowland is a Belgian outdoor dancing event (festival) organised every year in the Flemish town of Boom since 2005. This year's edition was from 22nd to 24 July. Over two months later after the event, Tomorrowland's Facebook Page is relatively speaking the most lively page of this moment with a daily change of over 1,000 new Likes and an impressive total of 273,240 fans. It's Tickets iFrame tab, however, is no longer accessible for most Facebook users because it's using a http connection instead, which got depreciated by Facebook recently over (safer) https connection.
It will be interesting to see how an event like Tomorrowland will keep its Fans' attention up until the next edition in July 2012, but so far they're doing a really good job.
Belgian page with the least growth: Van Vlees En Bloed
Van Vlees en Bloed was a Flemish television series, broadcasted at één between 1 January and 12 February 2009. The last Wall Post at the Van Vlees En Bloed's Facebook Page (a picture from the cast) was posted during that period, at 23 January 2009. Although the Page still has a whopping 118,462 fans, the amount of daily likes for this Page has dropped significantly over the past few weeks and months.
If a TV series becomes popular, unofficial Facebook Pages will pop up and force the TV Channel to either start their own or take over the grassroots one. But even for Van Vlees En Bloed, the "long tail" of a tv series clashes with Facebook's EdgeRank algorhythm. If a Facebook Page doesn't keep updating, it falls off the radar of its fans.
Belgian breakthrough page: BASE Belgium
BASE is a telephony services and broadband internet brand operated by KPN Group Belgium. Although in sheer numbers BASE Belgium's Facebook Page's posts does not receive a lot of likes, it does see a consistent 1% daily growth in its amount of "likes". BASE Belgium's Facebook Page got launched in April 2011 and currently has 6,834 fans.
Most popular non-branded Belgian Facebook Page: Shoppen
The Facebook Page Shoppen (the Dutch verb for "shopping") is one of Belgium's most popular Facebook Pages that is not linked to a brand (whether it's a personal brand, or a product/service). It is linked to fashion, beauty and lifestyle site/blog http://www.shoppingville.be and offers a mix of Dutch and English spoken pointers to its partners' content outside Facebook - mostly e-commerce sites that sell fashion brands.
And the most engaged fans belong to... JCVD
Although the "Muscles From Brussels" does have an international fan base, Jean-Claude Van Damme's Facebook Page still holds the number one spot in the Belgian Fan Page hitparade. Not only does he have the largest fan base (865,928 fans and counting!) they're among the most active ones, too. His most recent post against animal cruelty got over 3,000 Likes.
Facebook for business: traffic to site most prominent KPI
Custom fan page designers Pagemodo conducted a survey among small business owners who were using Facebook as a marketing and revenue generation channel. The results show that, while only half of respondents use Facebook, a significant number of users report increased revenue as a result.
Highlights from the survey:
- 47% of SME owners said their Facebook pages are pushing a significant amount of traffic to their websites.
- 48% reported that a portion of the traffic converts into customers.
Businesses that use Facebook for business engage in the following activities:
Social is gaining share in referrals
From Study Gives Insight Into Content Discovery Trends Across the Web’s Leading Publishers @ blog.outbrain.com:
Currently, search methods [...] send the largest slice of referral traffic to content. Links from publisher sites make up 31% of referral traffic to content pages [...], portal homepages (AOL.com, Yahoo.com, MSN.com) account for 17% of traffic, and finally, social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Fark.com, reddit, Digg) send 11% of traffic to content pages.
What kind of content do people share online?
This infograph says it all:
Download a high-res PDF of the report: Content Discovery and Engagement Report, Q1 2011 (.pdf)
You are what you share: 10 new generation Facebook Apps
One of this week's Facebook updates, the Timeline, has a major impact on how Facebook Apps will have to help Facebook users to define themselves through what they are doing - inside and outside of the Facebook environment:
Express who you are through all the things that you do -- the music you love, the recipes you enjoy, the runs you take, and more. Learn how to add apps to your timeline at http://www.facebook.com/about/timeline.
If you want to know what the future of digital identity and peer recommendation looks like, have a look at these ten new generation Facebook Apps that go beyond the “like”. Most of them are entertainment based, implying that your taste and activities with regard to movies, music, art and more. With these apps, you're no longer just “liking” a song or web video, but “listening to” or “watching” it. This way, your online and offline entertainment activities
- display your tastes and thus define who you are, and
- feeds peer recommendations to your “social graph” (viz. your Facebook friends and subscribers)
New generation Facebook Apps:
- Artfinder (178 monthly users): add your favourite artworks from Artfinder to your Facebook profiles and connect with their friends around art online.
- Cinemur (1,768 monthly users): Showcase movies/documentaries/comedies/... as you watch them and discover new movies based on what your friends are watching.
- Deezer (635,862 monthly users): by integrating with Facebook Platform, Deezer has built a social music experience that makes it easy for people to share their taste in music with friends. Warning: Deezer's music services are not yet available in Belgium yet.
- Mixcloud (286,101monthly active users) and Soundcloud (1,358,844
monthly active users) : both part of Facebook Platform, which allows them to have users upload and comment on radio shows, DJ mixes or podcasts (Mixcloud) or tracks that are on SoundCloud.com and timed comments on them (Soundcloud) right in your Facebook profile. - Myvideo (in German - 32,170 monthly users) and Dailymotion (in French – 63,189 monthly users): Discover new videos based on what your friends are watching.
- Spotify (4,151,457 monthly users): as you listen to music on Spotify, your Timeline will populate with your listens, as well as your top albums, playlists and artists.
- The Guardian (138,950 monthly users): once you add The Guardian app to your Timeline and turn sharing on, you can broadcast the articles you read to your Timeline.
- The Independent: Recently Read allows people on Facebook and on the Independent site to discover the articles their friends are reading, By opting into the Recently Read Facebook application on any article on The Independent site, articles that people have read will be posted to Facebook for their friends to discover and interact with in real time. People can control what articles become part of their profile directly from the application, and also on Facebook.
Most effective auto-posting apps for Facebook Pages
From Study: Auto-Posting to Facebook Decreases Likes and Comments by 70% @ insidefacebook.com
Many companies, public figures, organizations, and news outlets (including our own) use auto-posting apps to create Facebook Page updates by syndicating their Twitter posts or converting their blog post headlines. This increases efficiency by relieving the admins of these accounts from having to copy and paste headlines and links from one platform to another.
Facebook, however, depreciates third party applications over manual posting. According to a recent study by edgerankchecker.com, engagement ratio overall drops at least 70% per post. Check this infograph for an overview of popular auto-posting apps:
[Update] From Management Tools From Having Posts Hidden in News Feeds @ insidefacebook.com
We’ve now learned that Facebook maintains a secret whitelist of companies that are exempt from having content posted through their publishers consolidated across different Pages and clients. This protects them from a reduction in news feed impressions. The whitelist includes some top enterprise Page management tools from the Preferred Developer Consultant program including Buddy Media, Vitrue, Involver, Context Optional and Syncapse. Facebook has forbidden those included from discussing the existence of the whitelist. Facebook has confirmed with us that “trusted partners” are having their posts treated differently.