Facebook is making a big push into the tracking space – both in terms of tracking user data, and now in terms of tracking users’ movements. Today, Facebook announced that it purchased Moves, a fitness tracking app that records daily activities using smartphone. The goal, of course, is to record more data and to continue to target users in increasingly specific ways to make consumers’ lives more quantifiable – as well as to provide advertisers with a much wider range of ways of serving ads to specific instances. For now, Facebook intends to keep the apps independent much like it presently does with Instagram and Whatsapp. Nonetheless, it presents Facebook with the way to continually store increasingly personal data about its users.
Tag: Facebook
Facebook Launches FB Newswire
In its attempt to become the one ubiquitous homepage for the Internet, Facebook is pandering to news networks in its latest creation, Facebook Newswire. In cooperation with Storyful, FB Newswire promises journalists a constantly updating repository of realtime breaking, trending news stories. And with Storyful in cooperation, journalists can be sure that these trending stories are actually verified. The Newswire will collect “newsworthy” stories being shared across the network publically – including media like photos, videos, and status updates from places where stories are breaking. As Facebook looks to position itself against Twitter as the place to go for breaking stories and trending topics, the Newswire will attempt to lure journalists away from the now-traditional breaking news center that many consider Twitter to be.
Facebook To Debut Ad Network
In what comes as little surprise to those who have been watching Facebook’s general trend towards advertising, Facebook will announce a full fledged Mobile Ad network at its F8 developer conference in San Francisco at the end of this month. The goal, of course, is to get publishers and developers to leverage the social network’s giant database of user information for the purpose of expanding ad reach more broadly. Now, Facebook will be able to make money off of its users beyond the confines of the Facebook platform. Facebook’s been trying out different models for different types of ad networks, but with $1.24 billion in mobile ads generated in the last three months of 2013, it’s clear that Facebook understands that it’s going to need this network to move forward financially. It’s also going to allow mobile advertisers to market to mobile phone users in an extremely granular fashion, in the very near future.
Facebook Forces Users To Use Messenger
Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp threw Facebook’s proprietary Messenger app into question on many different levels, but now we know that Facebook wants to keep its in-house app around – at least for the foreseeable future. The company is doing this by forcing its users to send messages exclusively through the Messenger app by eliminating the chat features from the traditional Facebook app; that is, in two weeks time, anyone who wants to send a Facebook message on their cell phones will need to download the separate message app. The messages tab in the main app will redirect users to the other app. It will allow Facebook to build its Messenger app out even more, adding deeper features like stickers, gifs, and video sharing, pushing branding and native messaging advertising out through the app and onto the customers.
India Becomes Facebook’s Biggest Market
As far as the number of active users is concerned, India is pushing to overtake the U.S. as Facebook’s biggest market. As of march 31, there are over 100 million active users in the country, whose increasing population of mobile phone subscribers means that Facebook can aspire to get into those phones in the near future. Though India might become Facebook’s biggest market, getting money out of those users is always a challenge, as large user markets aren’t always the biggest drivers of revenue. That said, Facebook’s push to increase revenue in user markets outside of the US has yielded a revenue per user increase of $2.14, chiefly powered by 33% growth in Europe and 17% rise in Asia. And as access to the network continues to be dominated by mobile users globally, the push to break the 1 billion mark in India, in conjunction with smartphone use rise, means that Facebook will be focusing much of its ad spend – its lead driver of revenue – through mobile platforms and markets.
Facebook’s Wide Video Ads Finally Debut
Facebook is finally rolling out its video ads to a larger group of advertisers – in a wide format to try to directly compete with the TV ads. The 15 second “premium” video ads will play automatically when a user rolls past them, and if users click on the ads sound will start playing and the ad will expand. Facebook is ensuring that good, well-targeted ads work in users’ feeds by working with Ace Metrix, a response measurement tool that feeds Facebook information about user engagement potential via the ad’s creative, before it appears on Facebook, to weed out bad ads. Facebook wouldn’t say if there are any plans for specific campaigns, but this news today is one of the final moments before the social network launches the ad network after having dawdled for several years; the news first broke in 2012 that Facebook would launch video ads, and only now is it properly coming to fruition. Facebook is pitching video ads at $1 million per day for one of four broad demographics, and all four can be had for $2.4 million.
Facebook Rewards Natural Brand Interplay
Facebook made a subtle, but important change to its product Pages on Tuesday. Pages can now tag other pages in their Facebook posts, which means that brands can extend their reach on Facebook by tagging other brands or pages. For instance, if you don’t “like” a brand like Pepsi, but Pepsi has tagged someone that you do “like,” the Pepsi post will show up in your feed. The sample post was a Bleacher Report piece that tagged Houston Rockets players; though users don’t necessarily like Bleacher Report, if they do like James Harden, the post showed up. The goal here is to reach, and thereafter capture, users they might not have previously had access to.
But Facebook is doing its job of making sure that the cross-pollination is natural. It won’t be allowing Twitter-like tactics of brand interaction and simply hopping onto zeitgeist-y trends for the sake of growth hacking. Facebook is actively discouraging such behavior by punishing brands: the post won’t be seen by those who follow the tagged page if the post isn’t related to the page the brand has tagged. For now, Facebook isn’t showing whether the algorithm is catching the post as unrelated, so brands are going to have to go out of their way to make sure they do the right thing. The moral of the story is: if you want to expand your reach on Facebook through this method, do it right, or Facebook’s algorithms will show you the consequences.
WhatsApp To Add Voice Calls This Year
On the heels of Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp, the popular messaging service announced that it will expand into full-fledged voice calling for both iOS and Android this year. The feature will be available to BlackBerrys and Nokia devices afterwords. According to The Guardian, the voice calling will initially be free, but that will likely be temporary. Messaging is free at first but thereafter requires a $0.99/year subscription, so it’s likely that we’ll see a similar model for voice calling. Whether that will change with an eye to profitability under Facebook, however, remains to be seen. WhatsApp also released a user update: it now has 465 million monthly active users and 330 million daily users – 15 million more monthly users than even Facebook.
Facebook’s Referral Traffic Share Up 48% In Q4 2013
Social discovery and sharing platform Shareaholic released a report looking at referral traffic data from social media sites in Q4 of 2013. Here’s the short of it: Facebook, Pinterest, StumbleUpon, and Google+ all gained, while Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, and LinkedIn lost. But the data says that Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter combine to dominate so much of the Internet’s referral traffic that the numbers don’t actually speak for the other sites in this category – combined, the rest of the sites only had 1% of the total share, so even as their shares jumped around rapidly it’s hard to take those numbers seriously in the big picture. So, for the top three, Facebook’s referral traffic share rose from 10.37% to 15.44%, and Pinterest also rose from 3.68% to 4.79%; Twitter essentially remained level, changing from 1.17% to 1.12%. The takeaway? Facebook, as usual in these sorts of studies, is the real winner, having driven more than twice the referrals of all other platforms combined.
Teens Leaving Facebook? Not So Fast
The general consensus on social media seems to be that teens are running away from Facebook at frightening speeds. According to a new social media study of Q2 through Q4 of 2013 show that Facebook still triumphs over mobile and Instagram for teens. The key is diversity: more users are accessing more social networks across the board than ever before. The reason Facebook looked to be slipping was because of the relative increase in the other social networks, not necessarily because teens were running from their parents. Users, especially teens, are social multitaskers. The notion that teens are abandoning any one network wholesale doesn’t add up; their attention is simply divided and thus gives the impression that they might be leaving. It makes it more challenging for advertisers in particular to target them, but getting the facts straight is the first step to doing so.
