Although he delayed it as long as he could, on Wednesday 1st February 2012, Facebook Founder & CEO Mark Zuckerburg filed their S-1 Documents[1] disclosing the company’s plans to seek $5 Billion ahead of an I.P.O.(Initial Public Offering) which will beat Google’s 2004 offering to become the world’s largest initial public offering of an Internet company. Facebook stocks, & those of companies with even miniscule associations to Facebook went, “soaring in trading”[2].

The release of their S-1 Documents revealed interesting information about Facebook’s business operations. Most of the Social Network’s revenue is generated from advertising & associated fees, their payment infrastructure enables users to buy virtual and digital goods from their Platform developers. Of the $3.71 Billion[1] revenue generated in 2011, $445 million was made through virtual goods sold by Zynga Games who account for approximately 12% of Facebook’s revenue with Facebook taking 30% of all Virtual Goods sold by Zynga Games, such as FarmVille and CityVille.

Facebook’s public offering will make it a public company, enabling anyone to buy shares in the company. Though this means huge amounts of cashflow for the company to further their visions, it also means monetising the company which could compromise Mark Zucherburg’s idealistic & user based approach to running the pioneer social network. Just as Apple challenged Microsoft for Software supremacy, Facebook now challenges Google for Internet supremacy. To strengthen this challenge, they will have to begin to split focus as their users, who have always been at the fore of their business and who form the basis of the business value proposition will now become the product of their business, firstly, and secondly the shareholders will now also need to see returns on their investments.

The company is expected to be listed on New York Stock Exchange or the Nasdaq in a few months and investors from around the world will be watching eagerly to see how this long awaited listing performs. Internet advertisers will be looking to see what this does to the performance of their ads, especially in comparison to long dominant Google.

References:
[1]: http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000119312512034517/d287954ds1.htm
[2]: http://mashable.com/2012/02/02/facebook-ipo-tech-stocks/

As 2011 draws to a close, Facebook published Memology 2011, a list of statistics regarding global topics, trends and cultural phenomena. These statistics are generated and compiled from the over 800 million Facebook user’s status updates. The top 10 global topics identified by Facebook, quite accurately represents the media highlights of 2011. However, the top 10 global topics make it clear that the majority of Facebook users reside in the USA, with ‘Packers win the Super Bowl’ being the 2nd most popular global topic of 2011.

Quite understandably, especially from the perspective of the United States, the top global topic of 2011 was the death of Osama bin Laden. The deaths of Apple’s Steve Jobs and singer Amy Winehouse were the 5th and 7th most popular topics respectively and Charlie Sheen’s antics landed him as the 4th most popular global topic on Facebook in 2011. The Royal Wedding of Kate Middleton and Prince William, which happened in April, is at position 6. The massively popular Call of Duty game franchise, was the 8th most talked about global topic of 2011 with the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. Other topics in the top 10 include: ‘Casey Anthony found not guilty’, ‘Military operations begin in Libya’ and ‘Hurricane Irene’.

Facebook also provides country specific status trends of 2011 (you can take a look by following the second link below). Unfortunately South African topics are not provided (I am sure the Rugby World Cup would have featured in one form or another). Some interesting status trends from other countries include: UK Riots (United Kingdom), Skrillex (Canada), Planking and Skrillex (Australia), UFC and Slipknot (Brasil).

2011 has certainly been an exciting, tragic and strange year for the 3rd rock from the sun.

Learn more about Social Media Marketing

Links:
http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=10150391956652131
http://www.facebook.com/facebook?sk=app_271705986210152

Why are companies with Facebook profiles on the hunt for more “Likes”?
It could be one of the following reasons or in most cases all of them:
To gain more social media fans, to gain brand exposure, to position their brands in the eyes of the consumers, and ultimately to effectively utilise this medium to run competitions and promotions.
As the Social Media Expert at SAbest it intrigues me as to why Facebook users do not want to like a Company or Brand on Facebook. I did some research to see why and what expectations people have when they do interact with a Company or Brand socially.

There are various reasons why Facebook fans don’t “Like” a Company on Facebook:

• 54% don’t want to be bombarded with messages or ads,
• 45% don’t want to give any companies access to personal profile information,
• 29% don’t want companies to contact them through Facebook,
• 23% don’t see the benefit of it,
• 4% don’t understand what it means to “Like” a company.

If a Facebook fan likes your Company page, it is very important to observe that they do so with an expectation. People don’t just “Like” every page on Facebook, they “Like” it for a reason. Fans like Company pages to gain access to exclusive content, events, sales or promotions.

47% of users “Like” a page to receive updates about the company, persons or organisation in their newsfeed. 26% want to interact with the page owner. The survey also shows that only 24% want to be contacted through other social media channels such as Twitter once they have interacted with a company on Facebook. 37% do not expect anything to happen.

Media such as photos and videos always perform well on Facebook. It grabs attention in newsfeeds and it is easy to share.

Just ask. People like to interact with each other so ask for those opinions on topics, and if you want your fans to share favourite content, go ahead – ask them.

One of a fan’s expectations is that the page owners will thank them for their replies and for sharing their opinions. From time to time, talk about things other than your products. Wish them happy holidays. Ask them fun questions or to share their personal stories.

Remember, if a fan likes your page; interact with them, because it’s one of the biggest expectations any Facebook Fan has.

Location based social gaming has been gaining a lot of momentum and this is apparent when you look at the big boys starting to through their weight behind it. But for does of you that don’t know what location based social games are. Simply put social gaming refers to social interaction by playing games. Location based social gaming is just the next step which incorporates your location as part of the game.

The top players in this field are Foursquare and Gowalla, which have dominated this sector. Foursquare is probably the biggest and best known of the two with the most users. In essence they work very similar except for a few small differences in the interface. But how does it work. Well watch the video below about Foursquare.

So basically what it amounts to is you earn rewards by achieving some goals set out in the platform such as checking in on a boat or checking into more than 3 place in one day etc. You then compete with your friends and you can also see where they have been.

You might understand the appeal of this but it is making such big waves that even Facebook have now implemented location check in’s. Although the big difference between platforms such as Foursquare and Facebook is in Facebook you don’t earn anything by checking in. While Foursquare has a fun game style approach to location based check in’s which rewards you with badges for checking in. Facebook plays on the social factor and your reward is your friends reacting on where you check in.

The future of these are still to be seen and there are a lot of privacy concerns around it as it is believed that these platforms can be used to identify where you are and maliciously use the information but for the moment people are enjoying it. I for one check in using Facebook, Foursquare and Gowalla although I still haven’t found it overly exciting. This might casue me to loose interest if they don’t adapt their platform to keep it fresh. I know of several users how have become bored with it and as such aren’t using it anymore. Hope you found this info useful and feel free to leave some comments below.

After visiting search engine strategies London this past week there was a clear and increased interest in Social Media at the conference. So we thought it would be good to discuss how you should integrate social media into your business.  Before we can do this though we need to help you understand what social media is.

Well this isn’t as clear-cut as you might think as social media has been confused as being certain social platforms used to generate social media. For instance when you mention social media most people immediately think Twitter or Facebook. While both of these are social media platforms social media is not just about the platforms users use to generate social media.

Social media is seen as media that is social in nature. Thus generated by people and not only by corporations, as was the case in early stages of the Web’s existence. This description form Wikipedia sums up Social Media quite well for me – “Social media is content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies.”.

This means that any platform that allows users to publish information online is social. Even Wikipedia’s 3,202,005 articles, which have mostly been generated by the public, is a form of social media.

So now that you have an idea of what social media entails would you consider the following example as a form of social media? A UK based online bank has taken customer ratings made online and started posting it in it’s offline advertising on underground trains. Is this still social media or has it become traditional media?

Customer ratings are a form of social media that most companies don’t even recognize as being social. For a lot of companies this might be a customer service agent on it’s own as it encourages people to buy products by using comments gauge if a product will suite them. In the same manner this may discourage customers from buying a product that doesn’t meet there needs. Because customers don’t buy product that will fulfill their needs it indirectly lowers after sales customers support.

So now that you have an idea of what social media is we will show why you should be implementing it in your business and who it will benefit your business. Our next post will be on why you should be implementing social media in you company.