Facebook Facts For Marketers

Little known facts about Facebook - 

• Facebook is the most visited website in the world
• Facebook serves 570 billion page views per month
• There are more than 1.2 billion facebook users across globe
• There are more photos on Facebook than all other photo sites combined (including sites like Flickr)
• United States has the highest number of facebook users in the world with more than 180 million users - followed by India at 2nd position with approx 88 million users
• More than 3 billion photos are uploaded every month.
• Monaco is the only country in the world which has every person above 14 yrs on facebook
• Facebook’s systems serve 1.2 million photos per second. 
• China - world's most populated country - with more than 40% internet penetration has an overall facebook base of 0.05% only
• India's facebook population is more than UKs overall population
• More than 25 billion pieces of content (status updates, comments, etc) are shared every month.
• With more than 53% Facebook user penetration, US has the highest population of facebook users - where as, India has only 5% facebook penetration and is nwar half of US facebook population
• Facebook has more than 30,000 servers (and this number is from last year!)

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Like Page Option Upon Sharing

I shared a link from Economic Times recently and found that sharing threw an option of suggesting to Like the page - "Want to see more from The Economic Times? Like Page"

I did little bit of google and found out that there are certain web publishers who have this feature.
Its definitely an excellent way to get more likes, for free

One thing I couldn't find out yet -
How do I as a marketer get this feature for my website. Are there are any meta tags/descriptions or api's which need to be added. If anyone has any information on this then please share it with me.

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Facebook Algorithm

Facebook releases its new algorithm which is a must to know, understand and follow for all marketers. This is going to change the way Facebook marketers have been tapping their targeted audience.

The News Feed algorithm responds to signals from you, including, for example:

• How often you interact with the friend, Page, or public figure (like an actor or journalist) who posted
• The number of likes, shares and comments a post receives from the world at large and from your friends in particular
• How much you have interacted with this type of post in the past
• Whether or not you and other people across Facebook are hiding or reporting a given post

Story Bumping:

Say a friend, but not a close friend, had an awesome post at 8 a.m., but it didn’t show up on your News Feed when you checked at that time, because it was too far down. With Story Bumping, Facebook is borrowing from NBC with the idea of, “If you haven’t seen it, it’s new to you!” That post you missed from a friend at 8 a.m. is eligible to be bumped back up toward the top of your News Feed when you check again an hour or two later.

This gives a second chance for posts from users and pages who didn’t have their content shown shortly after posting.

Lars Backstrom, Facebook’s Engineering Manager for News Feed Ranking, discussed Story Bumping with reporters:

What can we do to make it so people aren’t missing these important stories? Maybe the position 1 and position 2 stories were a little bit better, but that story that was just below the fold, we really would’ve preferred to see that rather than (another story) … which just happened to be the newest thing. So we had this idea, “Let’s change the model slightly.” Before, I said, whenever you come to feed, we’re going to take all the stories that are new since your last visit and put those at the top. Let’s just tweak that a little bit, and instead of taking all the new stories, we’ll take all the stories that are new to you.

Facebook has already tested this among 7,000 daily active users in July. With Story Bumping in place for these users, there was a five percent increase in stories seen from friends, an 8 percent increase in stories seen from pages, and a jump from 57 to 70 percent in overall stories read. Facebook also tested the Story Bumping change with 80 percent of its own employees, and Backstrom said that there was only one complaint. Right now, Story Bumping is in effect for roughly 99 percent of desktop News Feed users, but the team is still tweaking it on mobile.

Last Actor:

Another change Facebook announced Tuesday is Last Actor, which takes into account the last 50 interactions a user has done, such as liking a page’s post or writing on a friend’s timeline. This information is wrapped into the News Feed ranking system, so people with whom you’ve engaged most recently will be given more weight. For instance, if you’ve been liking and commenting statuses from your new coworker or best friend (or sharing posts from your favorite restaurant’s Facebook page), Facebook will push those posts up higher in News Feed.

When Last Actor was tested among Facebook employees as well as select users, Backstrom noted that there was a bit of a bump in engagement and positive reaction, but more modest than Story Bumping:

This change was less impactful than (Story Bumping), but still a nice change for feed relevance. So how does this work? Essentially what we wanted to do was try and capture your current state of mind as you’re consuming News Feed and using Facebook. A lot of the important symbols that we have in feed ranking are kind of long-term things: what’s my relationship to my friends and that kind of thing. We wanted to make this more real time, “What am I consuming right now?” So we built this new signal where we take into account the most recent interactions that they’ve had.

Facebook also tested something it called Chronological By Actor, where there’s more chronologically-ordered posts from people users have engaged with most recently, but Backstrom said that this led to less engagement from users in tests, so Facebook is still playing with this.

Backstrom noted what many users have been saying, that people still want to see things in chronological order. However, Chris Cox, Facebook’s Vice President of Product said that there’s a vital difference in operation between Facebook and Twitter.

Conclusion:

Its very important and critical for each Facebook marketers to know who are their influencers and who can be. People with more number of friends and who are more active on facebook ( by not posting but by liking/sharing/commenting on others's posts) can be the biggest assets in achieving a wider reach.

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Facebook getting rid of few features

Facebook recently launched the #hashtag with a hashtag feed URL With the advent of this new feature. Facebook also announced that out of the 27 types of ads currently running on Facebook, more than 50% of the ad types will be removed.

The above 2 announcements are really a boon for the marketers and the brands making their job easier. What sad is that Facebook would soon be getting rid of features like 'Questions' and 'Offers'. Now this is a bad news. Let's analyse the situation:

Facebook Questions is definitely a great feature and it saw extensive use post its launch. But then, slowly it started dying. Number of people using this feature kept going down with time and finally Facebook thought that there are hardly people using this feature hence lets get rid of it. This is where Facebook went wrong (atleast I think so). Instead of trying to find out what's causing its death, instead of finding out how they could revive such a powerful tool - they chose the easier path; to get rid of it.

What I would have done - If I were Facebook, I wouldn't have thought of killing this feature, infact would have tried to make it stronger. For Example - 

• When you create a question, you don't get a URL. Having a URL for each question could have helped a lot in sharing the question apart from just using the Facebook Share option.
• Each Facebook Question should also generate an html code which can be embedded on a blog/website. This tool then could turn to be the most extensive free 'Poll Tool' available in the market.
• Facebook users aren't allowed to ask questions anymore, its only the pages which can do so.
• We have an option to 'boost' a question but can't schedule it

Facebook says that marketers can still ask questions on posts, but then, will that give a report to the marketers as to how many votes were cast for each answers, is Facebook expecting us to keep counting all the answers ?

Facebook Offers is another excellent feature and an answer to Google Offer (at one point of time Google allowed businesses to create offers through local search listing). Why 'Offers' couldn't click :

• You can't upload an image, it by default takes your cover pic.
• Offer is a paid feature, you can't create an offer without proceeding to the payments. (Every business does not have a credit card attached to their account, and even if they have they wouldn't want to use it for every post/offer. If Facebook makes this as a free feature and gives an option to the marketers to go with a sponsored post or free offer then the number of people using this feature would grow exponentially

Integrated marketers/agencies who have been using this feature to promote offline stores, and more importantly track the number of offers saved, claimed and walk-ins. With this feature gone, though we still have lots of options to track online claims but this is the only social tool in the market to track offline claims. With no competition at all, still Facebook decides to bury this feature - Strange.

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