A Harbinger for 2012: Facebook on Top?
January 3, 2012
Experian Hitwise, a subset of Experian Marketing Services, reported on a recent analysis of the top 1,000 search terms for 2011 in article “Facebook was the Top Search Term for Third Straight Year.”
According to the article, Facebook was the top search term and the most visited website in the U.S and accounted for 3.10 percent of all searches, a 46 percent increase from 2010. Social networking-related terms dominated the results, accounting for 4.18 percent of the top 50 searches. This is an increase of 12 percent compared with 2010.
Simon Bradstock, general manager of Experian Hitwise, said:
Marketers need to be particularly brand-savvy when managing their search optimization campaigns because of this behavior, which is a result of predictive search functionality across major search engines. Other top 2011 searches reflect ongoing fascination with celebrities online, and many of the top fast-moving searches centered on natural disasters or notable personalities passing away.
It seems that social media is here to stay and business leaders ought to stay abreast of these trends and utilize them to their advantage.
Jasmine Ashton, January 3, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Facebook Beats Google Plus on Android
December 23, 2011
Google is still hurting in the social media race, and this time it is even on its own mobile device.
Facebook has become the most popular app on Android, seeing a higher active reach than every single one of Google’s first-party apps.
ZDNet’s article, “Facebook is Now the Most Popular Android App”
The latest data comes from Nielsen, which ranked mobile apps by active reach: the percentage of Android owners who used the app within the past 30 days. The metrics research firm analyzed usage data from its proprietary device meters put on the smartphones belonging to thousands of participating consumers. As you can see in the chart [in the article], Nielsen broke down users by age group. Facebook had an 80 percent active reach for 18-24 year-olds, 81 percent for 25-34 year-olds, and 77 percent for 35-44 year-olds.
If accurate, very interesting. Facebook released its most recent app for Android last week, so as a twenty-something avid Facebook user, I am not surprised with this finding. I am, however, surprised with Google’s initial predictions that Google Plus would be strong competition for Facebook. The Google Plus Android App didn’t even rank on Nielsen’s top fifteen active reach rankings. What is going on, Google?
Andrea Hayden, December 23, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Facebook Still Tops Google Plus
November 23, 2011
Tech Crunch reported on social media news this week in the article “Report: 61 Percent of Top Brands Have Created Google+ Pages, But No One is Following.”
It appears that in the competition between Facebook and Google+, Facebook is staying in the lead. The SEO firm BrightEdge found that since the release of Google+ pages last week 61 percent of the world’s top 100 brands have signed up for pages, however, few people seem to be following them.
Despite the fact that Google+ pages on average appeared in the top 12 Google search results for the corresponding brand, while the brand’s Facebook pages on average appeared in the top 13 or 14 listed results, the article states:
Ninety four percent of the Top 100 brands have a presence on Facebook. BrightEdge says that only 12 percent of the brands that created these pages displayed a link to them on their home page. About 53 percent of the Top 100 brands display a link on their home page to their Facebook page. And brands appear to be having mixed success at building social networks around their Google+ presence. In fact, Google had the largest fan contingent of any brand on Google+, having attracted more than 65,000 fans.
If Google+ doesn’t gain a significant following soon, and Google+ becomes the “new” Google, we can most likely expect a big shift coming in usage patterns. Maybe the “old” Google should not have been thrown under the bus.
Jasmine Ashton, November 23, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Protected: Is Microsoft SharePoint a Facebook Service?
November 2, 2011
Gain Power, Lose Control? A Search Variant
October 20, 2011
The future of technology, like always, is fascinating: personal virtual assistants, customized search results, and big changes to information appliances. However, the new future Silicon Valley giants like Apple, Google and Facebook will be creating a mix of changes that will bring both unique benefits and some bad results.
It seems that the more advanced and powerful technology becomes, the more control users lose. We learn more in Datamation’s article, “How Apple, Google and Facebook Will Take Away Your Control,” which tells us:
“The more advanced this technology becomes, the bigger the decisions we’ll rely on them to make for us. Choices we now make will be “outsourced” to an unseen algorithm. We’ll voluntarily place ourselves at the mercy of thousands of software developers, and also blind chance. We will gain convenience, power and reliability. But we will lose control.”
Personal computers will no longer need to be maintained or customized. Personal assistants, like the iPhone 4s’ Siri, will place our words in context and learn what we “want.” Search algorithms will continue to customize to user attributes and actions.
Is the gain of convenience and reliability that we get from these shiny new toys worth it? Or is the shine just a distraction from the fact that we lose all control in search and technological decision making? I am not so sure the good will be outweighing the bad in this scenario, but I fear that we may be stuck in the cycle.
Andrea Hayden, October 20, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Facebook: Not Necessarily the Root of All Teen Evils
September 3, 2011
Facebook has changed the landscape of teenage socializing, no one would disagree. While it allows people from across the world to keep in touch and share exciting personal news, it also allows highly susceptible teens to be exposed to illegal activities. According the article, U.S. Teens on Facebook More Likely to Use Drugs, on CBC News, although a new report shows that teens who use Facebook are much more likely to engage in drug, alcohol and tobacco abuse, there may be more factors involved.
The article reports of the study and its results:
The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University conducted the back-to-school survey of 1,006 teens who answered questions about their use of social media, TV viewing habits and substance abuse. The findings suggested that compared those aged 12 to 17 who spend no time on social networking sites in a typical day, teens who do were: five times more likely to use tobacco, three times more likely to use alcohol, and twice as more likely to use marijuana.
While these facotids might be accurate, one must ask, “What other factors contribute to the results” The study compared one extreme against everyone else, teens who had no presence on Facebook, and teens who spent any time at all on Facebook. The study also had over 1,000 participants. No information was given on the socioeconomic, age, race, or cultural breakdowns of the group.
These data give one pause. But without more information one should not discount Facebook. The article makes an excellent point of mentioning the role of parents and extra-curricular activities as crucial components in teen abuse of drugs and alcohol. To be fair to Facebook, more information is needed as is a cause-and-effect study of teens, Facebook and alcohol/drug abuse.
What’s the relevance to search? With general purpose research shifting to accommodate social content, we want to understand the “content outputters” before we accept the “inputs” without understanding motivations, provenance, behavior, etc.
Catherine Lamsfuss, September 3, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Facebook NLP Group Postings
August 30, 2011
ZDNet reports on the technical side of Facebook’s newest adjustment to the ubiquitous news feed in, “Facebook using natural language processing to group posts, link to Pages.”
Facebook has added a new type of story to its News Feed today: if more than one of your friends post about the same topic, and it has a Page on the social network, the posts will be grouped under a Posted About story, even if your friends don’t explicitly tag the Page. The story is posted in the following format: “[Friend] and [x] other friends posted about [Page]” where the last part is a link to the Page in question. It turns out Facebook is using natural language processing on status updates as well as the headlines of posted links to figure out if a topic mentioned has a corresponding Page, and then searches to see if your other friends have done so as well.
This is Facebook’s first attempt to match the “trending” ability of Twitter. I’m just not sure that it’s effective yet. As a librarian and a Facebook user, there’s a personal and a professional side to this story for me. The privacy aspect of the social network prevents a metasearch that would allow a user to find relevant posts by subject across the platform. So in its place, it seems Facebook is attempting to show you common themes among those within your friend group, those to whom you have access.
A sure complaint will be the mile-long list one has to scroll through when a friend’s birthday is being universally acknowledged. Sometimes the groupings don’t even make sense, as is the case when two people on different days post to the same person’s wall, but the news feed is grouped together. The only common denominator in that equation is the individual whose wall was being written on. The topics can be completely separate and yet somehow wind up grouped together.
The real power that Facebook should leverage with this feature is the ad revenue potential. The ZDNet article shows an example of several friends discussing the new Harry Potter movie, with a news grouping headline of “So and so and two other friends also posted about Harry Potter.” “Harry Potter” then acts as a link to the product page, in this case, the movie promotion page. So here there is potential to take casual conversation, use NLP to pick up on products or services that also use Facebook, and then direct those users back to the product pages for that particular product or service. If Facebook could find a way to do this effectively, and get companies to buy in on this type of targeted marketing, it could be much more effective than sidebar ads. Expect to see more experimentation from Facebook with natural language processing.
Emily Rae Aldridge, August 30, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Google Plus Demographics
August 14, 2011
Here at the Beyond Search goose pond, we pay more attention to the less zippy aspects of search. The notion of asking someone and getting an answer is a method we learned at our orientation class at Halliburton NUS 40 years ago. The training went something like this.
When you need to know where the diagrams for the ECCS are, you need to ask the duty officer?
Not too fancy, but the method worked despite government and plant operator bureaucratic “efficiency.” Moving questions to another communication medium seems pretty understandable to us. Searching the digital artifacts is an obvious step. We can even get our tiny minds around the notion of knowing who asked whom, what, and when.
When we think about Google Plus, we see a new service which is changing. We think that the changes are coming less quickly than we anticipated. Google seems to be putting considerable effort into the new service. Once a person provides the who, what, why and when for routine communications one has a very interesting commercialization opportunity.
“Study Google+ Winning over Suburban Parents, Losing College Kids and Cafe Dwellers” caught our attention on august 13, 2011. The write up provides some early data about the demographics of the 20 million plus Google Plus users. (Am I the only one who eschews using the plus sign because of its role as an operator in some search systems?)
Here’s the passage we noted:
Google+ seems to be falling out of favor among the “colleges and cafes” crowd, generally younger people without children. However, it’s seeing an increase in interest from the “kids and cabernet” segment — defined as “prosperous, middle-aged married couples living child-focused lives in affluent suburbs.” That’s a group that hasn’t embraced Facebook as much as the rest of the population, according to the Experian Hitwise data.
My hunch is that Google is going to want hundreds of millions of users of all demographic stripes and hues. The inclusion of games is a first obvious step of what is a consumerizing move. The video stuff also points down market to me, but I am 67 and not too keen on the boob tube whether implemented on a big screen TV, a mobile device, or some intermediate gizmo like an iPad. A wasteland is a wasteland to me.
The more consumerized a service, the less utility that service has to me. Facebook is the ultimate consumer “space”, and I don’t spend much time in that service. (A couple of the goslings are working on a Facebook implementation for Augmentext.com, but I just watch and learn. I don’t “do.”) Google Plus seems more appropriate to me, but if it goes down-market, then I will drift away. LinkedIn has already become a crazy “hire me” and “I am an expert” place, and I am not too keen on that digital watering hole either. I am willing to be semi flexible, but since I can’t touch my toes, I don’t know how far I can go in this down-market type environment.
Stephen E Arnold, August 14, 2011
Google vs. Facebook: Peewee League or World Cup of Social
August 10, 2011
Search vs. Social Media. Google vs. Facebook. The two sides seem to be locked in what some pundits and “real” experts see as an epic battle for ultimate Internet supremacy. Slow news day? Brilliant insight?
Both sides have significantly changed the online landscape. With Google’s new Google + social network, the two are now fighting over essentially the same territory, and ultimately the same advertising revenue. The Guardian reports in, “Google and Facebook Get Personal in Battle for Social Networking Rewards.” We learned:
Ultimately the real battle is over cold, hard cash. Google made 97% of its revenues, or $32.3bn, in the past 12 months from advertising. eMarketer, meanwhile estimates that Facebook’s largely ad-generated revenues will grow from $0.74bn in 2009 to $5.74bn in 2012 – yet the site has hardly begun rolling out truly personalized, targeted advertising. If there is any of Google’s lunch to be eaten, it is here.
Google has admitted to being behind the curve in the social media game. Facebook is deeply entrenched and has momentum on its side. Google maintains that at its heart it is still a search company, but Google + can add another level to the personalization and identity of the searcher. They are not trying to recreate exactly what Facebook has done, and that’s exactly the problem.
World Cup?
We noted this passage:
Though Google+ is an intelligent attempt at a social networking tool, it seems a typical Google product in that it is brilliantly, heavily engineered but lacks the human focus required for a social network – the fuel that has propelled Facebook to 750 million users.
Is Google+ a Threat to Facebook’s Business Demographic?
July 16, 2011
EWeek.com informs us that “Google+ Will Target Businesses, Facebook Audience.” It seems that Google intends to entice businesses as well as personal accounts into its Google+ Web. This may pose a problem for Facebook, who has long encouraged companies to set up pages on its site. Recently, that company has even introduced new tools aimed specifically at businesses.
Google discourages businesses from setting up shop in its initial Google+ project. However, it is working on something just for them:
We have a great team of engineers actively building an amazing Google+ experience for businesses, and we will have something to show the world later this year,’ Christian Oestlien, a group product manager at Google, wrote in a July 6 posting on his Google+ profile page. ‘The business experience we are creating should far exceed the consumer profile in terms of its usefulness to businesses.
If that’s true, Facebook had better continue to step up its game. Our view at Beyond Search is rotated about 12 degrees.
First, we think that social media is useful. It is less about the Internet and more about communication. No problem, but communication has a history of industry-centric regulation. As social media follows the path worn by AT&T, there will be some interesting changes coming.
Second, the novelty of social media may follow the pattern of behaviors in other group discussions; that is, intense use followed by declining use and then popping in and out of groups “to find out what’s happening”. The data backing my assertion were collected in the early days of online groups, and I am watching for signals that suggest a similar pattern. My hunch is that there may be some usage shifts coming which will be as interesting as the regulatory net that will be woven around social media.
Third, control of content within social media systems will impart enormous power to those who have a superior capability within the social media system. For this reason, social media will morph into products and services which have a built in magnetic quality. A user may leave one group, only to reengage with a different group later. Fragmentation of attention will be a defining secondary characteristic. The primary characteristic is that fragmenting of attention will be just hat Dr. Algorithm ordered to punch the user’s purchase, vote, think buttons. The users won’t have much choice. Some won’t even care.
Net Net: Both Google and Facebook may be chasing demographics. Neither service may be the end of the line. What’s next is likely to be even more Googley and Facebooky.
Cynthia Murrell July 14, 2011
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