Social State of Mind and Facebook

The social media phenomenon is definitely one of the most important developments in the fairly short history of the internet. The concept of self-publishing was introduced through social media and social networks. It dates back to 1997, when the blogging began. Then followed instant messaging, community websites and social networks. Of course there were social networks before Facebook. Social-circles network model was introduced by sixdegrees.com, but sixdegrees.com couldn’t grow as big as it’s successors Myspace, LinkedIn, Xing and Facebook. MySpace and LinkedIn were launched in 2003. LinkedIn became a phenomenal success in business circles. MySpace on the other hand is still actively used in the US, but lost the international growth battle to Facebook in 2008.

There are also local social networks such as Orkut (Brazil), Vkontakte (Russia), Sina Webio and Renren (China), Skyrock (France), Yonja.com (Turkey) , Tuenti (Spain) etc. Only a few of them managed to preserve their top positions in their local markets, whilst others have been overtaken by Facebook. Social media as we know it was shaped by a series of events such as the launch of LinkedIn in 2003, the launch of Facebook in 2004, the launch of YouTube in 2005, the launch of Twitter in 2006, Facebook’s massive international growth in 2007, Facebook announcing their platform strategy in 2007 and Zynga’s first Facebook game etc.

During the last couple of years, the social media has played a very important role in the spreading the word for the most remarkable events from political uprisings to the Olympics, the election campaigns and the world record in free space jump. Facebook reached over 1 billion users in 2012 and an average user spends more than 7 hours per month on Facebook. See the video below for interesting facts about social media by Eric Qualman, the author of Socialnomics.

Social Media and Marketing – Facebook gets aggressive in the game

As I mentioned in my previous post, the dynamics and methods of advertising has changed with the trends and technologies in digital, social and mobile. As the social media became an inseparable part of our lives, it has also become one of the most important advertising outlets for marketers. In order to create engagement through marketing, social state of mind is prerequisite for today’s marketing experts.

Recently Facebook announced their purchase of Atlas Ad Business from Microsoft. Monetisation through ads has been a priority for Facebook for quite a long time. After this purchase, it is needless to say that Facebook is now taking advertising revenue even more seriously, they are eager for more share from advertising pie. With this recent event, the on-line advertising game will get more interesting and competitive in coming days. Facebook believes this will help advertisers “close the loop and compare their Facebook campaigns to the rest of their ad spend across the web on desktop and mobile”.

That’s not the only news from Facebook. After announcing the graph search in January, Facebook is now about to reveal the changes in news feed on the 7th of March. Facebook has all the necessary and relevant data (demographics, interests likes etc.) of its over 1 billion users. The company recently invested in a targeted advertising platform and not long ago declared their intentions on bringing on new advertising solutions with rich media (video, big pictures etc.). So, it wouldn’t be wrong to assume that the coming changes in news feed will play a major role in Facebook’s plans to get more advertising dollars. Facebook’s new ad models will probably include more video and rich media features.

Keep en eye on the new developments and stay tuned!

A few good watches – Social media in 2012

A great video about social media by the author of Socialnomics