Facebook Experimenting with Pay Per Highlighted Post Model

12th May 2012 by Lauren Proctor

Tumblr announced a one dollar highlighted post feature into the fold of their blogging platform a few weeks ago, but now it seems Facebook is following in their footsteps. The social network is experimenting with $2 highlighted posts that let regular users buy increased visibility in friend’s Facebook newsfeeds with one simple payment.

(Note, this should not be confused with Facebook’s pinned or highlighted posts for brand pages. This feature for brand pages is free, and it allows page admins to anchor posts in the upper left-hand corner of the timeline for a few days. You’ll also see a tiny orange flag that demarcates these pinned posts, but what we’re talking about here is a feature Facebook is testing for regular members of Facebook.)

Under normal circumstances, the only way for people to make sure your posts earn maximum visibility in friends’ newsfeeds is to collect a significant number of likes and comments on a given post. This algorithm helps Facebook surface relevant quality content, but apparently if you’re not interesting or interactive enough, highlighted posts means money will get you visibility too.

It’s an interesting approach, and I can think of more than a few friends who would use this feature to announce important life events. On the other hand, as a light Facebook user from a personal perspective, I can’t imagine purchasing people’s attention like that.

I can appreciate the fact that Facebook is attempting to move past traditional advertising though, and I’m anxious to see if highlighted posts become the norm. If this feature takes hold I assume the era of buying social currency will have arrived and I can only imagine what’s next.

P.S. I am aware that the highlight image in this post is the actual highlight app logo. If you’re unfamiliar with this app, it passively monitors your location via your smartphone’s geolocation. Then it tells you who’s nearby and lets you “highlight” people of interest. The hallucinatory effects of their logo has been polarizing to date, but I find I can’t stop staring at it, hence the inclusion in this post.

Amazon To Launch Tech Blog

11th May 2012 by Lauren Proctor

If you’re a holdout on the importance of content marketing, perhaps the latest buzz about Amazon will convince you otherwise. According to GigaOm:

The Daily cites unidentified “multiple sources in the Seattle area” who say Amazon plans to launch three blogs: one “designed to compete in the tech news space with websites like Gizmodo and The Verge” that would be “populated with unbiased reviews that would link back to Amazon’s retail site,” one on “film, comics, TV and other geek-related activities” and one on “the emerging market of mobile phone photography apps.”

Read more…

Internet Marketing and Social Media Statistics: April 2012

30th April 2012 by Lauren Proctor

Oh what an April it’s been! Social media is going visual, marketers are getting settled with Facebook Timeline, and I landed an awesome new project creating a marketing platform and popularity algorithm for online video with Bedrocket Media Ventures. April was great, but I suspect May will be even better. And now onto our statistics fix for the month…

There are currently 9 million Facebook apps and 901 million Facebook users in the world. In case you don’t want to do the math yourself, that’s one in every 7.7 people in the entire world. – Source, Facebook

Facebook’s daily active users are up to 526 million (up from 372 million last year) – Source, Facebook

3.2 billion Likes and Comments are posted daily on Facebook. – Source, Facebook

Forrester released a study this month supporting evidence that Facebook fans are in fact some of a companies most valuable customers. According to the study:

• Brand fans on Facebook are 79 percent likely to consider buying a company’s product (versus 49% for non-fans).
• Facebook fans are also more likely to recommend your products (74 percent of fans are likely to recommend versus only 38 percent of non-fans).
• The study also found that being a fan impacts customer values in big ways. For Best Buy, Facebook fans are 5.3 times more likely to purchase than non fans. (The next closest influence factor for increasing purchase probability was conducting purchase research, which only increases buyer influence by 1.4 times.
• This is similar to above. Having a Wal-Mart in your area increases your likelihood to shop there 2x. If you’re a fan of Wal-Mart on Facebook though, you’re more than 4x more likely to purchase from Wal-Mart.

Research by Bain Consulting shows Apple fans are worth 90% more to the company than a regular customer ($4,400 vs $2,300), mostly because Apple fans convince a new customer to go Apple every year.  This kind of fan advocacy accounts for 17 percent of all of Apple’s new customers.

Finally, in honor of the acquisition of Instagram by Facebook, I present to you a statistic on Instagram. It’s still hard to believe that after all the numbers were sorted through, Instagram made $725,000 per day in the short time it existed before the acquisition.

More Stats!

Interested in more recent statistics? This post is part of a monthly series and you can view January, February, and March social media stats here:

• January: Featuring Facebook usage stats, Pinterest growth, the cost of consumer loyalty, and more.
• February: Includes an infographic spelling out the volume of social media activity that takes place every 60 seconds.
• March: Featuring projections on the future of the web, mobile behavior, and our reliance on email.