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Post by Admin on Feb 5, 2014 6:08:14 GMT
Facebook on Tuesday celebrates 10 years since Mark Zuckerberg's Harvard dorm room launch of the social network, a business now worth more than corporate centenarians General Motors and Ford Motor combined. Whiz kid-turned-CEO Zuckerberg's social juggernaut, now the de facto water cooler gathering for 1.23 billion worldwide, commands the world's largest network and a coveted advertising position. Facebook's journey into the fabric of people's lives, marketer's playbooks and as a formidable company with staying power wasn't always a guarantee. Blunting hype for its promise of social ad dollars, a steady meme still runs of privacy concerns, advertising angst and fickle users. Facebook has always had rivals. One concern plaguing the social network has been its waning teen audience exiting for the next new social party. Such concerns led it to buy photo-sharing app Instagram for $1 billion and bid $3 billion in an unsuccessful attempt to acquire disappearing photo-messaging service Snapchat. Word on the street is that teens are leaving Facebook in hoards and instead flocking to apps like Snapchat and Instagram. A report from digital agency iStrategyLabs breaks down just how many teens have abandoned the monster social network since 2011. According to its findings released Wednesday, which the agency claims were drawn from Facebook's Social Advertising platform, 25% fewer U.S. teens use Facebook now than in 2011. That results to a net loss of more than 3 million users. However, Facebook could not confirm these numbers, so take the data with a grain of salt.
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Post by Admin on Feb 6, 2014 7:15:25 GMT
Twitter’s share price dropped sharply on Wednesday after its first results as a public company prompted concerns among investors that its rapid growth was running out of steam. In its first quarterly earnings report since going public, Twitter revealed that it had more money than in the last three months of 2013 than analysts expected. But shares fell sharply as the company announced it had 241m users at the end of 2013, just 9m higher than the previous quarter. Twitter also disclosed that the number of “timeline views” – its equivalent of page views, and a key measure for advertisers – dropped for the first time in the last quarter of 2013 to 148bn from 159bn. According to the earnings report issued on Wednesday, in the three months to 31 December, the company had revenues of $242.7m, an increase of 116% compared to $112m in the same period last year. It made a net loss of $511m for the fourth quarter of 2013, compared to a net loss of $9m in the same period last year. Twitter said it expected first-quarter revenue to be in the range of $230m to $240m, with revenue for the year of between $1.15bn and $1.2bn, nearly double the $665m it posted in 2013. "Twitter finished a great year with our strongest financial quarter to date," said Dick Costolo, Twitter's CEO. "We are the only platform that is public, real-time, conversational and widely distributed, and I'm excited by the number of initiatives we have underway to further build upon the Twitter experience."
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Post by Admin on Apr 21, 2014 15:05:46 GMT
Teenagers are increasingly losing interest in Facebook in favour of Instagram, a new survey has found. While Mark Zuckerberg's social media platform was previously this demographic's favourite, they are now using and joining Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger's picture sharing app more. Piper Jaffray senior analyst and managing director Gene Munster said that they found Instagram was taking the mantle for the most preferred social teen site. Nearly 30 percent of surveyed teens chose Instagram as their most important social network, making it the top social property for youngsters for the first time in the history of the survey. Munster said that the changes over the last six months showed that teens interest level in Facebook went from 27 percent to 23 percent, Twitter 31 percent to 27 percent, and Instagram 27 percent to 30 percent. Interestingly, just one year ago, Facebook was the preferred social network for roughly 33 percent of teens. So, do teens have a point - should we be forgetting Facebook and dedicating our time solely to Instagram instead? 1. Which has the most annoying pictures? You'd think with Instagram being an image-led platform it would definitely have greater potential to be the more irritating of the two. However, it really depends how you feel about pictures of friends' babies vs pictures of celebrities' babies. Pictures of friends' engagement rings vs pictures of celebrities' engagement rings. Pictures of friends' lunches vs pictures of celebrities' lunches, and so on. How do I decide? Figure out who you like better - your friends or celebrities. 2. Which has the most annoying status updates? There's nothing more inner-rage-inducing than a self-pitying status-posting Facebook friend. "Having the worst day ever", "my life couldn't get any worse", etc, followed by the much-wanted "wot's up hun?" has probably sent the most sane of us quietly mad at some point. Instagram, meanwhile, goes to the polar extreme of this. "Gotta love my new Jimmy Choos #love #shoes #fashion #fashiongirl #justcallmeCarrieBradshawbitches #100DaysHappy". How do I decide? Figure out what makes you less angry - attention-seeking misery or shameless boasting. 3. What do you use social media for? Are you forever tapping away in that Facebook message box, liking friends' sonograms and accepting invitations to events? Or are you too busy taking pictures of your breakfast, your dog, your boyfriend, a cool wall? How do I decide? Figure out whether you're in it to keep in touch or build your own amazing digital persona and then ditch the one that doesn't work for you! (Not really though - we mean, who doesn't have Facebook and Instagram?)
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Post by Admin on Jul 24, 2014 13:54:36 GMT
Remember when Princeton researchers published a paper asserting that Facebook would lose 80 percent of its users by 2017, based on analyzing Google Trends data for Facebook searches? Everyone had a good laugh over that, not least of all Facebook, whose clever comeback used similar data to find that Princeton was in trouble. Yet a second study (Strong Regularities in Growth and Decline of Popularity of Social Media Services) by researchers Christian Bauckhage and Kristian Kersting of Germany's noted Fraunhofer Institute has reached a similar conclusion. And they looked at 175 different Internet services — including Friendster, Myspace, Secondlife, Yelp and Zynga — across 45 different countries. Their conclusion: "...our analysis reveals that collective attention to social media grows and subsides in a highly regular and predictable manner. Regularities persist across regions, cultures, and topics and thus hint at general mechanisms that govern the adoption of web-based services." In other words, many social internet services are like fads. And like most fads, interest tends to peak and then decline over time. Peak Facebook? The authors note that search terms do not represent absolute user interest — people may stop searching for Facebook because they have it bookmarked or use an app — but a large body of research has found Google Trends data is a good index of consumer interest. They graphed their findings for several major services, including Facebook and Amazon. Here's the Facebook graph: They used several different diffusion models to fit the data and found that the shifted-Gompertz model had the best fit across the data. That curve also gives a massive falloff in Facebook's relative interest. But this isn't true of all Internet services. For example, Amazon's curve looks very different. To be clear, the research doesn't predict imminent doom for Facebook. But it does suggest that the Facebook fad faces user interest declines just as other services before it have. Interest has already declined among younger teenagers — one reason Facebook paid $19B for WhatsApp — and Facebook has more challenges ahead. Concerns over information security, selling of information, and constant UI changes have soured many people I know. But given the "social" nature of social services, is it so surprising that they are more like fads than utilities? Facebook will struggle to stay relevant to users' lives.
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Post by Admin on Aug 6, 2014 14:29:56 GMT
Over three quarters (82 per cent) of internet users aged between 16 and 64 years old now have a Facebook account, research from GlobalWebIndex has found, but there is a six per cent decrease in active usage. The GlobalWebIndex Social Q2 2014 study found that messaging services was the biggest boom, with Snapchat seeing a 67 per cent increase in its user base, while WhatsApp has seen a 30 per cent increase and has now overtaken Facebook’s own Messenger service to become the third most popular social app globally. Picture sharing sites have also seen an increase: Instagram has seen a 25 per cent increase in active user numbers in the last six months, while Tumblr has seen a 22 per cent increase, and Pinterest an increase of seven per cent. The GlobalWebIndex study found that Tumblr and Instagram have the youngest user bases, with 76 per cent and 74 per cent of their active users coming from the 16-34 age group, respectively. Along with YouTube, these are also the only platforms where 16-24s form the largest share of active users. The reasons that teens turn to these apps, as well as messaging apps such as Snapchat, WeChat and WhatsApp, are straightforward, Jason Mander, head of trends at GlobalWebIndex, believes: “They’re simple, largely ad-free and are seen as being much more private." The research discovered that LinkedIn and Facebook have the oldest audiences, with only 52 per cent and 55 per cent of their respective active users come from the 16-34 group. For the top ten behaviours on Facebook, audiences are growing via mobiles and tablets but holding steady or declining via PCs and laptops, with more using mobile to comment on posts, message friends or watch video clips. Over the last year, the percentage of internet users accessing social networks via a mobile phone rose to 38 per cent – a five per cent increase. The GlobalWebIndex team interviewed 170,000 users in 32 countries, representing 89 per cent of the global internet population.
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