DreamGrow Social Media

Facebook to be worth over $40 billion dollars next year?

As WSJ reported, Facebook will probably go public in 2011, once it has reached a year of $1 billion behind it in sales. So a bunch of investors were polled about what they think the market capitalization would be – The results came to be between $35 and $40 billion dollars!

Although, some brave analysts have even suggested that the amount would be $59 billion in 2011 (a market cap over 2 times bigger than that of Google’s in 2004), and up to $100 billion dollars by 2015.

Priit suggests that the time of poster-boy Google may soon be over. Replaced by the poster-boy Facebook. Over everything else, people want to communicate. And right now, nothing enables us to do it better than Facebook.

What do you think? Would you buy Facebook shares?

HUGE: Google Will Go For Social Media With GMail

Google is becoming irrelevant. Facebook is where people send increasing amounts of their online time. As we have pointed out earlier the main thing that is working for Google is search. Their social pushes with Orkut and Google Wave haven’t had much success.

Facebook on the other hand is having a search component missing from internet domination. Facebook’s search sucks. It is really really bad even finding their own pages and giving relevant results to users. This could be solved with Bing. Facebook’s part owner Microsoft could lend its declining to be used as a search engine inside the social network.

The Facebook’s interface update last week hints at this possibility as the search box was promoted to the prominent position in site’s header. Now Facebook has a lot going on for them and snatching search from Google doesn’t seem really far fetched. With its user-base over 400 million and growing at a rate almost 20 million a month Facebook is the biggest threat Google has ever faced.

Now Google is throwing it all in. Trying to convert GMail with its 150 million users to a social site seem to be their last countermeasure against Facebook. As they can’t break the user experience for the whole user-base the changes couldn’t be too great. The other obstacle, Mashsble points out, is that you probably have thousands of email addresses in GMail and only fraction of those are people you would like to share your status updates with.

So, we have to wait and see what the coming week reveals. Tuesday is the day if Mashable is correct. I have to admit that I am a bit skeptical and I think that Google’s chances against Facebook are really slim.

400 million users on Facebook and accelerating

Facebook is 6 years old and reaches this week 400 million users. As Mark Zuckerberg announced this is almost twice the number they had a year ago. But the important thing is that the last 50 million users were added in about just 65 days. The growth from form 300 to 350 million took a whole 77 days. The average pace for the last 150 million users has been about 22 million a month.

Last year we predicted that Facebook will hit 700 million this year. We did some calculations and found that this is not entirely impossible. Now, looking back we see that Facebook went from 200 to 400 million with an average pace of 19,1 million users per month. Drawing a straight line from now to December 31 will give us a user base of 610 million. So, our initial 700 million is entirely possible.

The question now is if any of the big non-Facebook countries (China, Brazil, Russia, etc) will start to join up in big numbers. This may speed up the growth significantly. Facebook should start seeding by paying the user to join up in these countries and to reach the tipping point.

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Image credit Inside Facebook

Social Media Weekend: Baby Boomers, Automotive, Social CRM, The Economist

Free Social Media Marketing Kit. Expert guidance on setting social media strategy and how-to articles on social media tools and tactics in the Social Media Marketing Kit. New marketing articles and social media content published daily.

Baby Boomers and Seniors Are Flocking to Facebook [STATS]. A new eMarketer report shows that the number of Baby Boomers embracing social media, especially Facebook, jumped drastically between 2008 and 2009.

Social CRM: The New Frontier of Marketing, Sales and Service (PDF). The emergence and increasing usage of social media and other Web 2.0 tools has dramatically altered the ways in which companies interact with their customers. For instance, buying advice, product information and technical help is increasingly being disseminated from consumers to other consumers, in some cases without involvement or oversight by the provider.

The Economist: A special report on social networking (PDF). Online social networks are changing the way people communicate, work and play, and mostly for the better.

Study: Consumers Are Not Annoyed by Ads on Facebook. Good news for Facebook: It turns out users find ads on social networks no more annoying than any other ads on the web.

Using Facebook fans to improve automotive marketing. Facebook Fan Pages have become the most recent in a long line of social media “must-haves” for automotive marketers –- but what do they really tell you? And are they even helpful?

All together now. Diageo, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft and Procter & Gamble are among 10 companies taking part in an ambitious project that invites brands to work together on developing new brand and product ideas and new avenues for research through in-depth analysis of existing data.

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Image credit Cris Watk

700 Million Facebook Users

In our 2010 trend post we predicted that Facebook will have 700 million users. Well, let’s look at some numbers.

According to checkfacebook.com 43.03% of US on-line users are on Facebook. In UK this percentage is 51.5, Canada 47,24%, Australia 42.88% and this data is three months old. Then there are countries like Chile where 66.54% of on-line users are on Facebook and Venezuela with 68.97%. Seems that Facebook penetration, in countries where it is the leading social network, moves towards 50 percent of internet users or even beyond that.

Currently there are about 1.733 billion internet user in the world. When Facebook gets half of that then their user base would balloon to 850 million. Amazingly there are still some countries that have some other social networking site dominating. As we wrote in our post World Map Of Social Networks. The keys to Facebook’s world domination lay in Brazil (Orkut), Russia (V Kontakte) and China (QQ).

I would say that using a single social networking site would be beneficial to all internet users. In smaller countries there is constant pressure from across the borders to leave the local socnet and join the global one? However in large countries you may now feel that the language restricts your social sphere. Still, if you subtract the users of Brazil, Russia and China from 1.7 billion, you are left with about 1.3 billion I internet users.

There are several factors that drive Facebook domination. The network effect will make the value of the environment to go up as more people use it. More people are inviting even more friends, using Facebook will be the norm. Business use will legalize social networking during working hours. Older people join to keep in touch with their young relatives but also form their own sub communities. Businesses promoting their Facebook presence bring in more users. Initial success of the early adopters will move Facebook to marketing mainstream, but at the same time this will decrease the effectiveness of the channel as breaking through the clutter will become harder.

But the basic drive is universal, people want to belong and talk to each other, to connect. Most of the social networks’ content is social chatter, nothing terribly important or of timeless value. But social chatter is what we do and the site that can best mediate it will take everything.

700 million users is 54.6 percent of internet users excluding China, Brazil, and Russia. Maybe note by the end of this year, but it’s entirely possible. Next, 1 Billion.

Facebook More Visited Than Google

Everything social is what people want to do most. Currently the top site is still Google but it will pass. People love to talk more than search. If we look at the top sites in US for 2009 then we see that four of them are used for communicating with others (Yahoo Mail, Facebook, MySpace and Live Mail). I believe that this social chatter is fundamental human need and won’t go away any time soon.

As we pointed out in our 22 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2010, people will use more social networks’ messaging instead of regular email and IM. This will boost the visits to the social sites and decrease the usage of web mail. This all leads to Facebook becoming the most visited site in the world some time in 2010.

Experian Hitwise US tweeted that:

Facebook was the most visited site in the US on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. 1st time the site has been the #1 visited US site ever. — Hitwise_US

Search Engine Land has a Hitwise graph for the data running up to the Christmas.

Experian Hitwise UK shared their data:

Facebook was the #1 US website this Xmas. Not quite there in the UK yet – maybe next year… — Hitwise_UK

I think there are two factors holding back total domination of Facebook. Lack of news and god-awful search. If Facebook would integrate Bing search to its platform then Google would have a lot to worry about.

Facebook Having A Redesign

GigaOm has released two new screenshots, depicting the forthcoming redesign that’s going to change the look of Facebook a bit. We don’t know when the changes are supposed to happen, but generally, changes tend to happen soon after pictures are released.

So, what has changed?

• The navigation bar has been reorganized, removing the doubled profile link we have seen so far.
• The search bar has been moved to the center, indicating Facebook’s desire to make search more relevant inside the site. If they would also work on it’s algorithm a bit, it may really grow to be a widely used search engine. At the moment, the Facebook search feature is really bad. Even if you know what you are looking for you may end up empty handed. SO, if this is only cosmetics then it won’t do much good as people will probably ignore it, if it gives consistently bad results.
• Facebook has combined some of the menus to an all-purpose “account” dropdown, making it look more logical than before, especially for the newcomers.
• The sidebar is scaled down, taking some design elements from Facebook Lite. Still the functionality of the sidebar is a bit rudimentary considering the amount of space that it takes on the screen. This could be remedied by
• the bookmarks that have been added to the sidebar – a (hopefully) nice way to have a quick access to your favorite applications or pages.

World Map Of Social Networks

Italian writer, blogger and photographer Vincenzo Cosenza has put together a visualization showing the most popular social networks around the world on a map, based on recent traffic data (December 2009).

As we can see from the map, Facebook is still strong and on the rise. It is dominating most of the western world, together with Africa, Middle-East and the Pacific region. With a user base of 350 million and growing, the map will probably look even greener next year.

Friendster…is…well…Friendster. Nothing to talk about here.

Although Facebook is also growing in Russia, it is still dominated by Odnoklassniki and V Kontakte. I personally don’t see this situation changing any time soon either. They both support cyrillic and are strongly oriented on the Russian-speaking community. They are also widely used among Russian inhabitants in other Eastern European countries.

Google’s Orkut is shrinking steadily, still dominating only in Brazil and Estonia. With Facebook’s user base having grown by 50% in both of these countries in one year, Orkut probably won’t be on the map at the end of 2010. Orkut also used to be big in India, but with Facebook growing by 150% in two consecutive years there, it has lost it’s dominant position.

Mixi is mainly dominant in Japan, with it’s main “advantage” being the possibility to stay totally anonymous – The people in Japan like to generally stay anonymous when surfing. Facebook’s privacy settings haven’t really been embraced there…

China’s QQ, when only usernames are concerned, is the biggest social network in the world. QQ today has over one billion usernames, but only one tenth of them are recurring visitors, topping at 91 million in Dec. 21. Without a doubt, QQ is the biggest player in China and will probably stay that way for a long time.

There are also a bunch of smaller players, being dominant in only one or two countries. But Facebook is changing that situation quite fast:

When compared to june 2009, Facebook has become dominant in 19 countries:

India, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Czech Republic, Cameroon, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Azerbaijan, Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, Oman, Yemen, Quadeloupe and Martinique

So, China aside, Facebook is still growing fast. By the same time next year, we will probably see a map where Facebook is dominating most of the western hemisphere, together with the Middle-East and the Pacific. The only real players who are stopping Facebook from having a total “world dominance”, will probably be China’s QQ and V Kontakte in Russia.

In Social Media Aim for the Long Term

I checked some Facebook ads tonight and approximately two thirds of them were just advertising some offer like a regular display banner. Hello there, we have some great stuff for you, come buy now. I think this is a misuse of social media ad space. Sure, I don’t know if these ads work or not or if anybody is even measuring. But. I think the point of Facebook ads should be starting a long term relationship not a quick sale.

Facebook ads should be about things that people care about, thing that will engage them and tie them to your brand. Gain the permission asset and the you can start selling them. There are marketers who “get it”. Some of the remaining ads invited people to become fans and promised something that might actually be interesting to these people.

Forget the quick sale. Aim for the long term. Think, what would you talk about if you couldn’t mention your products and services but had to get people interested. What would you have to do so that people would come to you and ask if you had a solution for their problem.

It is not easy and it takes time, but the base you built this way will last for a very long time.
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Image credit: Sachin Ghodke

Facebook getting ahead of Google before 2010?

We have seen the emergence of Facebook for a long time now, and with every social media site talking daily about the enormous success of it, it almost starts to get worn out….almost. Looking at the latest graphs, I can’t stop but feel amazed. Facebook will soon have more visits to its homepage than Google itself! The yearly amount of its visits has grown by 342%, compared to Google’s 42%.

On september 2008, Facebook started out with 0.5 Billion pageviews – a year later today, it’s 2.3 Billion pageviews a month! When looking at the growthchart, I can’t stop but feel amazed – will the only thing stepping in Facebook’s way be the actual number of people in the world with internet connection?

In one way, Facebook’s growth is understandable. People want to communicate and with all your neighbours and even the milkman being on Facebook, it’s natural that Facebook is where they’ll go. 500 Million users next year is a fact seems pretty certain. What about a billion? Can Facebook handle that? Is it even possible? Maybe, cause when looking at the graphs, it seems funnily realistic.

Remember when your company’s homepage on the web was important? Although still important, the times are changing now – Facebook is where you’ll want to be. Getting on the bandwagon early in the game (and Facebook themselves think 2009 is just the start), will get you some big advantages over your competitors in the long run.

Will this be the new Google in 2011?