DreamGrow Social Media

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

Gartner: Social Software Is an Enterprise Reality

Gartner released a report “Predicts 2010: Social Software Is an Enterprise Reality” in which analysts offer predictions for the next five years. Concentrating on social software Gartner stresses five key points.

1. By 2014, social networking services will replace e-mail as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20 percent of business users.

This prediction is matches our own view of changes brought on by mass adoption of social networking sites. (Social Media Replaces Email and IM and 22 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2010). Gartner predicts that by 2014 about 20 percent of business users will use social networking sites as the hub of their business communications. We believe this number to be even higher as social networking companies will push to make this happen. On the other hand email provides will seek out ways to turn their user-base to social networks. These trends will blur the line between social and email.

2. By 2012, over 50 percent of enterprises will use activity streams that include microblogging, but stand-alone enterprise microblogging will have less than 5 percent penetration.

Our view is that in-house corporate microbloging platforms will not see wide spread adoption. The main reason for this is that small user base will not generate enough social chatter to keep the interest up. The second obstacle in the adoption of private microblogging platforms will be the resistance from employees who see it as another “time waster”.

3. Through 2012, over 70 percent of IT-dominated social media initiatives will fail.

Well, this is a bit of a no brainer. We have seen it in our work and we firmly believe that IT-people should be kept away from making decisions about marketing communications. As Gartner puts it:

When it comes to collaboration, IT organizations are accustomed to providing a technology platform (such as, e-mail, IM, Web conferencing) rather than delivering a social solution that targets specific business value.

Social media communications is a business process. This process needs tools that come out of IT-department, but they do not define those processes. Business side must be very careful not to bend under the pressure from IT about what can or cannot be done.

4. Within five years, 70 percent of collaboration and communications applications designed on PCs will be modeled after user experience lessons from smartphone collaboration applications.

Yes, mobile is big! It will get BIGGER. But the user experience on different devices will (hopefully) be driven by delivering the best user experience, doh. Gartner suggests that people are more productive on smartphones than on PCs due to better user interfaces.

The experience with these tools for all who use them will enable the user to handle far more conversations within a given amount of time than their PCs simply because they are easier to use.

We believe that small devices have inherently worse user experience than their desktop counterparts. This ensures that full size computers will continue to provide superior user experience. This will hold until we have perfected voice commands, HUD-glasses and other wearable computing technologies.

5. Through 2015, only 25 percent of enterprises will routinely utilize social network analysis to improve performance and productivity.

The Gartner’s number 25 percent seems reasonable, but the reasoning does not. Privacy concerns will not hold people from analyzing social data. Lack of knowledge and initiative in the enterprise will do that. Our personal information is mined and analyzed in countless places and most of us don’t care. Agreed, social is more personal than that, but we believe that a lot of the benefits can be dug out from anonymous statistical analysis that doesn’t invade privacy. For more sensitive information consumers can trade privacy for benefits.

Social networking is in it infancy and the next few years will see a lot of change. How we communicate with friends and businesses, new business models and processes, new hardware technology, user interfaces, etc. But at the core of it is our need to communicate and belong. So, there.

Who rules the social web?

I found this really cool infogrphic. Gender balance in social networks? Chicks Rule! Women seem to be in general more sociable. This would make the social networking sites more appealing to them as places where to connect and share experiences.

I believe that the number of users may equalize in future. However, if we would look at the activity on the social site my guess would be that women rule even more.

Marketers must understand that women are directly or indirectly behind most household spending decision. Also, women lead 4 out of 5 stages of the buying process. Three of these stages are closely tied to social media sites: research, ownership and word-of-mouth.

To summarize: in social networking sites it is a good idea to target women and try to influence the non-purchasing stages of buying process. Women don’t buy brands. They join them (Understanding Women — Eight Essential Truths That Work in Your Business and Your Life). From the marketers point of view this is very important. So, adapt and get some women in your marketing team.

Here are some more facts about women spending (via she-conomy.com):

• Senior women age 50 and older control net worth of $19 trillion and own more than three-fourths of the nation’s financial wealth. – MassMutual Financial Group–2007
• Over the next decade, women will control two thirds of consumer wealth in the United States and be the beneficiaries of the largest transference of wealth in our country’s history. Estimates range from $12 to $40 trillion. Many Boomer women will experience a double inheritance windfall, from both parents and husband. The Boomer woman is a consumer that luxury brands want to resonate with. – Claire Behar, Senior Partner and Director, New Business Development, Fleishman-Hillard New York
• Women account for 85% of all consumer purchases including everything from autos to health care.
• 92% pass along information about deals or finds to others.
• 76% want to be part of a special or select panel.

And still women feel misunderstood:

• 59% of women feel misunderstood by food marketers;
• 66% feel misunderstood by health care marketers;
• 74% feel misunderstood by automotive marketers;
• 84% feel misunderstood by investment marketers
• 91% of women in one survey said that advertisers don’t understand them.

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.

Seven Actionable Marketing Trends

Excellent! A collection of insights and ideas in relation to each of the before published seven actionable marketing trends.

Social Media Replaces Email and IM

In our social media trends post we suggested that people will use more social networks’ messaging instead of regular email and IM tools.

We haven’t seen any real research on this yet. In my opinion the convenience of using messaging tools without leaving the friendly social network will move a lot of email communication away from mail clients. I believe that this will happen mainly to personal email. When people talk to each other it’s only natural to use the tools that are right in front of you.

But not to fear, the email will stay with us some time yet. Businesses will continue to use email until some authentic way of private B2C communication channel becomes available for them on social networks. The second factor that keeps email alive is the rudimentary user experience of messaging tools in social networks. These tools are convenient but have only very basic functionality.

Now, a smart move for social media sites would be to include email in their environment. If a social network like Facebook would build a full-blown email client into its interface then Live, Yahoo and GMail would really have something to worry about.

In the instant messaging field the desktop apps have a lot more to worry about. The IM does not have 40 years of history behind it and the most used IM clients have only about 400 million users (Usage share of instant messaging clients). Well, in China they do.

The problems with social networks’ IM clients are similar to email. Rudimentary interface, lack of voice and video. But looking at my own IM habits it is not a problem as most of the communication is text-based and I don’t much care for the bells and whistles of the desktop apps.

Facebook can have a huge advantage by implementing these tools. So, what do you think when will we see the fully-featured email and IM clients in Facebook colors?

Youtube search taking up 28% of all Google searches

A year ago, comScore reported that YouTube has grown to be the second largest search engine on the internet, topped only by Google itself.

Today, comScore’s 2009 US Search Rankings Report, published last week, reports that YouTube searches grew by 35% in 2009, reaching to more than 3.9 billion search queries.

YouTube had 50% more searches than Yahoo web search and 180% more searches than Bing. What we can see clearly here, is that people are getting used to finding information in the form of a video. The same tendency has also shown on websites – people are more likely to watch a short video, rather than read the text next to the video, saying the same thing.

The growing importance of Youtube search (and video search in general) isn’t showing any signs of slowing down, but rather it will grow even more in 2010. So keep an eye on Youtube and maybe consider picking up a camera yourself.

Customer interaction becomes social

In our post about social media trends for 2010 we suggested that more and more customer interaction will take place on social networks. Here’s why.

You are endlessly transferred from a robot to automatic response to answering machine. Push 1 for billing, push 2 for tech support… This may ruin your day even if you started out quite OK.

Personal touch makes business sense. If you feel that the person that you are communicating with is someone live, who understands your needs, then you are much more forgiving and open to compromise. Personal touch can fix a potentially explosive situation.

This means that bringing the support staff out from behind the anonymous company logo will give you more satisfied customers and sh*t will hit the fan a lot less often. This does not mean that you have to give in every time there’s a complaint. By simply listening and showing a human face will get you a result that answering machine never could.

When creating our clients’ strategies we usually interview their customers. This has given us invaluable insight how to improve the communication of fix a web site. But one of the most important things I have learned from those sessions is how grateful people are when they see that you are there just for them and you really try to understand them.

Social media will help to scale that personal touch. When a brand is answering somebody else’s problem in a human and authentic way then this act will improve my opinion of that brand. Every touchpoint and channel should be personal and open, increasing the brand value. Social media is the tool that helps you do that.

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Image credit Sanja Gjenero

The Future of Work

Thi Odesk presentation is very similar to our own vision anout the future of employment and work.

Social Media Weekend: Measurability, Top Blogs, Resources, Trends

How-to: Do Almost Anything Online in 2010. If you’re looking to improve your life in 2010, we hope you’ll find these 40+ How-To guides useful. You can find even more How-To guides and tips in the How-To section of this site.

CMOs Plan for Higher Social Media Measurability in 2010. How do CMOs link social marketing with real, bottom-line results? 120+ CMOs shared their biggest challenges, plans, and expectations for social marketing in this 2009 survey by The CMO Club and Bazaarvoice.

Social Media Blogs Top 200. This is the real thing. The best list of social media blogs in the world. Why is this the best list?

Social Media as the ‘Last Mile’ – The Internal War. First up is the internal war. This is what I originally said: 1. Jealousy from the existing marketing teams towards the ‘new’ social media team. This results in internal political battles that cripple both sides.

Top 10 Resources for Keeping Up with Social Media. You need to know what’s developing, what are the best practices, what are the trends. Everyone has their favorites, but here are some must reads. Sign up for their newsletters or feeds so you don’t have to go chasing around the web to keep up with them.

22 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2010. Here’s our own social media trend prediction presentation for this year. We were really amazed how much feedback we got from it.

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Image credit Sanja Gjenero