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Facebook IPO: Lifting the Lid on Claimed Numbers

Following Facebooks IPO a number of documents have been released covering the misgivings the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) had around their user data, in particular around mobile devices. These have been expertly summarised in this fascinating story on Bloomberg. This is not just important insight of investors; it is critical knowledge for marketers that are building businesses on Facebook and for our perception and application of analytics and social listening to developing strategy.

The Finance Sector is Starting to Look Beyond the Dangers of Social Media

Social media provides an opportunity for the finance sector to revive relationships and rebuild trust with the public after the recent economic crisis. Despite this, only 36% of organisations in the finance sector are using social media to support their business activities, and 11% have fully integrated online strategies, according to CICERO Consulting’s January 2012 figures. Fear of lack of expertise, compliance issues, potential brand damage and difficulty in measuring ROI, are some of the issues driving companies away from fully investing in a social media strategy.

Path vs. Instagram

In the USA 34% of internet users have uploaded photos online via a mobile phone, and 59% of internet users upload photos to a social network. The photo sharing community is growing rapidly, and now with a large increase in the number of sites specifically designed for photo uploading and sharing, such as Instagram and Path, the photo sharing world has much untapped brand and marketing power, figuring out how to use it in the best possible way for a business is the difficult part.

The Connected Correlation: Triple device users more social

Last week I looked at how local market social networks are still successfully competing with Facebook in certain countries around the world. This week, in contrast, I wanted to delve a bit deeper into a distinct type of consumer segment, the triple device user (myself included in that category). By triple device users I mean people who actively access the internet via PC/laptop, mobile phone, and tablet devices. This segment, at the moment, still resembles a typical early adopter segment that is more male and tends to be younger adults in most countries around the world.

One key point to remember is that the trend in triple-device users has been clearly increasing since the introduction of the iPad in 2010, and triple-device usage is fast moving to the mainstream particularly in more advanced markets such as the US and UK. The fact that Facebook penetration in these two countries is nearly the same among triple device users as it is for the average social networker testifies to this trend. As we examined last week, there are big local social network players in markets like Russia, but Russian triple device users are more than twice as likely to use Facebook than the average Russian social networker. If we extrapolate the trend we see in the US and the UK, it seems that Facebook has significant growth opportunities in Russia and other emerging markets, especially if its recent investments in mobile technology pay off.

Facebook dominates globally but closer inspection reveals local competition

June is GlobalWebIndex’s Social Platforms month, where we will go into detail on a range of social media platforms and how the world is interacting with them. The first article in this series takes a broad country by country look at the most popular social networking platforms to observe how those used varies around the world. We’ve taken the following subset of GWI markets as our examples: Brazil, China, Japan, the Netherlands, Russia, the UK and the US.