Facebook Beats Google as Most Popular Web Destination

Guess it had to happen, and it did, last week. Hitwise figures show Facebook's national domination as the most popular U.S. web destination. For the week ending March 13, Facebook grabbed 7.07 percent of all U.S. web traffic, barely beating Google's at 7.03 percent.

See the graph above; clearly Facebook has been steadily rising in traffic since last year. Traffic to Facebook increased 185 percent compared to the same week last year, whereas visits to Google increased only 9 percent.

Compared to the rise of social games on Facebook (like Farmville and Mafia Wars), there was little happening at Google to encourage traffic growth.

However, when measured by reach .... the percent of the U.S. population that visit ... Facebook still has a way to go. Comscore, another analytics firm, ranks Google as the top site by reach, with 81 percent of the U.S. population. According to Techcrunch, Facebook's reach ranking still has it behind Google (and Yahoo and Microsoft, for that matter) at 53 percent of the U.S. population.

Social Media Count: No Longer Possible to Ignore It

The rise of social media in the last few years has created exponential growth in web usage. Here's a "real time" app that shows just how dynamic and active the social side of the web is. It helps put the growth of social media in context:



Here are some of the key data points that the ‘Media Count’ is based on:

• 20 hours of video uploaded every minute onto YouTube (source YouTube blog Aug 09)
  Facebook 600k new members per day, and photos, videos per month, 700mill & 4 mill respectively (source Inside Facebook Feb 09)
• Twitter 18 million new users per year & 4 million tweets in April 2009 sent daily (source TechCrunch) ... now 50 million Tweets per day in February 2010 (source: eConsultancy)
• 900,000 blogs posts put up every day (source Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2008)
• YouTube daily, 1 Billion videos watched per day, $1mill bandwidth costs (source Comscore Jul 06; Dec 2009 SMH)
• Second Life 250,000 virtual goods made daily
• Text messages 1,250 per second (source Linden Lab release Sep 09)
• Money – $5.5 billion on virtual goods (casual & game worlds) even Facebooks gifts make $70 million annually (source Viximo Aug 09)
• Flickr has 73 million visitors a month who upload 700 million photos (source Yahoo Mar 09)
• Mobile social network subscribers – 92.5 million at the end of 2008, by end of 2013 rising to between 641.6-873.1 million or 132 million annually (source Informa PDF)
• SMS – Over 2.3 trillion messages will be sent across major markets worldwide in 2008 (source Everysingleoneofus sms statistics)

It's undeniable: social media are here to stay. Every non-profit, regardless of size, needs to think about their presence in this sphere.

The flash app above was designed by Gary Hayes; here's his Personalizemedia blog.

Oh No! Facebook fan page rating plummets to One Star! (But number of fans more than doubles!)

Early in November, while on Facebook, I noticed that my Peak Performance Philanthropy fan page had attained a 5-star rating and a very high post quality score.

I proposed an experiment and promised to report back. The results are in.

The 5-stars rating has dropped to a measly 1-star. Why? Lack of interaction on the part of the fans. I guess the subsequent posts haven't been very engaging. Thus, the rolling 7-day average caused four of the stars to disappear.

What apparently created the "high post quality" score was a flurry of interactions in response to postings on Sesame Street and the election results in Maine. Over several days, there was an abundance of comments, likes, and wall postings. Together, they drove the quality score up to 112. Today, it's zero! On the chart at left, you can see several days' worth of interactions that elevated the post quality score ... preceded and followed by a flat-line. Not that I take this personally, but would it hurt you to click on like? Or jot a comment? Or even scrawl something on the wall?

What's really revealing is how few people need to do something to move the score. Less than eight people total "interacted" over a three day period to create the sky-high 112 quality score. Imagine if LOTS of people "interacted"?

Some of you did what I asked, and invited some of your friends to join the fan page. You can see the spike in total fan count that occurred just after the November 5 posting (in the red oval). That growth curve has continued at a slightly accelerated rate, so that, as of today, there are 64 fans of the page ... more than double what there were just 25 days ago!

So, not only was there an immediate bump in fan count ... but the "natural" growth was steeper after the experiment than before, perhaps attributable to the viral nature of social media. (Also, the fans are now from all over the world, including Canada, New Zealand, Vietnam, Thailand, and the Philippines. Before the experiment, you were all from the United States. Now, we have a multi-national audience!)

At this rate, there will be 100 fans by New Year's Day!

What's also interesting is to compare the makeup of the fan base, before the experiment (top chart as of 11/4) and after (bottom chart as of today). Or maybe it's not all that interesting, because the percentages didn't change all that much. Still slightly more male (53%) than female (45%).

Age-wise: not a striking change here either, but there's been a swing toward older fans.

Age 25-44:
Before, was 52%, now only 41%.

Age 45+:
Before, was 44%; now 56%.

So, what does this all mean? Beats me. What do you think?

And, if you're so inclined, I also invite you to visit the Peak Performance Philanthropy fan page (click here). Click on Suggest to Friends, carefully select some friends who might be interested in how people experience the joy of giving to their favorite causes (plus a smattering of other stuff with dubious relevance). In other words, invite some of your friends to become fans of this page.

My take-aways:

• I need to post more frequently.
• The posts need to be more relevant to your interests.

Let's see where this takes us.

5 Star rating of Post Quality on Facebook ... Cool!

I've got the greatest fans on Facebook! Checked in today to the Peak Performance Philanthropy fan page and saw this 5 Star rating of my post quality.

When one's fans choose to interact with posted material by commenting, liking, or writing on your Wall, it has the effect of spreading the content virally throughout Facebook (because their comments, likes, and wall scrawls show up in their News Feed that their friends see).

Apparently, "Post Quality" is determined by the percentage of fans that engage when content is posted to a fan page. It is calculated on a rolling seven-day basis.

The number of stars depends on how your Post Quality compares to similar Pages (that is, Pages that have a similar number of fans). I don't know how many stars one can get, but five seems like a great number, and I'm thrilled with that. And I'm not sure what 112 points means, but I know a lot of people with IQs that are lower, so I'm not complaining about that either.

On the scarier side, there's the question of how much Facebook knows about you. Yeah, the era of privacy is probably long gone. But here's just a snippet of the info Facebook can feed back to me about my fans. In the aggregate, I guess it's harmless enough. But, of course, Facebook has the actual details.

So, I love you men (56%) and women (44%); youngish (24% 18-34 years) and less-youngish (44% 45+) ... fans all!

Let's play a game. Invite some of your friends to join the page to see how the numbers shift. Just click on Suggest to Friends in the upper left corner of the fanpage. Will my Star rating plummet or soar? Will I attract more men or women? Will the age makeup skew; if so, which way? I'll report back in about a week's time.

Playing with social media to see how it works is fun. (Also a sign that I don't have enough to do!)

Click here to go to my fanpage and suggest to your friends that they join. Thanks!

USA TODAY launches online community, "Kindness: New Ways We Give and Volunteer"

We could joke and call it Philanthropy-Light. Or Giving-Digest. But our nation's top-selling newspaper has launched its newest online community, and its theme is charity, good causes, giving, and giving back.

No small audience: the print and online editions of USA TODAY reach more than 5 million a day. Here's how they're positioning the online community:

Kindness is your daily source of inspiration and guide to making a difference in fresh and exciting ways, no matter where you are. Each day, this site will unearth unique stories of giving with exclusive interviews, fresh takes on news stories, plenty of tips, and links to interesting resources. But we're also building a community, and we look forward to hearing from you.

The community can be found here. You can see a lot there, but of course, you have to register and all that to participate in commenting, connecting, blogging, posting in (or creating) forums ... the usual social networking stuff. But it's all under the USA TODAY brand. No doubt there will be an on-going promotion of it. Who knows? Maybe it will become a generalized philanthropy portal for those who are interested, attracting donors and organizations alike.

(USA TODAY also published its third annual philanthropy section in the newspaper, entitled "Sharing in the USA.")

Cool News for (non-profit) YouTube Users: Annotations and External Links!

I've refrained from doing a lot of posting on social media. For one, even though I'm a long time user of LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, et.al., other people know more than I, especially about the nuts and bolts. For another, I don't want to do "me too" postings, joining the landslide of commentators and advice givers, immitating and repeating essentially the same old stuff.

But THIS is news. In fact, if you haven't already put up whatever video your organization has on YouTube, then now is the time to explore that. The last possible "excuse" is gone!

Michael Hoffman of See3 Communications explains the new, special YouTube Annotations functionality available only to organizations that are part of YouTube's Nonprofit Program. With this new functionality, you can create "buttons" inside the video player that allow your viewers to connect to an external page---your website, your donation page, a petition, a call to action, anything!

Annotation has been around for awhile, but they always had to link to another YouTube video. This is the FIRST TIME that YouTube has allowed traffic to be directed away from its site. Watch ...



Cool, right? Well, there's maybe ONE excuse remaining:

"I don't know where to start."
Then check out Gear Up for Giving, a series of tutorials, to help nonprofits and their supporters understand how to use key tools and techniques to create awareness, catalyze civic action and cultivate new supporters and donors for their causes. Watch this introductory video to learn more about social media. Then, go to Case Foundation for further information.



Kudos to YouTube and Case Foundation.