Posts Tagged ‘facebook’

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Twitter downtime worse than other social media

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

By Robert Lockard

Twitter has come a long way since 2007. It exploded in popularity in 2009, though it still has yet to reach the heights of either Facebook or MySpace in terms of monthly visitors. You can read more about this in my Submit Solution blog entry, “MySpace is 3 times as popular as Twitter.”

Not only has Twitter gone from having less than 1 million visitors a month to nearly 20 million, it has also improved its downtime. Alas, just like its number of visitors, Twitter is far worse than every other major social-media site in its total amount of downtime per year. It’s getting better, but Twitter still suffers from frequent crashes. Remember the big one earlier this year?

I read some fascinating analyses of Twitter’s downtime in two Royal Pingdom articles: “Twitter growing pains cause lots of downtime in 2007” and “Social network downtime in 2008.” Check out this chart of the major social-media sites’ downtime, in hours:

Social network downtime in 2008

You can find the rest of this blog entry on the Social Media Blog on Submit Solution on November 30, 2009. That blog entry is called, “Twitter goes down 7 times more than Facebook, MySpace.” The Social Network Downtime graph is the copyright of Royal Pingdom. Keep coming back to the eHarbor Blog for great stories like this.

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Posted in Social Media | No Comments »

Twitter: Social media’s underdog

Thursday, November 12th, 2009

By Robert Lockard

Twitter is a total underdog compared to MySpace. That’s what I learned from comScore’s data on social media. Facebook is clearly the reigning champion of social media. That wasn’t much of a surprise, but the thing that really grabbed my attention is the fact that MySpace is a strong second while Twitter is barely in the running. Take a look at the graph below to see what I mean.

Graph showing Facebook, MySpace and Twitter visitors

Isn’t that amazing? All we seem to hear about is Twitter this and Twitter that in the blogosphere, but I think the real story is Facebook and MySpace. From all the talk, or lack thereof, about MySpace, I thought the service was practically defunct. But it has three times as many visitors as Twitter and two-thirds the number of Facebook’s visitors.

MySpace doesn’t look weak in my eyes. In fact, it looks dominant compared to Twitter.

I found the above graph in the Chicago Tribune’s Business section on a page simply entitled, “Twitter vs. Facebook vs. MySpace.” The paper offered no commentary on the graph’s startling revelations, so I’m taking the liberty of doing so here in the eHarbor Blog.

I would like to focus on three aspects of this graph: 1. Twitter’s and MySpace’s recent stagnation, 2. Facebook’s astonishing rise to the top spot, and 3. Social media’s revenue sources.

1. Both Twitter and MySpace are faltering

Both Twitter and MySpace have stagnated recently. However, MySpace was still above 60 million visitors in August, a barrier it crossed at the end of 2006 when Twitter was just starting out. Twitter, however, barely crossed over the 20-million mark after a meteoric rise in 2009, and then it started plateauing a little bit.

During the same time period in which MySpace has started dropping and Twitter has grown, Facebook has exploded in popularity, reaching 92.2 million visitors.

Facebook and MySpace seem to be performing well and have reached a much broader audience than Twitter. Perhaps over time Twitter will make up the difference, but I don’t see how that explains its disproportionate amount of attention in the media and blogosphere.

You can find the rest of this blog entry on the Social Media Blog on Submit Solution on November 17, 2009. That blog entry is called, “MySpace is 3 times as popular as Twitter.” The graph is the copyright of Tribune Newspapers. Keep coming back to the eHarbor Blog for stories about eHarbor, Inc.

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Posted in Social Media | 1 Comment »

Is email finished?

Monday, November 2nd, 2009

By Robert Lockard

In the Wall Street Journal article, “Why Email No Longer Rules,” I found a fascinating argument against email and for social-media sites, like Twitter and Facebook. Email is on its way out as the primary means of sending online messages.

Email gravestone, rest in peaceFor a dozen years or so email was the freshest, easiest way to keep in touch with people over long distances without having to pay big phone bills. Now it’s old hat. Basically, the paradigm of online communication has changed and we’re all going to have to change with the times.

What do you think? Is it a good thing that email is being replaced by instant communications? I think it’s great for ecommerce. With the aid of instant messaging, tweets and wall posts, online marketers can serve their customers much better and faster than ever before.

If you would like help getting a great website design, I recommend you contact Submit Solution’s Web professionals. They are extremely effective at delivering captivating website designs that help increase your conversion rate of visitors into customers.

You can find the rest of this blog entry on the new Social Media Blog on Submit Solution. That blog entry is called, “How ecommerce benefits from email’s death.” Keep coming back to the eHarbor Blog for stories about eHarbor, Inc.

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Posted in Social Media | No Comments »

Bing and Google launch social-media solutions

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

By Robert Lockard

Google could soon change the rules of keyword Internet marketing with the debut Have you heard? Google and Bing are adding new social-media search capabilities to their search engines in an attempt to keep up with these innovative websites. Bing already has a beta version of its new search engine designed specifically for Twitter results while Google is holding back at the moment.

Chess match in color and black and white

Google and Microsoft are caught in an escalating fight over who will dominate the search-engine market for social-media sites like Twitter and Facebook. I read about this in the PC World article, “Real-Time Search: Google and Bing Rivalry Intensifies on Facebook and Twitter.” This article refers to the Google-Bing rivalry as a chess match. Quite an apt metaphor, in my opinion, because I love all of the strategy that goes into a seemingly simple chess game.

Social media has been a thorn in the side of major search engines for a few years now. Facebook and Twitter are simply updated too often and too fast for search engines to keep up with them. It looks like that might be changing, though.

You can find the rest of this blog entry on the Submit Solution SEO Blog on Monday, November 2, 2009. The photo of the chess match is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of marcusrg.

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Posted in Search Engines, Social Media | 2 Comments »

Is Facebook dying?

Thursday, September 3rd, 2009

By Robert Lockard

Is Facebook starting to die? That’s the topic of an astonishing New York Times article, entitled “Facebook Exodus.” Author Virginia Heffernan starts by pointing out:

The exodus is not evident from the site’s overall numbers. According to comScore, Facebook attracted 87.7 million unique visitors in the United States in July. But while people are still joining Facebook and compulsively visiting the site, a small but noticeable group are fleeing – some of them ostentatiously.

Telluride, Colorado ghost town

I’ve written about Facebook several times in the eHarbor Blog, usually noting its strength and rapid growth. Along with Twitter, it is leading the social-media revolution – or fad – that could change search engines and other aspects of the Internet. This article grabbed my attention and demanded I discuss it.

You should definitely check out the New York Times article because it tells five stories about individuals who left Facebook for a variety of reasons. They are all quite compelling. One felt his privacy was violated by Facebook, and another felt she was wasting too much time on the website.

The feelings of privacy violation are completely understandable, and perhaps even unavoidable. Facebook is a social network so its information is not meant to be completely private. Perhaps people’s concerns are just the result of their own carelessness in posting too much information or not studying the rules to keep it hidden. Or maybe it’s a combination of shifting, hidden or hard-to-understand rules, as well as people’s decisions not to read the fine print.

The last paragraph in the New York Times article sums it all up nicely:

Is Facebook doomed to someday become an online ghost town, run by zombie users who never update their pages and packs of marketers picking at the corpses of social circles they once hoped to exploit? Sad, if so. Though maybe fated, like the demise of a college clique.

You can find the rest of this blog entry on the new Social Media Blog on Submit Solution when it is published. The new Submit Solution redesign is almost ready, and it will get most of our Internet marketing blog entries from now on, while the eHarbor Blog will mostly be about eHarbor, Inc.

The photo of the ghost town near Telluride, Colo. is from Flickr, and it is courtesy of Rob Lee.

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Posted in Social Media | 1 Comment »

Angry ecommerce customers fight back on Twitter

Monday, July 27th, 2009

By Robert Lockard

Customer retention has always been an important part of business, but it is even more essential for survival in the world of ecommerce. I read an eye-opening E-Commerce Times article, entitled, “Mapping Out an Effective Online Customer Retention Strategy,” that really laid out the situation.

Dog jumping in San Francisco

I’ve talked a lot about using social-media websites, such as Twitter and Facebook, to spread the word about your online business. These, combined with search engine optimization, are powerful Internet marketing tools. However, they can also be used against you by disappointed customers with an ax to grind.

Word of mouth used to be the most-effective and least-expensive way to market a company’s products or services. But today, anyone with online access can easily send a message about a company, whether good or bad, and have it seen by hundreds or thousands of people.

This is an important topic, and this isn’t the first time I’ve talked about customer service on the eHarbor Blog. I mentioned some customers’ efforts to get even with companies they thought were unfair to them in the blog entry, “Do you hate customer service?” In that post, I talked in general about losing customers and how they often turn to social media to vent their frustrations. But now I can share specific statistics that show why it is so important to keep customers happy.

The E-Commerce Times article mentions some sobering statistics that add a sense of urgency to retaining online customers. I think it’s okay to republish them here because the article’s author was quoting from a book, “Leading on the Edge of Chaos.” Here they are:

- Acquiring new customers can cost five times more than satisfying and retaining current customers.

- The average company loses 10 percent of its customers each year.

- A 5-percent reduction in customer defection rate can increase profits by 25 percent to 85 percent, depending on the industry.

- The customer-profitability rate tends to increase over the life of a retained customer.

- A 2-percent increase in customer retention has the same effect on profits as cutting costs by 10 percent.

Clearly, customer retention should be the focus of every business. Angry customers’ unfavorable words could influence a large number of people who might have otherwise become customers. If you keep your customers happy, they could share good stories about your company with their friends on social networks.

The photo of the dog catching a chicken in midair is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of mylerdude.

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Posted in Ecommerce, Social Media | 3 Comments »

Experts are wrong: Twitter and Facebook help SEO

Tuesday, July 21st, 2009

By Robert Lockard

On Wednesday, July 15, 2009, I attended one of WebMarketing123.com’s free webinars, called “Increase Sales Through Social Media Optimization.” I highly recommend you attend these wonderful webinars. They teach a lot about search engine optimization, paid-search campaigns and other important ecommerce topics that can help your bottom line.

Free-Google-search coupon

At this particular webinar, the speakers talked a lot about optimizing websites to get the best results on search engines. That’s a topic I also covered in my seven-part SEO series a while back. The part that really caught my interest was when they talked about social media and its relation to SEO.

The speakers said Facebook and Twitter are not useful at all for gaining first-page ranking on search engines, like Google or Bing. Any links posted on these two websites have a “nofollow” tag in their HTML code, telling search engines to disregard them in their algorithms. The good news is links on other social networks, such as Digg, LinkedIn, Technorati and Propeller, actually do count toward SEO for your website.

I also took away from the webinar the fact that Facebook and Twitter are great for generating qualified leads. You can tweet about company offers or post links to landing pages on your Facebook wall to invite interested customers to your site. They can definitely help increase traffic to your website, though not through the search engines.

I think the webinar speakers got one thing wrong, though. They said Facebook and Twitter offer absolutely no help with SEO, but I think that’s only partly true. Yes, they don’t offer direct SEO because the links on them don’t attract search engines’ attention. But one of the reasons you post a link on these sites is to get other social-media users to find it and post a link to it on their own blog or website. And that does help with SEO because inbound links are powerful.

I think Twitter and Facebook are useful SEO tools, even though they might not seem so at first glance. I’ve been talking a lot about Twitter and Facebook in the last week. My last eHarbor blog entry was called “Is Twitter overhyped?” but now I’m starting to realize Twitter is more helpful than I previously thought. Both Twitter and Facebook are fascinating tools and they can be useful when incorporated into an overall marketing strategy that includes SEO and other online strategies.

The photo of the free Google search coupon is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of Bramus.

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Posted in SEO, Social Media | 2 Comments »

Is Twitter overhyped?

Friday, July 17th, 2009

By Robert Lockard

I read an interesting discussion on Reddit with the heading, “Anyone else think media exaggerates the usefulness of Twitter?” The author makes a strong argument that Twitter is not as effective as many say it is. He starts his diatribe by saying,

Everywhere I look, it’s Twitter this, Twitter that. I feel that Twitter, although a nifty little social networking tool, is simply the medium of choice for the “old” and “non-tech savvy” to try and relate to the younger technical audience.

How Twitter took over the worldThis person goes on to compare Twitter to other social-networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace, and find it wanting. This discussion caught my eye because I have been hearing nothing but good things about Twitter, so it was refreshing to hear a different take on the subject.

Twitter is well-known as a way for people to talk about mundane, everyday tasks they are currently doing. Remember the time traveler describing Twitter to people in the past? In that light, it seems like a silly waste of time. But others tout it as a great way to stay in constant contact with clients. For instance, Twitter is an excellent way to talk about new product releases, special deals, real-estate listings and other marketing information.

You can build a network of like-minded businesspeople and customers interested in your products or services, without the usual cost of traditional advertising and marketing.

But Twitter’s usefulness is limited. It might be good for instantly delivering news, but the credibility of anything reported on that site is extremely low. Twitter can easily be used to spread false ideas and unfair rumors. I have to take many things I read there with a grain of salt because there is no quality control or other way to make sure what is said is true without outside verification.

I’m not sure if I totally agree with the author of the discussion on Reddit, but I appreciate his courage in bringing some debate to the idea of social media.

I’ve been covering a lot of stories on social media and Facebook and Twitter, in particular, this week. I hope you’ve enjoyed my discussion on these important Internet marketing tools. We’ve got plenty more ecommerce topics to talk about in the eHarbor Blog, so keep coming back.

The photo of “How Twitter took over the world” is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of renaissancechambara.

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Posted in Social Media | 3 Comments »

Facebook could soon rake in billions

Wednesday, July 15th, 2009

By Robert Lockard

Facebook is among the kings of social media, when it comes to total users. But it’s lagging behind in the amount of money it makes because its focus is so much on customer growth. However, one of Facebook’s board members expects annual revenue to soar into the billions of dollars by 2014.

Facebook headquartersFacebook currently has 225 million users, and it is expected to generate an estimated $500 million in revenue in 2009, according to an article in Reuters, entitled “Facebook revenue to be ‘billions’ in 5 years: board member.”

In the article, Mark Andreessen, an entrepreneur who has invested in Twitter and is a member of the board of directors of privately held Facebook, says Facebook’s value is about to explode. He also suggests the company could earn more than $1 billion this year, but it’s wise not to because if it did it might end up like MySpace.

Several years ago, MySpace was the most-popular social network, but then it tried to turn its popularity into profits by adding more ads and not improving its content as well as it could have. Now where is MySpace? A distant second to Facebook. It’s losing members while Facebook is rapidly picking them up.

Facebook faces a delicate balancing act trying to please both customers and investors. Its investors include heavyweights like Microsoft, Accel Partners, and the Russian company Digital Sky Technologies. You can read more about the Russian investment in Facebook in my eHarbor Blog entry, “Facebook’s $200 million boost a win for social media.”

As I said before, Facebook has the power to transform social media. It might take a few years, but it will be exciting to see when Facebook finally comes into its own and becomes a stronger company.

The photo of Facebook’s headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif. is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of steven.walling.

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Posted in Social Media | 1 Comment »

Facebook’s $200 million boost a win for social media

Friday, June 5th, 2009

By Robert Lockard

As a follow-up to my eHarbor Blog entry on Facebook’s growing pains, I would like to talk about Facebook recently receiving $200 million. I read about it in a CNN article, entitled “Facebook scores $200 million.”

Pile of dollar bills

Facebook has certainly not had any trouble getting new subscribers during this recession. In April, it surpassed 200 million users, an amazing number considering the company started just four years ago.

However, Facebook has had a bit of trouble obtaining investment capital since the start of the recession. That’s understandable, since investors and consumers are trying to be extra careful about where they spend their money.

I found it particularly interesting that the article mentioned Facebook’s overall value fell from roughly $15 billion in October 2007 to about $10 billion in May 2009. That drop coincides with my blog entry “Marketers cut social media presence when they need it most.” As times get tough, companies cut back on things they consider to be nonessential, and social-media sites like Facebook and Twitter are being neglected a bit.

Social media is an important part of marketing strategies now that so many of our potential and current customers are using those services. It’s a great way to stay in contact with them. Facebook’s growth and success could affect the way we market products and services in the future so it is wise to be a part of it. Just remember that social media is not search engine optimization, and both should be used to effectively reach customers.

The Russian company that invested $200 million in Facebook said they think Facebook could become one of the largest Internet companies in the world some day. Seventy percent of their users are already outside the United States, so they’re on their way.

The photo of the pile of dollar bills is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of mmarchin.

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Posted in Ecommerce, Media | 2 Comments »

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