A few weeks back there were headline reports of Facebook losing customers in May 11– 6m in the US, 100,000 in the UK. The figures were from a fairly dubious source and Facebook immediately refuted them. So we didn’t comment.
The actuality seems to tell a rather different story. ComScore reports that Facebook actually gained 368,000 users in the UK between Feb and May 11.
Last year (See my Earthquake presentation on 21st Sept 10) I presented a chart forecasting that Facebook would hit 1b international users sometime in 2011. Sounded a bit fanciful at the time. But today TechCrunch reckons they have hit 750m and are waiting to announce the ‘Big 1 Billion’. I reckon they will do that to coincide with their IPO announcement in early 2012.
Anyway, the number of users is not the most important measurement.
Any long term Holway-follower will know of MyTop – the portal to everything in your Cloud. (Just search the archives on MyTop fo
r the many articles I have written on this topic since 2007) We have long suggested that Facebook is as close to our MyTop as anything else around and it gets closer with every Facebook new feature. Users are spending more and more time on Facebook – up from an average of 21 minutes per day in Dec 09 to 25 min per day in Dec 10. I’ve just been reading a fascinating article by Ben Elowitz at All Things Digital. Using ComScore statistics, he shows that a combination of more users and longer time spent per user means that Facebook’s US users have increased their time spent on the internet by a massive 69% in the year to Mar 11. In that time, non-Facebook use of the web actually shrank by 9%. In the US, one out of every 8 minutes on the internet is now on FaceBook.
The significance of all this to advertisers is clearly huge. That’s why Facebook’s classified advertising $ poses such a threat to Google’s sponsored search $. It’s why Elowitz argues that SEO is becoming much less important. What really matters is engaging people on Facebook.
Interestingly, Facebook has also announced a rather neat new feature this week – Comments Ads. Basically it means that an ad will appear on your page, probably with a question. If you respond, your comment generates a Status update which is viewed by your friends. This kind of viral marketing is hugely powerful. Every piece of research shows we are far more likely to be swayed by a friend’s recommendation than anything else.
I guess this is why I believe that the Facebook proposition is so very strong. It is the one real game-changer around. It could, of course, still fall flat on its face. But Facebook has the potential to eclipse both Google and Microsoft. Will Apple take on Facebook head-to-head? Will Facebook launch a phone? Will Apple try again in social?
Whatever, nothing will be the same again.