Facebook exceeds expectations again with Q2 2014 results
facebook, mark zuckerberg, revenue, income, q2 2014, arpu
Facebook once again represented its second quarter results exceeding the expectation of analyst.This happened for 8th time in a row which resulted in positive reactions in market place.The company shows growth in revenue, income and user numbers. Compared to Q2 of last year, its revenue jumped 61% to $2.91 billion and its net income grew 139% to $791 million. Facebook is also seeing user growth across the board with 1.32 billion active users and 829 million daily active users, up 14% and 19% year-over-year respectively. When talking specifically about mobile, Facebook's Q2 2014 numbers are even more impressive. The company hit 1.07 billion monthly active mobile users, up nearly 6% from last quarter, and its daily mobile users jumped 7.4% from 609 million to 654 million. Facebook has also now set records around the world for its global rise in average revenue per user (ARPU), according to reports. The company seems to be pulling in more cash on a user by user basis, even as it continues to grow. As some have suggested, the growth numbers are fairly impressive for a company that already has so many users, but the expansion also rises costs. Facebook spent $1.52 billion in the second quarter of 2014, up about 22% from the year prior. However, despite the heavy expenses, Facebook clearly had a strong quarter. "Our community has continued to grow, and we see a lot of opportunity ahead as we connect the rest of the world," Mark Zuckerberg said during a statement accompanying the Q2 results.
1. YOUR BIGGEST ADVOCATES HAVE THE FEWEST FOLLOWERS:
When looking at your social media monitoring strategy, note that your brand/company mentions on social will likely not come from social’s biggest players. Very few, in fact, will.
Social monitoring website Mention analyzed over 1 billion social mentions from the past two years, and in their analysis they found that 91% of mentions come from people with fewer than 500 followers.
And these are potential brand advocates--only 6% of the mentions in this study were deemed overtly negative.
What you can do with this stat: Putting this stat another way, fewer than 1 out of every 10 mention will come from a power user. You can prioritize these power users if you want, but it’s also important to give a quick and delightful response to those with few followers--the vast majority of those talking about you.
2. TWITTER HAS 6 DISTINCT COMMUNICATION NETWORKS:
The Pew Research Center and the Social Media Research Foundation combined on a report that analyzed thousands of Twitterconversations to come up with six distinct communication networks. Which of these six do you most closely identify with?
What you can do with this stat: Tight crowds and community clusters seem like apt groupings for brands interested in a lot of engagement. Support networks, too, can be a type of communication network for brands, especially if you are doing customer support on Twitter. Analyze your own place in these Twitter networks to see where you fit and if you need to change your strategy to mix with a different group.
3. MARKETERS SAY WRITTEN CONTENT TRUMPS VISUALS:
Social Media Examiner’s annual survey of nearly 3,000 marketers leads to a ton of insights into how marketers think about social media and sharing.
Interestingly enough, in a social landscape dominated by visuals, it is written content that most resonates with marketers. Over half of marketers (58%) claim written content is their most important form of social content. Visual content came in second (19%.)
What you can do with this stat: Original written content can be a great opportunity forthought leadership, authority, and brand awareness. When you’re creating new content to share, keep in mind the power of storytelling. If you’d rather zig while the others zag, this stat shows you some fertile ground for developing lesser practiced strategies, like focusing on visual content.
4. YOU HAVE LESS THAN AN HOUR TO RESPOND ON TWITTER:
Consumers expect a lot from you on Twitter, as recent research by Lithium Technologies confirms. The real-time nature of Twitter has led to incredible expectations. According to Lithium, 53% of users who tweet at a brand expect a response within the hour. The percentage increases to 72% for those with a complaint.
What you can do with this stat: Tools like Must Be Present can help you track your response time on Twitter, or you can invest in software like Spark Central to stay on top of your customer support tweets. At the very least, consider the timeliness of your response to your Twitter followers: Either grab a monitoring service to manage your timeline or get really good at checking your Twitter email alerts.
5. LATE NIGHT IS THE BEST TIME FOR RETWEETS:
TrackMaven analyzed over 1.7 million tweets to come up with data behind the best practices for earning a retweet. The best time of day to tweet for a retweet? After-hours, between 10:00 p.m. and 11:00 p.m. ET.
This advice follows the Late-Night Infomercial Effect (share when share volume is lower, and your content has a greater chance to stand out), so it makes sense to see that engagement after hours would be highest. Track Maven also found that Sundays are the best day of the week to get retweets and that tweeting with the word “Retweet” or with all caps or exclamation points leads to more retweets.
What you can do with this data: Test out the after-hours theory with some of your own tweets and see how engagement changes based on the time of day and day of week that you tweet. If you’re feeling particularly bold, you can try all caps and exclamation points, too.
6. FRIDAYS ARE FACEBOOK’S BEST DAY FOR ENGAGEMENT :
The Social Intelligence Report from Adobe analyzed over 225 billion Facebook posts from the past two years to come up with some data-backed recommendations forFacebook marketers. Their research on the best day to post pointed to a clear winner: Fridays, which receive more comments, likes, and shares than any other day of the week.
What you can do with this stat: Be sure that your posting schedule includes a Friday post, and you might even consider saving your best stuff for the end of the week.
7. PHOTOS DRIVE ENGAGEMENT ON FACEBOOK PAGES:
It’s likely that a stat about the power of visual content is not surprising to you, but how about a stat of this magnitude? According to Social Bakers, 87% of a Facebook page’s interactions happen on photo posts. No other content type receives more than 4% of interactions.
What you can do with this stat: The obvious takeaway here is to post more photos--and not just any photos. Choose photos that support your post or tell a story on their own. Certainly, Facebook pages are already embracing photos as posts: 75% of page updates are photos.
8. FACEBOOK, PINTEREST AND TWITTER DRIVE THE MOST TRAFFIC:
Social sharing site Shareaholic revealed an interesting split in the way that social media sites refer traffic back to a website. Turns out, the data points to social being a source of either quantity or quality.
In terms of quantity, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter are the top three referrers of traffic. The Shareaholic study looked at a four-month period of data (December through March), covering more than 300,000 websites. In their study of engaged traffic, the lowest-performing sites for referral volume came out on top for engagement.
YouTube, Google+, and LinkedIn ranked as the top three sources for referrals in terms of time on site, pages per visit, and bounce rate. Social referrals engaged What you can do with this data: Get involved in social media accordingly. If you’re after a big reach and spreading brand awareness, go with Facebook and Twitter, and think long and hard about joining Pinterest, too. If you’re interested in more qualified traffic, then be sure to invest time in Google+, LinkedIn, and YouTube. These stats recommend a broad social strategy, if you have the time and resources to pull it off.
9. AIM FOR 28, 118 OR 385 INTERACTIONS PER POST (IT DEPENDS ON YOUR TOTAL FANS):
As Facebook page reach has declined, we marketers are left wondering what constitutes good engagement these days. Earlier this year, Social Bakers analyzed more than 40,000 pages to see exactly where the average engagement lies for pages of all sizes. Pages with 1 to 9,999 fans: 28 interactions per post 10,000 to 99,999 fans: 118 interactions per post.100,000 to 499,999 fans: 385 interactions per post.
Interactions represent the total of comments, shares, and likes. In addition to the benchmark data above, Social Bakers also found that interactions on a particular post are directly correlated to a post’s reach. The more engagement a post gets, the more people will see it.
What you can do with this stat: Measure your Facebook page’s success against the benchmarks in this Social Bakers study. As time goes on, reach and interactions may continue falling, so these targets could be great to aim for but not the end of the world if you miss.
10. THERE’S A BEST DAY FOR EVERYTHING ON PINTEREST:
The Pinterest blog recently revealed which categories get the most engagement on each day of the week. Here’s how the calendar lays out:
Facebook has conducted a secret massive psychology experiment on its users to find out how they respond to positive and negative messages - without telling participants.
Over 600,000 Facebook users have taken part in a psychological experiment organised by the social media company, without their knowledge.
Facebook altered the tone of the users' news feed to highlight either positive or negative posts from their friends, which were seen on their news feed.
They then monitored the users' response, to see whether their friends' attitude had an impact on their own.
"The results show emotional contagion," wrote a team of Facebook scientists, in a paper published by the PNAS journal - Proceedings of the National Academy of Scientists of the United States.
"When positive expressions were reduced, people produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts; when negative expressions were reduced, the opposite pattern occurred. These results indicate that emotions expressed by others on Facebook influence our own emotions, constituting experimental evidence for massive-scale contagion via social networks."
Facebook's workforce is 69 percent male and 31 percent female. In the US, employee base consist of 57 percent white, 34 percent Asian, 4 percent Hispanic people, and only 2 percent Black employees.
Facebook's Maxine Williams said that diversity is essential to achieving their mission, and they build products to connect the world and need people from different communities, backgrounds and cultures.
He admitted that Facebook's diversity figures follow disappointing trends seen across the tech industry, and they have more work to do, a lot more.
Facebook says New York City prosecutors who were building a disabilities-benefits fraud case last year got data from the Facebook accounts of 381 people.
The social media giant disclosed a nearly yearlong legal fight over the issue after the filings were unsealed this week.
Facebook ultimately turned over the information but is appealing the court order that required it to do so.
The Menlo Park, California-based company says prosecutors intruded on users' privacy in obtaining the largest set of search warrants the company has ever received. It says 62 of the users were among 134 people charged in the case.
The Manhattan district attorney's office and a judge have said the search warrants were justified.
The dispute adds to a roster of clashes between authorities and Internet companies.
Facebook and the New York district attorney's office are in a bitter fight over a privacy question that was bound to come up sooner or later in the digital age: Does a government demand for the entire contents of hundreds of Facebook accounts amount to an illegal search of people's digital homes, and can a service provider like Facebook do anything to stop it?
In confidential legal documents unsealed Wednesday, Facebook argues that Manhattan
prosecutors violated the constitutional rights of its users last year by demanding the nearly
complete account data of 381 people, from pages they liked to their photos and private
messages.
When thesocial networkingcompany fought the data demands, a New York judge, Supreme
Court Justice Melissa C. Jackson, ruled thatFacebookhad no standing to contest the search
warrants since it was simply an online repository of data, not a target of the criminal
investigation. To protect the secrecy of the investigation, the judge also barred the company
from informing the affected users, a decision that also prevented the individuals from fighting
the data requests themselves.
Late Wednesday, a few days after Facebook filed an appeal on the constitutional issues, the
court unsealed the case, allowing the company to discuss it and inform the affected users.
The case pits the Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches by the
government against the needs of prosecutors to seek evidence from the digital sources
where people increasingly store their most sensitive data. Facebook is the world's largest
social network, with about 1.28 billion active users worldwide, and it accounted for about 1 of
every 6 minutes Americans spent online in December
The world’s biggest social network is still by far the most popular among US teens despite the rise of new apps and services like Snapchat and Tumblr.
US respondents between the ages of 12 and 17 ”The results were clear: Facebook remains young users’ favorite social network. More than three-quarters of online youth use Facebook — twice as many as use Pinterest or Tumblr or Snapchat, and more than use Instagram and WhatApp combined.And 28 percent of young users who are on Facebook say they use it ‘all the time,’ a higher percentage than said this about any other social network.”
After a research on Facebook and a number of analysts suggested that teens were falling out of love with the social network. ”Ever since Facebook CFO (chief financial officer) David Ebersman admitted last October that young teens were visiting the site slightly less frequently, most have accepted as fact that young people are fleeing Facebook en masse,”
5 Data-Driven Ways To Get Your Facebook Post Seen by Your Audience!
1. Schedule for more engagement
A marketer has a never-ending queue of tasks, which makes it essential to know the most effective times to post to social media.
In order to land a spot on a user’s Facebook News Feed, try shifting your scheduling strategy from posting during the most popular times in the workweek to the most effective times.
For example, although most of the work marketers put in happens Monday-Friday, the magic actually happens during the weekend. Posts on Sundays receive 2.72 interactions and are 25% more effective than a post on Wednesday.
Studying time of day showed some similarly counterintuitive data. Posting during the weekday (particularly during lunch) is most popular (All the data to follow is based on Eastern Standard Time):
But posts published after hours (from 5 p.m.-1 a.m.) gain the highest average of interactions on average.
Both of these findings support the late night infomercial effect: When there’s little else on, you’re more likely to watch an infomercial. When there’s little else being posted, your posts are more likely to stand out.
2. Get visual: Images receive 37% more interactions
It’s a fact: the brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than text.
Facebook became the largest host of online photos in 2011, and it’s still a prime spot for visual content. 88% of the Facebook posts we studied are images, and they receive 37% more average interactions than those without photos. So stay visual!
3. Punctuate your posts: Try an exclamation point
Punctuation is often times considered an afterthought. However, punctuation can convey the kind of emotional value that helps brands connect at a more human level. For example, we found that using exclamation points in a post correlates with more engagement.
An exclamation mark isn’t commonly used on Facebook—71.17% posts studied did not use them. But the posts that do use them see 2.7 times more engagement on average.
How many do you need? Overall, we found a positive correlation between post effectiveness and number of exclamation points. (A post with 7 exclamation marks receives 7.84 interactions on average. Now that’s something to get excited about!)
4. Add hashtags for 60% more engagement
On any social network that offers hashtags, it’s generally a good idea to use them. They’re a relatively new development on Facebook, which introduced hashtags in 2013 to correspond with trending topics and to guide users to news and content on specific topics.
Fewer than 1 in 6 posts we studied contained hashtags, but those that include at least one saw 60% greater engagement results than those without.
How many hashtags gets you the best results? We found that post effectiveness is positively correlated with increasing hashtag use. Although posts with 1 or 2 hashtags did better than those with 3 or 4, posts that used a number of hashtags beyond 4 saw extraordinary engagement, peaking at 5.41 interactions per post at 7 hashtags.
5. Write longer posts: 80-89 words is best for engagement
The 140 characters on Twitter limit the message a marketer can craft and optimize, but it’s much different for Facebook. With a “limit” of more than 60,000 characters, you could get carried away. But since the competition is high, as a marketer it’s important to optimize your messaging to the right amount of words.
33.09% of posts we looked at had a word count of 10-19 words and the majority (57.21%) kept their message short, at less than 20 words.
But our data showed a positive correlation between word count and post effectiveness. More specifically, posts of 80-89 words got 2 times as much engagement, topping out at 6.19 average interactions per post.
Surprising, right? One possible theory behind the increased effectiveness of longer posts is that they benefit from the intrigue of Facebook’s “Continue Reading” link.
According to psychology and behavioral economics professor Dan Ariely, our brains have a tendency to shift our preferences towards things we invest energy into—a theory known as theIKEA effect. Users could be more likely to interact with these longer posts because they’ve invested more time in reading them, just like the way you love your IKEA furniture because you’re invested in it from building it yourself.
