FreshNetworks Blog

Facebook Home

Facebook Home, announced last week, is the social network’s latest bid to expand its social web over mobile devices. The Facebook Home app, available on Android phones, integrates the phone’s operating system with the Facebook platform by taking over your home screen with your Facebook news feed  and making SMS messaging look like a Facebook chat. This integration also gives Facebook the potential to mine vastly more information about its users than ever before.

What data can Facebook Home mine from your phone?

1. GPS: According to Gigaom, Facebook’s integration with the Android operating system allows Facebook to receive constant information about the phone user’s whereabouts via the phone’s GPS. From this Facebook could potentially work out things like where you live, based on your phone’s GPS location between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.
2. The phone’s accelerometer: The phone’s accelerometer could tell Facebook whether a phone user is walking, running or driving.  Adding this to the data Facebook already has about you, it can build a much better profile of its users, such as the places you shop, the restaurants you dine in and where you might spend a weekend pursuing your hobbies.
3. Chat Head: Facebook Home will bring together Facebook chat with SMS messages, so that your messages will get Facebook-ified and potentially, through the Android launcher, allow Facebook to read your messages sent outside its service.
4. VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol): Facebook has already been inching into this space for a while, but Facebook Home could bring internet calls via Facebook front and center to a user’s mobile experiences and bypass phone calls altogether.  Facebook calls would mean you wouldn’t have to look up someone’s contact details (Facebook already has them) and you wouldn’t have to pay international rates, giving many incentives to use a Facebook VoIP service. Although Facebook is not likely to actually monitor your calls, it would be able to get a lot of information such who you call, and how long you talk them.

What might it do with this data?

David Jacobs of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) suggests that the increased information available to Facebook via the new app, will help it to monetise your personal information through advertising. Advertisements won’t be in the first release of Facebook Home, but future versions will include an ad feature which gives Facebook an unprecedented opportunity to aggressively push commercial messages at its users.

However, there have been more and more news stories about a potential privacy backlash, as users are trying to weigh up the benefits of sharing increasing amounts of information with the risks of losing their privacy, and the potential damage caused by personal data getting in the wrong hands. As Jan Dawson, senior telecoms analysts at Ovum points out, “users don’t want more advertising or tracking and Facebook wants to do more of both”.

Hello!! (Photo credit: I_Believe_)

Only 10% of European consumers trust posts by brands on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter; in North America this number increases to 15%. This is the finding of new research from Forrester. It shows that consumer trust of brands in social media is still much lower than the trust they have for their friends and the posts they make.

The research, based on a sample of 20,788 (and 63,703 North American) European online consumers, was published by Forrester this week and explores how consumers react to different marketing messages and types of content.

Overall the message is clear – consumers trust content they go out to find (from expert reviews to recommendations from friends and family) than they do content that is pushed at them. Interruptive advertising such as marketing text messages and banner ads perform worst from a trust perspective. Posts by brands on Twitter and Facebook are the fourth least trusted source of information.

There is much brands can learn from this and from how they seek to build relationships online. The nature of social media is that it is about interaction and that it allows consumers to build their own networks or communities of people with whom they share common interests. And it can be difficult for brands to truly engage here.

Many consumers treat what brands say as they treat advertising – it is something that interrupts them when they are doing something else, and they treat it with a healthy level of scepticism. This is reinforced by the way many brands use these channels – promoting offers or discounts or new products to consumers.

For brands that truly engage in social the trust levels will be much higher. These brands are not using it for interruptive messages to to be part of consumers networks and communities, part of their shared interests. This is not easy to achieve and may not even be relevant for all brands, but with such trust can come real benefits.

In a world where we can learn so much from interacting with consumers and from seeing what they say, like and who they interact with, it is important that we earn their trust. Otherwise, there is a real risk that consumers block brands from their social media life; stop them seeing their data and stop them from understanding more about them.

Trust is important in social media and it comes from real engagement, not interruptive messages.

The Fifties in 3D (Photo credit: The National Archives UK)

“We want this video to go viral” – a phrase used too often without really considering what ‘to go viral’ means. I imagine what people mean when they say this is “we want this video to be really popular and seen by lots of people in our target audience”. But popularity is not the same as virulence. And very few things actually go viral in social media.

The distinction between popularity and virulence is important:

• Popularity concerns the number of people who see a piece of content
• Virulence concerns the manner in which this content is shared

A great piece of research exploring these differences has just been completed by a team at Microsoft Research, led by Jake Hofman. The team recorded every tweet containing a link to one of the top 40 websites in the world for music, news and videos over an 18 month period; they then built a data set of all content that had been linked to more than 100 times. This data set included links to nearly 300,000 pieces of content from over 1.4 billion tweets.

Then came the task of analysing how this content had spread, and this is where the difference between ‘going viral’ and ‘being popular’ became clear.

Popular Content

• Some content, such as many major news stories or brand content, would originally be Tweeted by an official media or brand account to possibly millions of followers. Maybe a few hundred of these would share the link to their followers and then maybe a few of those would share it on again. There is no doubting that the content was popular, and it was probably seen by a very large number of people.
• But critically the content would be seen by these people over a couple of days and then peter out. Popular but not viral.

Viral Content

• Other content was spread differently. It typically starts from an obscure feed, only followed by a small number of people. In the first few days it won’t reach anywhere near the audience of the ‘Popular Content’ but would have spread into many new networks – each sharing it with their followers – and this sharing rapidly reaches a momentum.
• Overall, Viral Content may not reach a higher audience in the short or even medium term, but it has reached a level of momentum that means its audience will slowly grow and grow before it finally peters out.

So when people say they want their content to ‘go viral’ do they really mean that, or do they mean that they want it to be popular with their target audience. ‘Going viral’ is nothing to do with the number of people who see your content but the way it is spread and the speed at which it is seen by people.

In most cases being popular is probably the most important thing – and that is hard enough in a world where more than an hour’s worth of video is uploaded to YouTube every second.

Just say no to evil (Photo credit: Jean-François Chénier)

Facebook yesterday launched a significant refresh of its News Feed – the main way most people interact with content on the social network. The changes give images a more central role in the user experience (which makes sense as almost 50% of the content shared on Facebook is now visual). And there are now more options to tailor your feed – including the option to get updates just from your friends. Herein lies the real challenge to brands – Facebook has just created a way for people to filter out all your content.

There are many benefits of the new Facebook News Feed for brands that are being discussed, notably:

1. Having a wider canvas to play with – by hiding the left hand navigation content behind a tab (like on the Facebook mobile app), they are offering everybody more space to play with. For brands this will create more space for them to be creative with the content they post and will increase the importance of imagery in their content plan.
2. Creating a similar experience across mobile and web – the new design unifies the experience across web and mobile – making it simpler for brands to design campaigns that work across platforms.

But, will these benefits be realised if people can just filter out your content in the first place?

Given the option to filter to just see updates from actual Friends, we must expect that many users would opt for this. Indeed research shows that the users unlike brands on Facebook because they ‘clutter up my News Feed’ – Facebook has just given people an easy way to remove this ‘clutter’.

This is serious for brands  who are using Facebook as an engagement mechanism – people consume brand information from the News Feed and not from individual brand pages. Now they might not consume your information at all. Unless, of course, you pay.

Advertising and sponsored posts will now also look more beautiful and be able to take advantage of the greater space available to them. For many brands these may now be the vehicle to make people aware of their page and of the content they share on Facebook.

Swing time (Photo credit: Dave-F)

Are you spending less time on Facebook than you once did? According to a recent report from Pew Research, over a quarter of all Facebook users in the USA (27%) plan to spend less time on the social network in 2013 than in 2012. And 61% of users report having taken a ‘Facebook vacation’ where they stopped using the site for several weeks.

Overall it appears that US users of Facebook are becoming more nuanced in their use of the social network – happily spending time away from the site and expecting to spend less time on it overall.

This is not necessarily a sign of them abandoning the site, or indeed that Facebook has ‘had its day’ as some may report. But it does suggest that the role Facebook plays in their life is changing. New tools, site and networks are fulfilling needs that were once served by Facebook. And users are becoming more mature in the way that they use social media tools and the ways they engage with people.

To understand more about this report it is worth exploring the motivations of people who take Facebook vacation, as well as of those who plan to spend less time on Facebook.

Why take a Facebook vacation?

61% of US Facebook users report having taken a break from the site that lasted ‘several weeks’. The most popular reason for the vacation was that they were ‘just to0 busy’ (21%) of users; with 10% saying they were just ‘not interested’ and another 10% that they thought it was a ‘waste of time’.

The reasons that we might expect for taking a break from Facebook (such as being on an actually vacation) were less frequently cited (only 8% of users in this case).

So for the majority of users taking a Facebook vacation, the site became irrelevant for them (for the period of the vacation). There was either nothing to tempt them onto it during a busy period in their life, or they felt somewhat disenchanted with the site and just wanted a break from it, possibly feeling they wouldn’t lose something.

This is significant for Facebook and shows the potentially precarious nature of social networks. People use it because it is relevant – either because of the content that is shared on it or because of the people they can communicate with through it. If people feel that the site is becoming less relevant they will drift away. Taking a Facebook vacation here and there, but ultimately using the site less and less unless it becomes more relevant to them again.

Why spend less time on the site?

When asked to think about the role they expect Facebook to play in their life in 2013, just 3% of US users of the social network expected to spend more time on it this year; 27% of users expected to spend less time on the social network. But perhaps the more interesting is to explore how this breaks down by age:

• 38% of those aged 18-29 expect to spend less time on Facebook in 2013 than in 2012
• 26% of those aged 30-49
• 17% of those aged 50+

So the younger Facebook users are the ones planning to spend less time using the social network. This is not necessarily a problem for Facebook, the younger audience is more likely to try out new sites and tools when they emerge and to develop a place for them in their life. They will be more promiscuous than some of the older (and it would appear more loyal) Facebook users and social networks may have to learn to live with this promiscuity.