Youth Prefer Instagram and Snapchat over Facebook

Some interesting facts have emerged from eMarkter's most recent mobile forecast regarding how the young are using social media sites. The most important finding is that younger social media users prefer Instagram and Snapchat over Facebook.

Facebook has 14.5 million users in the 12-17 year old demographic, but Snapchat has 15.8 million in the same age group. Instagram lags behind both with about 4.2 million users in this age group. However, among 18-24 year old users, Instagram has almost the same number as both Facebook and Snapchat with Instagram having 22.1 million, Snapchat 24.4 million, and Facebook coming in at 23.5 million. These statistics are for U.S. users of these social media sites only.

From long, sentimental posts to black and white photographs from childhood... let's face it, when it comes to mothers, all of Facebook is incredibly "thankful" for all that mothers do each and every day to make our lives so much sweeter.

In addition to all those heartfelt sentiments that were shared last Sunday, to kick off Mother's Day weekend, the social site brought back the purple flower reaction which allowed you to respond to posts with a reaction of "thankfulness"... instead of a simple Like.

Facebook tests breaks for ads interrupting on-demand videos on their platform, and video creators get a 55 percent cut on the revenues.

Facebook has announced it is testing the concept of ad breaks during on-demand videos in collaboration with a limited group of partners who will garner 55 percent of the ad revenue generated by the plan. Facebook keeps the remaining 45 percent. This could create changes in how video makers make videos, causing them to create content that keeps viewers hooked through ad breaks and drawing more video creators to Facebook.

As Facebook tests breaks for ads, they are allowing video producers to pick where they want the ads to appear in their video, as long as they come on no sooner than 20 seconds into the piece and are a minimum of two minutes apart.

Aran Khanna was looking forward to an Internship at Facebook before that opportunity was taken away. A browser application that he developed showing individual’s location when they were chatting with Facebook Messenger, made the company upset. The application used a security flaw in the site that Facebook had been aware of but did not fix. Khanna promoted the app on Medium, Reddit, and Twitter. Within 3 days the company disabled the security flaw, asked Khanna to take down the app, and withdraw his internship. For a Harvard student working in his dorm room, the move was quite ironic.

Google admitted that when it comes to competing with Facebook, it simple cannot.

In matter of fact, Google's vice president, Brad Horowitz, said that those who want to chat with others on Google products will not need to have an account on Google+. All they will need is a Gmail account.

Google's social networking site was started a few years and it was hoping to be Facebook's competition, but Facebook has more than 1 billion users around the world. As for Google, they had around 300 million, and there have been some reports that have wondered how active Google users were.

The Facebook acquisition of WhatsApp may seem excessive, and some insiders echo this sentiment. Reviewing the acquisition may present a different perspective, and the $19 billion price may not seem excessive after all.

WhatsApp users fit the demographic mix of customers that Facebook may be searching for. Facebook enthusiasts display a preference for mobile messaging that works as a social network as well.

You can send messages to a single recipient or to many recipients with WhatsApp. 600 million photos are sent daily with WhatsApp, and this is greater than the number of photos that are uploaded to Facebook each day. 62 percent of Facebook users are active each day, but WhatsApp reports daily activity of 70 percent.
Facebook wants to grow its base, and the WhatsApp purchase mirrors the Instagram acquisition of 2012. Facebook has lost some of its younger customers, but WhatsApp may help them recapture the teen and tween mobile messaging market.

Illustration of Facebook mobile interface (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Facebook Announces They Will Begin To Publish Mobile Games

On July 30, 2013, Facebook has decided to announce that they will begin to publish games for mobile platforms.  The announcement took place at the Casual Connect Conference in San Francisco, California.  They are sharing the news in San Francisco in the hopes that the technologically-apt environment of Northern California will offer a number of developers that are looking to join their new game publishing effort.

Illustration of Facebook mobile interface (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Facebook Posts Get A Lot of Exposure

Each time you post to Facebook you might think that no one sees it because no one liked it and no one made any comments. But according to a recent study done by Facebook on its own data, a full third of the users that follow you see each posts that you make. That is a really good number of friends that have seen your posts.

twitter y macworld (Photo credit: juque)

Twitter Follows LinkedIn, Facebook and Google With Ad API

In an attempt to get more advertising without hiring a good number of new sales members, Twitter opened its Ad API to the public today. This follows other technology companies that have made similar moves including Google, Facebook and LinkedIn. This makes it easy for large buyers to quickly setup and manage campaigns with in-house programmers. Small businesses can continue to use the web-based interface provided by Twitter for small transactions.