Webb 36.0

Women Flock to Social Games

Nearly one-half of US social network users now play social games, according to Lightspeed Research and Trendstream’s Global Web Index. That makes it the fifth most popular social networking activity, ahead of watching videos or searching for new contacts.

Women are taking to the casual gaming environment in greater numbers than men. Among all female Internet users, 28% play games such as FarmVille and Mafia Wars; men were 6 percentage points less likely to do so. Several other types of gaming, including offline and online console gaming and play in virtual worlds, were more popular with men than with women.

Online Gaming Activities of US Internet Users, by Gender, February 2010 (% of respondents in each group)

“Women are particularly attracted to short, casual games involving an active community like FarmVille, Cafe Wars or Pet Society,” said Tom Smith, managing director of Trendstream, in a statement. “Women also spend more time on social networks in general.”

Earlier research from PopCap Games also found women ahead in social gaming.

Q Interactive reported that 36% of female Web users played social games in January 2010. Slightly fewer than one-half of that group were used to seeing brands affiliated with the casual online games.

Frequency with Which US Females* See Brands Affiliated** with Social Games, January 2010 (% of respondents)

But from virtual goods to sponsorships, social games provide many opportunities for marketers to connect with players who now consider them an integral part of the social networking experience.

“The transformation of the gaming market towards casual social concepts has already changed the way that games are created and distributed,” Mr. Smith said. “The market is now much more open to anyone who wants to create games.

“This gives brands a huge opportunity to engage with consumers through casual games much more cost effectively than through other forms of advertising,” he said.

SMO - Social Media Optimization

"Increase website traffic by using SMO techniques on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Linkedin, etc."

Social Media Optimization or SMO is yet another method for search engine optimization of your site. As the name implies, you optimize your site by advertising it through the social media sites, online communities and community websites such as blog sites, message boards, podcasts, wikis and vlogs.

 The methods for social media optimization involve the use of RSS feeds, social bookmarking, video and photo sharing, social news buttons and blogging etc. The basic idea is to drive traffic to your site without spending money on search engine advertising.

The concept of social media optimization was introduced by Rohit Bhargawa of Ogilivy Public Relations. Originally, he enunciated five rules for social media optimization, but the list was expanded by other contributors.

According to Rohit Bhargawa, “The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.”

In actual practice, social media optimization seeks to create links to the site by making it more visible through the social networking sites like Squidoo, Blogger, Hubpages, Face Book, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, My Space or search engines like Technorati.

How does one go about social media optimization?

Getting links for your website

The number of links your site manages to pull through decides its popularity with the search engines. It is like deciding the popularity of the leader through the votes he gets. In case of a website its popularity index is the number of links it gets from other websites.

Tagging and bookmarking

Tagging and bookmarking can be made easier by inducting content features such as buttons like “add to delicious" and other bookmarking sites. In addition to this, you can also include relevant tags to your pages besides the home page for the popular social bookmarking sites.

Create inbound links

Inbound links are considered important for the popularity of the site and its content in searching engine ranking. You should create links to the blogs or sites that contain back links to your site and increase its visibility.

Make your content travel

Make some changes in your site to enable your content to travel far and wide in your niche area. This can be done by including portable content such as PDFs, video and audio files and submitting them to your list members as well as sites related to your niche. This will help you to create back links for your site.

Allow others to use your content

A glaring example of this practice is YouTube. You can download its videos to your sites to illustrate your content and make it more interesting. Another example is to use RSS feeds to syndicate your content so that others can use it for their benefit. This can help you to drive traffic to your website.

Pros and cons of social media optimization

As with other methods of driving traffic, social media optimization has become victim of spamming or link farming. While the noble idea behind social bookmarking is to include links to informative, useful and interesting sites, people bookmark - syndicate - their own sites in numerous bookmarking sites unmindful of the quality of their content which can be pirated, duplicate and cheap. It simply eats into the web space of the bookmarking site and creates a kind of content garbage making it difficult to sift grains from the chaff.

Twitter Usage Stats

Twitter has long kept secret the number of its registered users, reports Adweek, however the figures were finally revealed at the company’s Chirp Conference on April 14, along with a few other key stats:

1) 105,779,710 registered users
2) 60% of those are from outside the U.S.
3) 180 million unique monthly visitors
4) 75% of all Twitter traffic comes from outside of Twitter.com
5) 3,000,000,000 requests per day to Twitter’s API
6) 19 billion searches per month

Building the Social Web Together

Facebook has always focused on building ways for people to connect with each other and share information with their friends. We think this is important because people are shaping how information moves through their connections. People are increasingly discovering information not just through links to web pages but also from the people and things they care about. 

This flow of social information has profound benefits—from driving better decisions to keeping in touch more easily—and we're really proud that Facebook is part of the shift toward more social and personalized experiences everywhere online.

Three years ago at our first f8 conference for developers, I introduced the concept of the social graph, which is the idea that if you mapped out all the connections between people and the things they care about, it would form a graph that connects everyone together. Facebook has focused mostly on mapping out the part of the graph around people and their relationships.

At the same time, other sites and services have been mapping out other parts of the graph so you can get relevant information about different types of things. For example, Yelp maps out the best local businesses and Pandora maps out which songs are related to each other.

All of these connections are important parts of the social graph, but until now it hasn't been possible to easily share the connections you make on sites like Yelp or Pandora with your friends on Facebook. And you haven't been able to bring your friends from Facebook to share experiences on these sites or personalize them to you.

Today at our third f8, we are making it so all websites can work together to build a more comprehensive map of connections and create better, more social experiences for everyone. We have redesigned Facebook Platform to offer a simple set of tools that sites around the web can use to personalize experiences and build out the graph of connections people are making.

This next version of Facebook Platform puts people at the center of the web. It lets you shape your experiences online and make them more social. For example, if you like a band on Pandora, that information can become part of the graph so that later if you visit a concert site, the site can tell you when the band you like is coming to your area. The power of the open graph is that it helps to create a smarter, personalized web that gets better with every action taken.

We think that the future of the web will be filled with personalized experiences. We've worked with three pre-selected partners—Microsoft Docs, Yelp and Pandora—to give you a glimpse of this future, which you can access without having to login again or click to connect. For example, now if you're logged into Facebook and go to Pandora for the first time, it can immediately start playing songs from bands you've liked across the web. And as you're playing music, it can show you friends who also like the same songs as you, and then you can click to see other music they like.

We look forward to a future where all experiences are this easy and personalized, and we're happy today to take the next important step to get there.

by Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday, April 21, 2010 at 10:44am