Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Just as Facebook has changed tremendously since 2010, so have users' habits with regard to the like button.

Just as Facebook has changed tremendously since 2010, so have users’ habits with regard to the like button. PostRocket, which helps brands manage their Facebook campaigns, analyzed how people liked pages two years ago in comparison with current nature. The company quoted statistics from Lab42, showing that 87 percent of people like brands now, compared with 38 percent in 2010.

PostRocket also gleaned statistics from a 2010 ExactTarget survey that asked users why they like pages. It showed that 40 percent of people liked a page to receive discounts and promotions, 39 percent wanted to show support for the brand, and 36 percent wanted to get a “freebie,” while only 13 percent wanted to interact.

Here’s a snippet of an infographic from Lab42, showing the motivations in 2012 for liking a page. Naturally, people still want something in exchange for the like...

[A sea change and opportunity for marketers, content pros and PR ~Jeff]

...The digital landscape changes fast, and pictures are a main catalyst. Netscape released the first commercially available web browser in 1994, and fewer than 15 years later Flickr housed more than 6 billion photos -- that's more than 450 times the number of photos held by the Library of Congress. In 2009 more than 2.5 billion camera-enabled devices were in the hands of would-be photogs who, in the course of a year, produced 10 percent of all photos ever taken. Instagram -- the mobile photo-sharing app that Facebook bought earlier this year for $1 billion -- measures its customer engagement in uploads-per-second. Back in the quaint old days of December 2011 -- pre-acquisition and before comScore released data showing Instagram's daily usage is now greater than Twitter's -- that engagement was 60 uploads per second. By early 2012 Facebook members were uploading more than 300 million photos every single day to the site.

"This slurry of data signals the end of the Kodak Era where we took photos on birthdays and vacations and shared them only with a small group of friends," said Bob Lisbonne, CEO of Luminate and former SVP for Netscape's browser group. "We've now entered a phase in which visual communication is supplanting the written word -- what some are calling the dawn of the 'imagesphere."...

Research from a team at Harvard Business School supports Malik's claim. A 2009 study finds that 70 PERCENT OF ALL ACTIVITY INSIDE SOCIAL NETWORKS REVOLVES AROUND PHOTOS. Keep in mind that the study was conducted in a time when Facebookers were uploading a mere 31 million photos a day, and MySpace was still relevant enough to be included in a study of social-media sites....

[I highly recommend this post for marketers, content pros and PR. It provides a very strong rationale for visual content in anything to do with the Internet. ~ Jeff]

"Social TV" service GetGlue says it's now rivaling Twitter when it comes to certain kinds of TV shows. But it may be that many of us are happy not to chat about TV shows at all.

Most “social TV” apps want you to hang out with them instead of gabbing about TV on the social networks you’re already using, like Twitter. That seems like a nonstarter to me.

Not so, says one of them. GetGlue, a start-up that’s been working on social TV for a couple of years, says that for some kinds of shows it has as least as much engagement as Twitter does — even though Twitter has many more users.

GetGlue says that for many scripted TV shows — that is, excluding reality shows, news events, awards show or sports shows* — the company sees as much action, or more, than Twitter.

Here’s the argument (which requires many caveats, which you can read at the bottom of this post) in chart form...