Here’s some statistics about effectiveness of Facebook marketing tactics:

Looking at the numbers, we see that creating Facebook applications was the most effective tactic. Surveying fans had pretty good results too. Advertising on Facebook is the worst performer.

Usually, a good Facebook application will engage users in a fun or meaningful way. Facebook applications have the potential of engaging for long and can exploit viral channels available in Facebook. I also thought it was the most effective approach in Facebook in the long term since brands can use an application to grow a user base with time. Then, the brand has a base of operation to pitch their fan page, contests or other timely promotions. I’m glad to see that numbers are confirming what I believe.

Here are the statistics for Twitter:

For Twitter we see that try to sell was giving the worst results. The best performing tactics were those involving answering tweets about PR problems or responding to other negative tweets about the brands.

I also like the fact that in-person events are performing well with Twitter. Twitter is always proving to me that it is an amazing bridge between online social interactions and real world interactions. What’s more engaging that meeting persons face to face? Fun stuff!

It’s common sense for people in social media but it proves that really engaging with users or customers is the most effective social media marketing approach.

I read on Mashable yesterday their 10 Things You Must Do to Earn Your Audience’s Trust. I often made similar recommendations to people. I feel that some points needs clarification or adjustments. Here are my insights on some points.

Tell us who you are

I would add that you should say what topics you will discuss, what is your angle. If you run a blog, do not make it only about your brand. For example, Paradivision creates social media applications but our blog covers social media news and trends for business.

Don’t setup a profile on every network

I do not recommend to write the exact same message on all the network. I stay away from tools to publish the same updates on many networks; doing that only creates noise. If you wish to engage in a conversation with your customers, you must be willing to make the time.

I often spread the same stories on Twitter and Facebook. But I will use different sentences to do it. On Twitter, my followers may have never met me. There are more chances that I have at least met you once if we are Facebook friends. For that reason, I use different words to talk to each audience. In Facebook, I use the link and comment features to publish richer content.

Know that news spread more and die faster on Twitter. I find LinkedIn to be a passive social network. But some people like it. Try it to see if it is for you.

Write for the Word

Writing short posts is crucial. Aim for posts between 200 and 400 words. People do not have the time to read longer stories. If you wish to cover several angles, split the story in a series of posts. Each post must stand on its own.

Document Everything

I wish to point out that text is more SEO friendly than video. So even if you post a video, you need to include some text in your post. Use videos to complement what you are saying, to bring a topic or to document an event. It works great for quick interviews. Keep your videos under 2 minutes but aim for 1:30 minutes. It needs to be short for people to watch your video.

Web 2.0 is about sharing and engaging. Upload your videos on You Tube or Vimeo. You want to give bloggers a chance to spread the words and embedded your video into their story.

+ Photo by Jerome Paradis showing an improvised session at PodCamp Boston 4, that happened last weekend

• ComScore Media Metrix’s year-end report: Women’s community was the most visited and fastest growing Internet category, tied with politics. The number of unique visits to women’s community sites jumped 35% to almost 70 million from 52 million. This is quite an achievement considering the US Presidential race.
• InsideFacebook: Two days ago (in September 2008), a new survey shows that women outnumber men on Facebook in every age group.

The most current Facebook statistics look like this

What it interesting is that reality is still holding. It has been true month after month. Women are truly embracing social media. The only social networking site where there is more men than women is LinkedIn.

Anderson Analytics’ Social Network Sites A&U Profiler Survey

The first conclusion that is interesting for a marketing viewpoint or if you wish to have your own social network application is to look at how men and women use SNS. You can read from the press release on that particular SNS study the following:

While male and female SNS users engage in similar activities online, the survey found that males are more likely to share information about their hobbies, interesting articles or work-related topics. Female users in general are more likely to share photos, information about what they are currently doing or posts about their pets.

Social network sites vary in popularity based on ages. From that you can see that the older generations use mostly Facebook and Twitter. The Generation X and the WII generation are the most active on Twitter. Overall, Facebook is the most popular site, followed by My Space, Twitter and LinkedIn. Plus, Facebook members were the most loyal among regular users.

Anderson Analytics published the results of an interesting survey in mid-July 2009 about SNS habits and user profiles. The survey reached 5000 users in the United States. The average ages are not too far apart. The survey found that MySpace has the youngest user group (29 yrs old), while LinkedIn’s audience is the oldest (36 yrs old). Facebook users have on average 34 years old while the average age on Twitter is 33.

It came to no surprises that people in different age groups use social networking sites (SNS) for the different reasons. We see that survey after survey. After all, generation gap and different lifestyles play a role in how people uses SNS.

MORE:
+ New Social Media Study: Facebook Trumps Other Social Media as Most Valuable; Majority of Users Can’t Do Without Popular Site on Tom H. C. Anderson
+ How the Old, the Young and Everyone in Between Uses Social Networks on eMarketer

+ If you are not convinced of the popularity of social media, have a look at more than 20 mind-blowing social media statistics. The 250 million Facebook users have a high level of participation. More than 120 million Facebook users log on to Facebook at least once a day and more than 30 million users update their statuses at least once a day. 50% of all Twitter updates are published using mobile and Web-based tools. Twitter is my social media when I am on the go.

+ Mitch Joel of Six Pixels of Separation shared how some brands use Twitter to listen, discover problems and act on it without posting a single tweet. Twitter is a wonderful tool for customer service research. Even if the high level management is not ready at your company to actively interact in social media, it does not mean that you should do nothing. Remember that just monitoring what people say about your brand is useless if you do not act on based on the information you gathered. Read How Big Business Is On Twitter Without Being “On Twitter”.

+ If you are thinking of tapping into the social game industry, know that 1 In 10 Internet Users Buys Virtual Goods. According to a survey released yesterday, 12 percent of Americans said that they spent real money on virtual items in the last year. Via Information Week

+ One big news on the technology side was the Microsoft-Yahoo search deal to try to better compete against Google supremacy on the search engine market. You will find some key facts about the deal on Mashable.

+ Looking at the avatar of my friends, I say that that the “Mad Men Yourself” microsite launched Wednesday created attention for the AMC’s TV series. I am a fan of the show. People use the head shot as an avatar on Facebook or Twitter. You can also swell your body image on your iPhone or on your Facebook profile. Or if you are still into that, display the scene on your desktop.

+ One thing that I am not convinced yet that it was a worthy investment for Eight O’Clock Coffee. It is the brand that fuelled (i.e. sponsored) the microsite. AMC approached them to sponsor the Mad Men Yourself microsite. Out of curiosity, I am running a small Twtpoll at the moment to gauge if people have noticed the Eight O’Clock Coffee’s sponsorship. So far, no one answered Yes. I need more votes for a proper assessment. Voting will be open until August 1st. Vote or see the results at http://twtpoll.com/r/l4u99j

This is the latest social widget for Facebook Fan page. Fan Box can turn your Web visitors into fans. It is meant to be put on the blog or Web site of brands, celebrities and local businesses with a Facebook page. If it is your case, you should test the Fan Box widget to see if it brings you more new fans than your actual Become a Fan link.

Any Facebook page administrator will not have any problem installing this Facebook Connect-enabled social widget to their existing Web site or blog. You can simply display a Become a Fan button but I feel the widget gets more social when you add the profile image of your fans and/or the stream of your recent posts. The fans that will be shown are randomly selected each time the Fan Box is published. The link underneath the Fan Box leads to your fan page on Facebook.

How to Install It?

It is super easy to do. You generate the code to add to your Web site via Facebook. The interface could not be simpler.

You can custom the number of rows of fans to be published by entering a multiple of 5 as the parameter for connections. You change that information from the code generated by Facebook before pasting it into your Web site HTML page. Two rows (10 connections) is the default. Two rows creates a widget  that will be 265 pixels tall.

The default width is 300 pixels but you can adjust it. Notice the widget must be at least 200 pixels wide and 64 pixels tall in its simplest form. If you do not wish to use the recommended Javascript, click on Advanced Options for the iframe code.

You can supply the generated code to an ad server if you wish. That is what we did for At Home with Kim Vallee.

To generate the code to add to your Web site, simply click on the Add Fan Box to your Site that is now available on the links after your Page’s profile picture. So far, several big names have implemented the Fan Box widget on their site including the World World Fund and Lance Armstrong/Livestrong.

If you used the Facebook Fab Box widget as a fan or a page administrator, can you comment on your experience?

MORE:
+ Facebook Developers

Let’s take Farm Town, a recent social game on Facebook by SlashKey.

As of today, the game has 4,778,781 monthly active users.

From information gleaned from the developer and the moderators in the forums, Farm Town’s user growth is simply astounding. The game is still in beta and cannot yet be found when searching the Facebook Application Directory.

A developer (known as Bert) said that they initially only sent 12 invitations on February 1 to friends to test the game with a few users. They went from 12 users to 3 million users in 2 months with zero marketing. Today, a bit more than 4 months later, they are nearing 5 million users.

A single MAU can be expected to generate between $ 1 and $2 per month for a successful online game. Make a quick calculation. With more than 4.5 million MAU, you can see that if Farm Town is intelligently monetized, it has the potential to generate major monthly revenues. I wouldn’t be surprised to see an acquisition of Slashkey in the near future.

The game has experienced some growing pains in managing this unexpected growth. At one point, they were adding between 1 and 2 servers a week. I tried to contact the developers to get more insights but understandably, I did not get any answer. They must still be very busy adding new servers or features!

For a quick glance at what the game is about, I suggest your read Kim’s post about Farm Town.

Excerpts

As background information, here are some excerpts of information I found in their forums at different points in time.

March 31, 2009

Just to give you some idea of what we are dealing with here is some information about the game development:

Some basic stats:

• Farm Town launched on February 1st. (we did some testing in 1/31).
• Over two million monthly active users.
• We have 550K visitors per day, and we are growing about 10-20% daily.
• The game is running on 11 servers, and we are adding 1-2 per week.

It is easy to see that some growing pains should be expected!!

April 8, 2009

From 0 to 2,453,182 monthly active users in just over two months, do you have any idea how much hardware and bandwidth growth is needed to keep up?

Originally Posted by sfppfo
when i do a search on facebook for farm town it says no application found. so i tried just farm and still Farm Town didn’t come up on the list then i tired town and still Farm Town didn’t come up on list and i was wondering why not?
•    Interesting that you should ask that question. I just learned some interesting information in the last few days and hadn’t had a chance to convey it yet…
•    Quote:
Originally Posted by Bert
Farm Town is not “public” per se. If you search for it on Facebook, you won’t find it. We haven’t published it to the application directory. You cannot install it.

The only way to install Farm Town is by following an invitation from a friend.

We needed to test how the application would perform in real life. To do this we sent it to a dozen people to test. The idea was to test with a handful of users, iron out all bugs, and then publish the application. What happened is that in 2 months, we went from 12 users to 3 million users, with 1 million users playing in a day. And we’ve been trying to slow growth since day one.

Currently our servers are processing 4,000 requests per second, and transmitting 200 MBytes per sec. To put things in perspective you would need 1300+ DSL lines to serve this much bandwidth…

April 20, 2009

3,466,004 monthly active users.

April 26, 2009

3,925,219 monthly active users.

POST UPDATE – 2009-06-09

As of today, June 9, 2009, Farm Town has 8,482,129 monthly active users. Farm Town, which is now officially in the Facebook directory, makes an appearance in the rankings as the fourth most popular game on Facebook.

POST UPDATE – 2009-10-24

Please note that we are not the makers of Farm Town. We are not related in any way to Slashkey, the creators of Farm Town and we do not know how to contact them. We just wrote about their game.