Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: Facebook

  • Facebook and its mobile river of gold

    Facebook and its mobile river of gold

    It seems Facebook has found its river of gold with the company’s quarterly stock market statement reporting a 57% increase in revenues and a stunning 195% in net profits.

    Particularly impressive was mobile sales made over 8o% of the company’s advertising revenue, up from just short of three quarters in the previous years.

    For other online services, particularly Google, Facebook’s success on mobile must be galling as they struggle with the shift to smartphones.

    How long that growth can continue remains to be seen. For the moment though, Facebook is showing how to make money on the mobile web.

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  • Guessing ethnic affinity

    Guessing ethnic affinity

    What’s your ethnic affinity? Apparently Facebook thinks its algorithm can guess your race based upon the nature of your posts.

    This application is an interesting, and dangerous, development although it shouldn’t be expected that it’s any more accurate than the plethora of ‘guess your age/nationality/star sign’ sites that trawl through Facebook pages.

    Guessing your race is something clumsy and obvious but its clear that services like Google, LinkedIn and Facebook have a mass of data on each of their millions of users that enables them to crunch some big numbers and come up with all manner of conclusions.

    Some of these will be useful to governments, marketers and businesses and in some cases it may lead to unforeseen consequences.

    The truth may lie in the data but if we don’t understand the questions we’re asking, we risk creating a whole new range of problems.

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  • Bringing the Internet to the masses

    Bringing the Internet to the masses

    For the developing world, broadband and mobile communications are helping

    In Myanmar, the opening of the economy has meant accessible telecommunications for the nation’s farmers reports The Atlantic.

    At the same time, Indian Railway’s Telecommunications arm RailTel is opening its fibre network to the public, starting with Wi-Fi at major stations.

    What is notable in both cases is the role of Facebook. In India, Facebook’s project to offer free broadband access across the nation is meeting some resistance and it’s probably no coincidence Indian Railway’s WiFi project is being run as partnership with Google.

    In Myanmar on the other hand, Facebook and Snapchat are the go to destination for rural communities, it will be interesting to watch how this plays out as farmers start to use the social media service for price discovery and finding new markets – as Tencent Chairman SY Lau last year claimed was happening with Chinese communities.

    One of the promises of making the Internet available to the general public was that it would enable the world to become connected, thirty years later we may be seeing the results.

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  • Facebook has another attempt at local search

    Facebook has another attempt at local search

    Before the web came along, advertising for the local plumber or hairdresser was just a matter of placing an ad in the local newspaper and a listing in the Yellow Pages. Then the internet and smartphones swamped those channels.

    One of the greatest missed opportunities has been small business online advertising. With the demise of phone directories, particularly the Yellow Pages, it’s been hard, time consuming and expensive for smaller traders to cut through the online noise.

    This market should have been Google’s for the taking however the local search platform has been drifting for years in the face of company apathy, mindless bureaucracy and silly name changes to fit in with the Google Plus distraction.

    While Facebook has been playing in the local business space for a while they are now ramping up another service with a new site for local services search.

    TechCrunch reports Facebook are experimenting with the local search function and while it isn’t anywhere near as comprehensive as Google’s at present the rich data the social media service has been able to harvest could well make it a far more useful tool.

    However it’s not Facebook’s first attempt and Apple too has been playing in this space albeit with little traction.

    If Facebook or Apple does usurp Google, the search engine giant will only have itself to blame for missing the opportunity as it was distracted by loss making ventures while letting potentially lucrative services pass.

    The local business search market should be a lucrative opportunity for the business that gets it right. It may well be that all the big tech giants are unable to make this market work.

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  • A tale of two social media networks

    A tale of two social media networks

    This week showed the disparate

    At the time of its IPO in February 2012, Facebook claimed to have 845 million active monthly users. Eighteen months later at the time of their stock market float, Twitter boasted a more modest 232 million.

    This week Facebook reported 1.19 billion monthly active users while Twitter still languishes at 300 million, a number that disappointed the market and saw the smaller company’s shares drop 11% after their quarterly earnings announcement.

    Even more worrying for Twitter, and competing networks like Google, is Facebook’s success in mobile services with 874 million people accessing the service through their smartphones every day last quarter.

    So successful is Facebook in engaging roaming users that some pundits are predicting the company’s Instagram product may well overtake both Twitter and Google in mobile advertising revenues over the next few years.

    More concerning for Twitter is the company is still not profitable – of the business’ $957 million gross profit, an astonishing $854 million was eaten up in administration and sales costs which indicates their overheads are in need of some dramatic pruning.

    What is clear that Facebook and Twitter have very different user behaviour and, as a consequence, the revenue models are not the same. Twitter is never going to be Facebook.

    So the question for Twitter is what does it want to be? Certainly the current quest to drive up revenues seems doomed. Perhaps it’s time to accept the company is a smaller operation and start to plan accordingly.

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