Google Maps loses lead in mobile mapping in China
According to Beijing-based research firm Analysys International, the Google Maps app now accounts for 25.3% of mobile client usage in China, a decline from 46.3% around the same time last year, and now second to Autonavi by a mere 0.2% in terms of the apps Chinese consumers turn to for their online mapping needs. Considering the rise of location-based social networks in China, such as location-based check-in app Jiepang and other photo-sharing apps that use geo-tagging, losing out on market share could be very disadvantageous for Google, considering its already diminished presence in China with Google search capturing a small percentage of the online search market dominated by Baidu.

Blackberry photo app PicMix on par with Instagram’s initial growth
Blackberry’s 60,000 apps in its App World may seem paltry compared to Apple’s App Store and Android marketplace Google Play, but Blackberry developers have been catching on to the photo-sharing craze as well. PicMix, an app that includes photo filters and photo-sharing functionalities, has reached 1 million users within the last two months, which its founder claims is progressing at a pace faster than Instagram in its initial stage. The app has had over 7.5 million photos uploaded by more than 1 million members thus far, with 32,000 new members signing up every day. Its user base is spread out all across the globe, with 40% of members hailing from Indonesia, 10% from Venezuela, and South Africa in third with 9%. Let’s see whether PicMix can indeed become the Instagram for Blackberry devices.

360Buy has over 40 million users
E-commerce is booming in China, with a total transaction value of 240.1 billion yuan or S$47.71 billion for the year 2011, and China’s second-largest B2C e-commerce site 360Buy.com is reaping the benefits. It has over 40 million registered users to date, and have been processing around 400,000 orders per month for the past two months. Its sales income is also increasing at a rate of about 200% per year, which may have received a boost due to its new hotel bookings and travel services additions. Judging by the current rate of growth for China’s B2C market, we don’t expect 360Buy’s growth to be slowing down anytime soon either.

Tumblr’s new ad revenue model
Having recently passed the 50 million blog mark, Tumblr announced its first foray into paid advertising at Ad Age’s Digital Conference on Wednesday. Tumblr will start offering ad units  from 2 May 2012 via the “Radar” post that appears on a Tumblr user’s dashboard, which currently features an officially curated selection of images that highlights notable or popular posts. Prior to the repacking of Radar as an ad unit, Tumblr had 15 partnerships wherein Radar was used to promote content from brands. Radar placement currently receives 120 million impressions per day from users logging into their dashboard across devices. At present, Tumblr makes money by receiving a cut from sales of custom blog themes that are sold on its platform, as well as charge users to highlight posts for their followers within their dashboards for US$1.

US online video market
Data from comScore revealed that 181 million or 83.5% of the US Internet audience watched nearly 37 billion online videos in March 2012, with the average viewer having watched 21.7 hours of online video content. Considering that the duration of the average online content video was 6.4 minutes long, each viewer could have watched up to 203 videos in a month. Google Sites, driven primarily by YouTube.com, ranked as the top online video content property with 146.1 million unique viewers in March, followed by Yahoo! sites with 60.6 million, VEVO with 51.3 million, Facebook.com with 45.1 million and Viacom Digital with 44.3 million. The opportunities for brands to engage with its audience through video content seem pretty great, as is targeting their audiences via video ads.

KFC Thailand’s Facebook fail
Amidst tsunami warnings in Thailand, Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) Thailand suggested people take cover – but crassly suggested they made sure to stop and pick up their favourite KFC first. Although no tsunami surfaced, KFC received severe backlash for their misjudged post which read:

Let’s hurry home and follow the earthquake news. And don’t forget to order your favorite KFC menu.

KFC Thailand has since taken down the offending post and apologised on its Facebook wall.

Google+ targets Japan
We recently posted about how LinkedIn is reaching out to the Japanese market by creating a Navi site dedicated to demonstrating to Japanese users how to use LinkedIn. In a similar vein, Google+ has also created a TV commercial and dedicated Japanese site demonstrating to Japanese users how to use Google+. Google+ has previously tried to boost its visibility by linking up with Japanese super-band AKB48.

In addition, Google announced last week that Google+ had reached 170 million users, and released a re-design of the site which we posted about last week.

Pinterest-like site Mogujie’s revenue stream
While Pinterest has been in the fire for secretly profiting off users’ affiliate links, China’s Pinterest-like site Mogujie.com is having no problems with generating revenue. It has been revealed to be earning over 100,000 RMB or S$19,909 per day in ad referral clicks to Taobao, China’s largest e-commerce site. Based on its own figures, Mogujie has grown to 9.5 million registered users by the end of March, of which 2.2 million users are active daily visitors who browse through about 750,000 items on Taobao every day, and end up buying 60,000 of said items. That’s a pretty impressive referral and purchase conversion rate.

Twitter beats Facebook in Q1 advertising performance
According to a study of 45 billion ad impressions on Twitter and Facebook in Q1 2012, Twitter gets considerably higher CPMs than Facebook. The main difference between ads on Twitter and Facebook is that almost all Twitter ads appear in users’ streams, whereas Facebook ads appear to the side of the user’s page. Perhaps this comes as no surprise and it underlines why Facebook has been recently pushing its ‘Featured Stories’ ads.

However, another recent study shows that Facebook’s average CPM has risen by 43% over the last quarter.

Remember though, what advertisers want is lower, not higher CPMs, and the accompanying news that the average cost per fan rose by 43% in the same time period is jut as unwelcomed.

Financial firms prefer Twitter over Facebook
Twitter is the most popular social networking site for U.S. financial institutions. Corporate Insight‘s report revealed that at the end of 2011, 92% of financial companies tracked had a presence on Twitter, up from 51% in 2010, compared to the 88% which were on Facebook. In particular, many firms were using Twitter as a customer service tool.

Facebook’s Timeline to turn into MySpace?
The introduction of Facebook’s Timeline has offered users many positive changes, however, Piotr Łój who works for a Polish graphic design company has highlighted what could be described as a significant negative: animated GIFs now display properly, complete with annoying animations, harking back to the old days of MySpace. We wonder how long it will be before Facebook changes track on this.

Facebook users tagging their location more
According to a presentation by Facebook product manager, Josh Williams, around a quarter of all users include location information in their updates every month, and they do so an average of 10 times each month. With their geo-coding and place editing API now open to third-party developers (including those at Instagram), expect this number to rise significantly.

Facebook introduces school-specific Groups
Facebook’s ‘Groups for schools’ allow users with school email addresses to join online communities related to their place of study. This new feature will give students the opportunity to share documents with one another whilst also communicating with classmates. Not all schools are eligible for this yet, but once they are, individual classes, sports teams and clubs will enable users to join their relevant groups with the possibility of downloading and sharing documents. Although this was already happening unofficially, it will give students more structure to their Groups.

The open question for us here at We Are Social is whether this is a precursor of a larger roll-out to companies and other organisations.

Facebook’s profile photos get suspiciciously larger
Google+ updated their site to allow users  to include a larger photo, a move which wasfollowed by Facebook just days later. Facebook images previously measured 130 x 125 pixels in comparison to the new 166 x 160 pixels.

Facebook users able to download their personal information archive
In addition to the personal information Facebook made available to its users in 2010, according to a post made on the Facebook Public Policy European Page, you will now be able to ‘Download your information’ and look through all friend requests you’ve made, IP addresses you’ve logged in from as well as a copy of all posts, images, private chat conversations and similar activity you have participated in via your profile.

Facebook purchase Tagtiles
After having bought mobile sharing app Instagram, Facebook has made a smaller purchase: the Tagtile team and their assets. This mobile-based customer loyalty management startup, is described as ‘helping local businesses identify and engage with customers’.

With Facebook seeming to be establishing a strong-base of mobile-minded ideas, Tagtile, a hardware device that allows individuals to earn rewards after tapping their smartphone against the Tagtile Cube, have said they will not be taking on any new customers currently.

Instagram hits 40 million users
Instagram, the photo sharing app that was bought by Facebook last week for $1 billion, has had 10 million downloads in just 10 days, with only 5 million of them on Android.

Foursquare hits 20 million users
Celebrating what its users have christened 4sqDay on 16 April 2012, Foursquare announced that it has reached 20 million users who account for 2 billion check-ins, having added another 10 million new members since it hit the 10 million mark in June 2011. Users who check-in at a location yesterday would have been automatically awarded the ’4sqDay 2012′ badge, which is the second annual celebration of the semi-official Foursquare Day, first coined by its users in 2010.

Now anyone can make money from YouTube (in theory)
YouTube has extended its partner programme, now offering the opportunity for anyone to earn advertising revenue from their videos.

LinkedIn’s new company update content targeting & reporting
LinkedIn will be introducing two new features to company pages, ‘targeted updates’ and ‘follower statistics’. The first, ‘targeted updates’, will allow page admins to target their updates to specific followers based on detailed criteria, for example, industry and job function.

‘Follower statistics’ will add a new layer of reporting, with various metrics perhaps designed to persuade companies they can use LinkedIn as more of a marketing platform.

LinkedIn competitor Viadeo secures $32 million funding
Viadeo, a LinkedIn competitor, claims that 1 million new members join Viadeo every month, and receives over 3 million profile views with 150,000 new connections made every day. With a new $32 million round of funding to enable them to increase their growth across the world – especially in China – LinkedIn might have to keep a closer eye on its competitor.

Pinterest beats Twitter and Facebook’s revenue per clicks
According to Convetro CEO Jeff Zwelling, Pinterest represented 17.4% of social media revenue for e-commerce sites in Q1 2012, up from just 1% last year, based on a measure of 40 of Zwelling’s clients sites. They project that Pinterest will stand for 40% of revenue by the end of the year, reducing Facebook’s ‘revenue drive’ to 60% from 86% a year ago.

More importantly, on a revenue per click basis, Pinterest crushes Twitter and beats Facebook by 27%.

Tumblr attempt to find money in creativity
Tumblr’s CEO and founder, David Karp, revealed to GigaOm that he hopes Tumblr will make its mark by enabling people to express themselves in a deeper way than other sites that are currently around:

We are one of the few tech companies that cares about creators. We are not trying to build a network but we’re giving people a way to express themselves. I’m hoping in the next one or two years, we will prove we are a company that is bent on helping them do great.

Karp also gave a full interview to AdAge, which is interesting to both users and marketers, in relation to the future of the site.

Spotify becomes more web-friendly
Spotify, the music streaming service, has plans to spread itsself even further across the web. They are introducing a new feature that will integrate the service, via a “play button” widget, onto web pages. After downloading the Spotify software, you will be able simply press the ‘play’ button and listen for free. They’ve also teamed up with Tumblr allowing users to post songs, playlists and full albums directly to Tumblr.

They’re also introducing brand apps, with launch parters ranging from AT&T, Intel, McDonald’s and Reebok. AT&T’s “Surround Sounds,” will plots songs to the locations where they were written, recorded, played or performed, allowing users to find music by searching maps. Reebok’s app will create workout playlists, and Intel’s “Sifter” will recommends songs, bands and artists based on what users’ Facebook friends are listening to. Although there no costs to the brands to develop apps (other that spent on the development itself), Spotify obviously hopes brands will then spend advertising money with them to promote them…

TripAdvisor takes Facebook integration to new levels
TripAdvisor has been working over the past few years to create a personalised travel website whilst remaining logged-in to your Facebook account. Looking in to your likes and preferences, the site acts like a personalised travel planner by also looking at destinations your friends have visited and where they would like to visit.

The new ‘Friend of a Friend’ feature will allow your trip to be further personalised by expanding your network to not just your friends, but friends of theirs.

So now, when looking for a location or hotel to visit on your break, your friends’ opinions will appear first, followed by their friends. However, if this is not a feature you want to use, you can always opt-out of it.

Kraft’s cheesy campaign
KRAFT Mac and Cheese is celebrating its 75th anniversary and doing so by pushing a social media campaign that the old can in fact be modern.

As the video highlights, these two older women become temporary social media managers and are asked to share their opinions on trending topics and the things people are most interested in. With the older generation becoming involved in modern day technology, the outcome is fun and innovative.

Strip for likes on Facebook? Stüssy do!
Amsterdam-based Stüssy wanted to boost the number of fans they had on their Facebook page so decided that a new approach would be able to increase them significantly – the ‘Strip for Likes’ campaign.

The idea behind the campaign was simple: the more users who liked the Page, the fewer clothes a model would wear. While the campaign is definitely innovative, it’s also demeaning, and with Facebook’s T+Cs you won’t even get to see the goods. A double negative.

Microsoft’s ‘A year in the Like’ project
Microsoft have launched a new project where users are able to see a year of their Facebook Timeline as a summarised video, complete with options such as selecting certain friends to be in it.

Smart Car gets innovative
Smart’s official Argentinean Twitter account played host to a little bit of genius. The creative tweets take you on a drive with a Smart car, which has resulted in a lot of positive attention:

Random House first publisher to use Promoted Products
Random House has become the first UK publisher to use Twitter’s in-house advertising – in this instance, a Promoted Account as well as Promoted Tweets – in their promotion of EL James new thriller Fifty Shades of Grey.

Brands try Pinterest competitions
Over the weeks ahead, we’re sure we’ll see more brands trying out Pinterest, and both Harrods and Confused.com have been running competitions this week.

Harrods are inviting consumers to design a mood board for a Jubilee themed window display for a chance to see their window display put into action. Confused.com have encouraged females to submit a picture to a Pinterest board of them in their biggest heels, as part of a ‘Driving in Heels’ campaign which highlights the danger of, surprisingly, driving in heels which are too big.

Costa’s Facebook success
Costa Coffee announced some impressive numbers last week: they doubled the numbers on their Facebook Page to half a million in the first quarter of this year. They mainly achieved this through effective News Feed optimisation, by knowing their audience – they massively ramped up how much they posted, and the advent on Timeline helped them with their image-heavy content. A case study which is worth reading – perhaps on a coffee break.

An innovative way of dealing with a Twitter troll
After Mufadal Jiwaji insulted TV critic and author Grace Dent on Twitter last night, she responded by pointing out that she was actually a client of the PR agency Mufadal worked for.

Crackdown on social media in parts of Asia
In China, police arrested six and shut down 16 websites after rumours spread online that military vehicles were on the streets of Beijing. As a result, microblogging sites Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo have prevented users commenting on other users’ posts from 31 March to 3 April in a bid to stem the spread of news, even though they can still use other functions such as “retweet” or post on their own channels.

In Dubai, the government is also trying to fight back against social media users stirring the seeds of discontent against the government. The Chief of Police Lieutenant General Dahi Khalfan Tami accused the country’s Muslim Brotherhood of trying to cause trouble through Twitter:

We aim to clean Twitter’s space from any abuse. We want to make it a social networking medium and not a tool to create disharmony and disintegration.

Online word-of-mouth source credibility in China
Social business intelligence provider CIC‘s research reveals that consumers find review and recommendation sites the most credible online source of word-of-mouth information, followed by wiki sites and social shopping sites. It’s interesting that crowdsourced information is deemed more credible than what’s disseminated through microblogging sites such as Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo or social networking sites such as Renren, which rank 7th and 10th on the list respectively, even though information on these sites are likely to be shared by close friends and family.

Foreign enterprise accounts on Sina Weibo
We previously wrote about Sina Weibo’s 130,565 enterprise accounts, of which a large majority are ran by restaurants. The more intriguing question is, how important is Sina Weibo to foreign enterprises wishing to tap into the 1.4 billion population of China, of which more than half are on the Internet? According to Sina, there are 1060 overseas enterprise Weibo accounts, of which the majority helm from the US, followed by Japan, Australia, UK and France. Sina also claims that 143 Fortune 500 companies are on Weibo. Even though it’s not an overwhelming figure, it’s as good a start as any considering that Sina Weibo is not available in English.

Google’s Cherry Blossom Street View
In cooperation with Japan National Tourism Organisation (JNTO) and Japan Tourism Agency (JTA), Google has created its Street View guide to Japan: Cherry Blossom Season Edition. Just in time for Japan’s famous Cherry Blossom season, Google has featured eight main tourist areas Ginza, Tsukiji, Akihabara, Asakusa, Kamakura, Mt. Fuji, Kyoto, and Osaka. There’s more detailed information on the sidebar to the right, including descriptions, dining, and shopping information that would be useful to tourists.

Spending on digital marketing continues to rise
According to a survey conducted by Duke University, US marketing budgets will rise by 8.1% over the coming twelve months. This rise will mainly be spent online, with digital marketing budgets forecast to rise 12.8% over the next year, whilst ad spend on traditional media will drop by 0.8%.

The area which will rise most is social media: marketers said that they planned to allocate 7.4% of their overall budgets to social media in the coming year.

L’Oreal has a team of 400 staff working in social media
At Wednesday’s Facebook Marketing Conference in London, L’Oreal CMO Marc Menesguen revealed that L’Oreal has a team of 400 staff working in social media who post new content on Facebook everyday:

It’s a lot of work and requires a lot of commitment. The digital revolution is on at L’Oreal and we are integrating digital and social as early as possible in the marketing process.

Social media delivers higher value sales
New research has found that ecommerce sales which occur after exposure to a brand on social media deliver more than $280 per order, compared to less than $100 for those driven by natural search:

Tumblr now on Timeline
Similar to Pinterest and Instagram, your Tumblr posts will now appear on your Facebook Timeline in addition to your News Feed when you choose the “send to Facebook” option from Tumblr, whereby your Tumblr activities such as “reblogging”, “liking” or posting will be grouped together just like Pinterest pins and Instagram photos for easy viewing. This option is adjustable through users’ blog settings.

10.5 billion minutes spent on Facebook daily, what’s Timeline’s effect?
According to a tidbit of info released by Facebook, in January users spent an average of 10.5 billion minutes on the site daily, excluding mobile – or around twelve and a half minutes each a day.

This increase has mainly come from a growth in the userbase: aggregate minutes per day increased 57% and average minutes per user per day increased 14% year-on-year.

Nonetheless, it’s unclear whether Timeline is driving a boost in engagement, in addition to the figures above. Inside Facebook detailed a few studies which have been released about Timeline engagement rates, but the small sample size, coupled with the important caveat that most engagement takes place in the News Feed, means that it’s essentially impossible to draw a verifiable conclusion. The most reliable study comes from Edgerank Checker, which has looked at over 3,500 Pages and they have struggled to find anything which suggests Timeline has a discernible impact on engagement.

Local Facebook Pages outperform global Pages in reach and engagement
New research has found that local Facebook Pages with 30-100 fans reach five times more fans (as a percentage) than corporate Pages with 100,000+ fans, with engagement eight times higher.

It goes to show that for businesses with multiple small branches – say, McDonalds – there’s value in having both a corporate Page, and a local Page for each store.

Facebook adds permalinks to individual comments
Last week, Facebook added permalinks to individual post comments, with spam comments now automatically hidden.

Facebook expands Sponsored Stories, keeps Offers niche for now
Facebook has expanded Sponsored Stories in the News Feed, with a new ‘Page Like’ unit that includes the page’s profile image and thumbnails of more friends who are connected to the page.

Although the change applies to all new Page Likes – sponsored or unsponsored – it’s fair to say the greater impact will be for Sponsored Stories, as the old News Feed Sponsored Stories were easily missed.

Another post option – Offers – is still exclusive to premium advertisers, though it will be available free to all Pages later this year. Offers are a new free story type that allows Page owners to post coupons that users can collect from the News Feed or ad units.

YouTube hits upload record, holds Vlogging contest and adds video duels
User uploads to YouTube have hit one hour per second, and to mark this milestone YouTube have launched a website which visualises what happens in a minute on the site.

In addition, YouTube are running a new video blogging competition:

Starting today through April 18, applications will be open for sixteen promising vloggers to take part in three months of intimate educational workshops held on Google+ Hangouts. Each vlogger will receive $5,000 worth of video equipment and more than $10,000 worth of promotion on and off YouTube. Participants will also receive mentoring from industry experts, such as iJustine, one of the most successful vloggers and content creators on YouTube!

Finally, in a busy week for YouTube, they’ve launched YouTube Slam, where users can create their own video duels, and people can vote for which video they prefer. Although YouTube has been experimenting with this for a few weeks, it’s the first time users can manage the game themselves by choosing the videos included. Nice.

LinkedIn updates ‘People You May Know’
LinkedIn has launched an update to ‘People You May Know’, one of the site’s features which helps users grow their network. The biggest change is its now possible to filter by company/university, to find relevant contacts more easily.

Google+ adds new features
Google+ continues to add new features in their seemingly desperate attempts to get more active users. The latest new features include a series of apps in Hangouts, including a face-to-face poker game, and Google Effects.

The other new on-site feature is the option to phone people directly from Hangouts – calls are free in the US and Canada, and cheap elsewhere.

Off-site, Google have added Google+ functionality to Gmail – if you receive an email saying somebody has added you to their Circles, you can quickly add them to yours.

Barack Obama joins Pinterest
Barack Obama joined Pinterest last week – and although he quickly added 9,000 followers, the Daily Mail chose to focus on his chilli recipe.

BBC News personalise content on their Facebook Page
As different people are interested in different news stories, BBC News have added a Control Panel which allows Facebook fans to filter which updates they see. By liking different BBC News sections, correspondents and programmes, more relevant updates will appear in your News Feed.

The Economist reaches one million Facebook fans
Political magazine The Economist reached a million Facebook fans last week, an impressive milestone considering Time and the Wall Street Journal haven’t even reached half a million.

It’s noteworthy how they’ve set their Page up to cater to a global audience – re-posting stories at different times to hit different markets. Spot on.

Heineken unveils bottle designed by two Facebook fans
Beer brand Heineken has released a limited edition bottle which was designed by Facebook fans. The competition asked fans to design a bottle and then pair it with another in the gallery, and it attracted 30,000 entries. Nice.

Pepsico and Arby’s offer rewards for engagement
Although they’re doing it in different ways, both Pepsico and Arby’s are offering consumers rewards for engagement through digital channels.

Arby’s, an American fast-food chain is offering Facebook Credits in return for in-store purchases, thereby driving greater footfall.

In similar news, Pepsico has announced a tie in with reward company Kiip to offer fitness enthusiasts ‘achievement rewards’ when they log a run through fitness apps such as Nexercise and MapMyRun.

After a workout, bike ride or run users are rewarded with PepsiCo’s Propel Zero drinks mix packets.

Econsultancy’s David Moth drew a salient conclusion from the two campaigns:

The two examples are slightly different – Pepsico is offering physical rewards for digital engagement while Arby’s is offering digital rewards for physical purchases – but in essence they are part of the same trend. Consumers have come to expect discounts and rewards and increasingly we are seeing that brands are willing come up with the goods.

Samsung in search for Olympic bloggers
Samsung is searching for 100 bloggers to blog for them during the Olympics and join their Samsung Global Blogger (SGB) programme. Winners will blog and produce a daily show across the entire Olympic Games period using Samsung products, including the Samsung Galaxy Note, which the company wants to position as the perfect blogging device.

Spotify puts over 1,000 years of music on Facebook Timeline
Spotify have launched a really cool Facebook Timeline, which goes through 1,000 years of music history, and lets users discover some music they might otherwise have missed. On song.

Marvel teams up with GetGlue
Marvel has teamed up with GetGlue to offer exclusive stickers in return for checking-in while reading comics. As the stickers are so nice, there should be plenty of takers for this one.

Twitter user jailed for 56 days
A Welsh Twitter user who tweeted racist abuse about Fabrice Muamba, the footballer who collapsed on the pitch, was jailed for 56 days last week for inciting racial hatred.

Social media users in China
The number of social media users in China reached 256.5 million in 2011, and looks set to reach 414.5 million by 2014. Already making up more than 50% of China’s Internet population, social media users there will encompass 63% of China’s Internet population by 2014. Even without the presence of Facebook or Twitter, social media users in China have no lack of alternative local options that are not banned by the government, thanks to a very competitive social media landscape that is led by Internet giants such as Tencent, Sina, Biadu etc.

Smartphone growth boosts Asia-Pacific’s games market
Asia-Pacific’s booming smartphone market will boost the region’s gaming industry to more than $30 billion in 2016, with annual growth of 18%, which is 2% higher than the global average. Research by Ovum estimates that Asia Pacific will have more than 1 billion gamers by 2016, of which nearly 900 million or 90% of gamers will play games solely on a mobile device or in addition to a PC. In light of recent hit ‘Draw Something‘ and Zynga’s ‘With Friends‘ titles, it’s likely that social gaming will be the one paving the way forward in the growth of Asia-Pacific’s gaming industry.

Tumblr hits 20 million users
Microblogging service Tumblr continues to grow at an impressive rate, having hit 20.15 billion posts and a total of 49.89 million blogs at time of writing. Earlier this year, Tumblr founder and CEO David Karp announced that Tumblr was serving 120 million people and had 15 billion pageviews every month. Its average user creates 14 original posts each month, and reblogs 3. Given the rise in popularity of Pinterest, which has similar functionalities to Tumblr in terms of “liking” and “repinning” posts but with a focus on photos alone, we wonder whether Tumblr will continue on this trajectory of growth, or if it will in fact be affected by this bright shiny new platform everyone’s spending their social networking time on at the moment.

Does your CEO tweet?
Apparently, CEOs who tweet are regarded more positively than those who don’t. A survey by social media branding firm BRANDfrog discovered that 77% of respondents are more likely to purchase a product from a company if its CEO and other C-level executives are tweeting. In addition, 78% believe that CEOs participating on social media leads to better communication, 71% believe it improves brand image, and 64% feel that it offers more transparency. Internally, 82% of employees who responded trust their company more if the C-level and other leadership tweets. Of course, it’s not feasible for all CEOs to tweet, but brands should recognise that having an ambassador for the company in the form of higher management might instil more trust and confidence in consumers towards the brand.

New Facebook Pages drive higher engagement rates
A study by Simply Measured analysed 15 Facebook brand pages that were early adopters of Timeline to determine its impact on engagement rates. The results concluded that the implementation of Timeline led to a 14% increase in fan engagement, a 46% increase in content engagement, and a 65% increase in interactive content engagement, namely videos and photos. Of course, we’re not convinced that all brands will see a similar lift in fan engagement because the brands surveyed have a significantly large fan base and were also featured often on articles or used as case studies leading up to the big reveal of Timeline for brands. Still, the new features of Timeline should no doubt make it easier for brands to engage with their fans, so we shall see if a more comprehensive study of brands on Timeline in future will yield similar results.

We’re back (and heavier) from the CNY festivities, and will resume our regular Tuesday TuneUp next week. In the meantime, here’s our Midweek MashUp!

Spam ‘retweets’ on Sina Weibo
A report from HP Labs’ Social Computing Research claims that 49% of all ‘retweets’ on Chinese microblogging service Sina Weibo are from fraudulent accounts. In addition, these automated fake users account for about 32% of total weibos. As a result, what appears to be trending on Sina Weibo is in fact skewed by these spam ‘retweets’, which contributes to what HP terms ‘artificial inflation’. It remains to be seen whether the implementation of real-name identities for all microblogging accounts in China will help to ease the occurrence of these spam ‘retweets’ through the reduction of fake accounts.

Sina Weibo’s incredible record over Chinese New Year
Sina Weibo recorded some incredible statistics in the first minute of Chinese New Year, with an average of 32,212 weibos per second, with 481,207 messages sent during the first minute of Chinese New Year alone. This number beats Twitter’s tweets per second record, which stands at 25,088. Furthermore, the volume of messages sent this Chinese New Year is three times higher than that of last year, and illustrates the tremendous growth that Sina Weibo has had this past year.

India’s Prime Minister joins Twitter
India’s Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh is now on Twitter under the Twitter handle @PMOIndia in a bid to reach out to younger audiences and better communicate key announcements and news from the Prime Minister’s office, as well as his official trips and activities. Even though the Prime Minister himself will not be handling the account personally, he has already garnered 16,366 followers in the span of 2 days. Perhaps Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee should follow suit.

1 million milestone for Yahoo Box! in Japan
Yahoo’s new online storage service Yahoo Box! has reached 1 million users in Japan since its launch in October 2011. Similar to Dropbox and other web-based services that store information ‘in the cloud’, Yahoo Box! offers 5GB of free storage space to Yahoo Japan ID users. Notably, 51% of Yahoo Box! users are paying customers. Subscriptions start from 300 Yen or S$4.95 per month for 1,000GB of storage space. Yahoo Box! is most commonly used to store images, which make up 65.4% of items stored, while general documents take up 8.2%, music 3.4% and videos 0.7%. It’ll be interesting to see how Yahoo Box! fares against Dropbox and local Japanese search giant Naver’s similar offering, which provides 30GB of storage space free.

Google+ hits 90M users
As we’ve previously mentioned on our 5 Friday Facts #11, in Google+ is racking up its numbers with Larry Page unveiling a host of impressive stats:

Now when users start typing a hashtag, auto-complete suggestions will appear:

Users can now record and share videos straight from their webcams. Been posting nothing but photos of your cat? Meme-ify them instantly on Google+. We can’t even imagine the number of animal photos that are going to live on the Internet after this.

But the biggest new feature lets users post directly from Google search results to Google+. Searching for your favourite team might leads to news about, say, Thierry Henry, and then you can share this directly to your Circles.

Google will start invading your privacy, and there’s no opt-out option
Following the series of new features and additions it has introduced to its products, Google is planning to follow the activities of users of its suite of products and related sites, such as Gmail, its search engine, and YouTube. Only Google Wallet, its Chrome browser, and Google Books are not included. No doubt, Google has already been collecting information of its users, but soon it will combine data across its various websites to better target specific profiles for related ads. What is most frightening is that consumers will not be able to opt-out of this initiative, which will be effective from March 1.

Facebook becomes the premier social network in Brazil
Earlier this week comScore released results showing Facebook surpassed Google’s Orkut in December, becoming the largest social networking destination in Brazil for the first time. In the past year Facebook tripled its audience in the region, but even more impressively increased user engagement, from an average of 37 minutes spent on the site to 5 hours. It remains to be seen whether Facebook can replicate this success and capture the lead in other markets where it doesn’t lead such as Japan, Vietnam and South Korea.

US online ad spend to grow to almost $40 billion
Online spending on ads in America will grow 23.3% to $39.5 billion in 2012 as the internet proves its worth to advertisers in a tough economic climate.

Fast growth has seen online pull ahead of some traditional media and this year US online ad spending will exceed the total spent on print magazines and newspapers for the first time, at $39.5 billion vs. $33.8 billion. This is the sort of thing that a faux-savant would described as ‘a seminal moment’.

UK marketers also shift spend to digital as general confidence falls
Similarly in the UK, there’s been a distinct shift away from investment in traditional media campaigns towards digital channels: investment in internet advertising and search rose 13.4% and 14.9% respectively in the final quarter of 2011, with more traditional means of advertising losing spend.

31% of ad impressions are never even seen
Online will still need to continue to prove its worth, as comScore last week produced research that claimed over a third of ad impressions on the web are never even seen.

Working with 12 “national premium brands” in the US, including Chrysler, Ford and Kellogg’s, the report found that in many cases, ads are delivered but not in-view or on target and therefore never have a chance to make an impact.

Where users go, marketers will follow…
Nonetheless, with social media sites beyond Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn seeing significant boosts in usage, both in the US and elsewhere in the world, it is only natural that marketers plan to capitalise on this in 2012:

Rethinking information diversity in networks – the power of weak ties
New research from Facebook appears to validate the use of social networks in understanding the spread of information first popularised by economic sociologist Mark Granovetter, as well as discrediting popular notions of the web as an ‘echo chamber’ where web personalisation algorithms like Facebook’s News Feed force us to consume an ever more dangerously narrow range of news.

In his seminal 1973 paper, The Strength of Weak Ties, Granovetter found that, surprisingly, people are more likely to acquire jobs that they learnt about through individuals they interact with infrequently rather than their close personal contacts.

In a scale unheard of in academic sociological studies, the Facebook study observed nearly 1.2 billion instances in which someone was or was not presented with a certain link. The results confirmed the power of weak ties and highlighted how weak ties “are indispensible” to your network as they have access to different websites that you’re not necessarily visiting.

Some Facebook Pages only reach 17% of fans
Since all the changes in late 2011 it’s clear Facebook has made it tougher for community managers. Teaming up with EdgeRank Checker to examine what was going on, AllFacebook found that (in a review of 4,000 Facebook pages) the average page post is only reaching 17 percent of the Page’s fans.

The advent of the ticker and various apps’ inclusion – like The Guardian and Spotify’s – has clearly had an impact, but it’s worth emphasising that this is the number for an average Page; put simply, effective community management, based on statistical insights and a thorough understanding of how EdgeRank works, can overcome this.

Introducing new apps for Timeline
60 new apps were launched for Timeline last week, with sites such as Foodily, Ticketmaster and Pinterest teaming up with Facebook to encourage users to “enhance your Timeline with apps that help you tell your story”. The idea behind it is to share ‘your favourite activities’ with your friends.

Ticketmaster + Spotify = concert-goers paradise
Welcome to the world of social music through Facebook Timeline. A new app from Ticketmaster will recommend gigs based on your listening habits and history. Yet another reason to delete those tunes you’re a bit embarrassed about, lest you tell all of Facebook that you’re going to (another) Justin Bieber concert.

What you want from Auto Trader
A new app on Facebook Timeline from Auto Trader gives users the option to show friends cars they would like to own. Interestingly, rather than the traditional ‘like’ button, it will include a ‘want’ button instead.

Twitter seeing 3 to 5 percent engagement on Promoted Tweets and Trends
Defining engagement as a “click, retweet, reply, or favorite” Twitter have declared their Promoted Products — including Promoted Tweets, Accounts and Trends — a success, with advertisers seeing 3-5% engagement rates on campaigns. Twitter Chairman Jack Dorsey suggested that “advertisers are coming back… [the market] is proving that this is something people want to see more of”. Or so he thinks.

McDonald’s lose control of a hashtag
However, McDonalds show that buying a promoted trend is not necessarily a good thing, as their McDstories campaign spun rapidly out of control amid a McFlurry of negative tweets. A big McFail.

What’s cooking at Foursquare?
Foodies rejoice: mobile check-in app Foursquare has added restaurant menus with prices. So far, they are only available for big chain restaurants in the US, including Dunkin’ Donuts, Panera Bread, Starbucks and Applebee’s, and only on certain platforms (not on iPhone). This comes on the heels of the improved “Explore” tab, which lets users find the hidden gems near them based on tips from other users and begs the question: will Foursquare take over Yelp as the top grub finder for foodophiles?

Tumblr soars past 15 billion pageviews a month
Micro-blogging site Tumblr  continues to produce impressive numbers, with it now accounting for over 15 billion pageviews a month. The half-blog, half-Twitter hybrid owes its continuing success to making sharing effortlessly easy. Just 10% of the content on Tumblr is original, but the average post will be reblogged about 9 times.

LiveJournal wants to live again in the U.S.
Americans had nearly written off LiveJournal as nostalgia of the Noughties, but the site is trying to make a comeback by attracting users to tight-knit groups around specific subjects. It doesn’t hurt that George R.R. Martin, the author of the popular ‘Game of Thrones’ programme, writes avidly on his blog there.

Obama to host a live interview on Google+
American President Barack Obama will give his first ever completely virtual interview from the White House – answering questions on YouTube and hosting a Google+ hangout – after his State of the Union address. Nice idea.

Just like The Dude
Lionsgate is the latest studio to rent films through Facebook and has made its latest film ‘Abduction’ more interactive. Pop-up boxes appear on screen with quotes or a 20-second grab and give viewers the option to post it on Facebook. If one of your friends watches the film later, he can see the comment you left at that point in the film. You can also ‘Like’ the products that your favourite characters are using. Watching ‘The Big Lebowski’? Then perhaps you’d like some Kahlua.

Brewing in the hive mind
Crowdsourcing is bubbling up in the beer world. Untappd (a beer check-in and recommendation service) now lets breweries claim their pages, allowing them to see which of their beers is the most popular and be in contact with their biggest fans. They’ve already picked up 150 breweries thus far, including Dogfish Head, Kona, Boston Beer and Tenth & Blake.

In the same vein, Sam Adams has developed a Facebook app so that fans can create a custom beer, which will be brewed next month. Fans can comment on categories such as colour, body and sweetness. Will the result be delicious or taste like a bad batch of home brew?

You’re in Stephen King’s story
Could your mug be on Stephen King’s next book? To celebrate his next book, the publisher has invited fans to upload their photo onto a Facebook app and revel in their few ‘pixels of fame’.

MINI fans the Facebook flames
Pyromaniacs will get a kick out of this: at the Brussels motor show, MINI launched a new competition so that when Facebook users like their page, it lights a Bunsen burner under a rope attached to a MINI Countryman which one lucky fan won. MINI are on fire at the moment.

Discover Berlin with Hugo Boss
For Berlin Fashion Week, Hugo Boss sponsored Foursquare specials on drinks and starter deals at trendy bars and restaurants around the city. The best boss around.

Katie Price isn’t herself
Most thought that when Katie Price tweeted about the Eurozone crisis and China’s GDP over the weekend, she wasn’t acting like her usual self. And as it turns out, she wasn’t – it was a cleverly played PR stunt from Snickers, who paid to take over her Twitter account.

Cadbury says a big thanks — bar none
To celebrate reaching 1 million Facebook fans, Cadbury built a giant thumbs up out of 1 million chocolate bars. Two days and three tones of chocolate later, fans were rewarded with the sight of the massive treat.

Magical mystery tour with Burton
A new competition from Burton Snowboards lets Facebook fans pack a ‘bag’ with three items of Burton kit, and then pick two friends to join them on their trip (destinations have not been disclosed), should they win one of the three grand prizes.

One Like, One Balloon
Heineken Brazil launched a simple yet effective campaign to get more ‘Likes’ on Facebook: turn a ‘Like’ into a balloon. Soon an empty office was filled with thousands of them, and fans could see updates of the disappearing office.

Bald Barbie coming?
After a popular social media campaign, Mattel are still unsure about producing a bald Barbie because of the possible ramifications. Two women whose daughters lost their hair after cancer treatment are adamant that ‘bald is beautiful’.

Hirsute We Are Social MD Robin Grant is uniquely qualified to give his opinion on the issue:

The obvious thing to do would be to release a limited edition bald Barbie with a percentage of the proceeds going to charity. Some companies have a fear of being seen to bow to consumer pressure – but corporate marketing teams must guard against being unchanging and monolithic.

Happy 2012 everyone! After the merry feasting over Christmas and smashing (in more ways than one) New Year’s Eve countdown, it’s back to work in making this new year even bigger and better than before. 2011 has been quite the whirlwind year in social, digital and mobile, so let’s take a look at the big stories that concluded the year with a bang, and those that are paving the way ahead.

All restaurants in Malaysia’s capital to provide free Wi-Fi, by law
Come April 2012, all restaurants in Malaysia’s capital Kuala Lumpur will be required to provide free Wi-Fi. This new law will also apply to cafes, pubs, bars and club lounges, as long as they occupy 120 square metres or more. Even though patrons of these establishments will likely welcome the free Wi-Fi, it seems slightly extreme for this provision to be made mandatory by the law.

Free public Wi-Fi introduced in Bangkok
In another part of South East Asia, free public Wi-Fi will be made available to users in Thailand’s capital city Bangkok. 40,000 hotspots will be installed by the end of 2012, with estimated web access speeds of 2Mbps. Besides these wireless networks, the government aims to boost high-speed broadband access across Thailand such that 80% of the country will be able to connect to a faster web.

This is a great initiative to improve Thailand’s Internet penetration, which currently stands at 27%, but locals seem to remain sceptical of this free service given Thailand’s slow adoption of 3G mobile technology, and slow Internet speeds of current hotspots in Bangkok. Given that mobile penetration exceeds 100%, the majority of users accessing the free public Wi-Fi through their mobile devices will still benefit greatly, regardless of fast or slow web access speeds.

Find out what’s trending on Sina Weibo, even if you can’t read Mandarin
In order to provide a glimpse of the hot topics on popular Chinese microblog Sina Weibo to those unversed in Mandarin, University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre (JMSC) created WeiboScope, a website that allows users to perform a visual search for trending issues on Sina Weibo. Users can either search through a gallery of ‘retweets’ that contain images within the last 24 hours, or perform a direct keyword search through Google Translate. After all, photos transcend words, and can be universally interpreted.

What happens every 60 seconds on the Internet
These are just some of the incredible things that occur every single minute on the web. In 60 seconds, there are more than 20,000 new posts on Tumblr, about 13,000 iPhone applications downloaded, 600 odd new videos uploaded on YouTube, 6,600 new pictures uploaded on Flickr, 98,000 tweets or so, 695,000 Facebook status updates and 510,040 comments, and even more mind-blowing events. We sure are living our lives in the fast lane, online.

What happens every 60 seconds on the Chinese Internet
Similarly, the Internet activities occurring in China every minute are astounding as well. In 60 seconds, 227,000 ‘tweets’ are posted on Sina Weibo, 30,000 virtual ‘Q coins’ are spent on Tencent social games, Taobao achieves 3 million RMB in sales volume, and 5.55 million online ads are viewed.

Online shopping in China in 2011
2011 was a big year for China in terms of online shopping and e-commerce. 200 million Chinese were expected to have shopped online, spurring an estimated 7 trillion RMB in online shopping transactions. Taobao Mall was the market leader in B2C e-commerce with 51% market share, followed by 360Buy with 19%.

2011 Mobile Year in Review
2011 was the year of mobile, and this phenomenon will well continue into 2012. In all, 8 trillion text messages were sent, Facebook saw 350 million mobile users, 103 million wireless tweets were sent per day, 1 billion check-ins on Foursquare, and 1 billion mobile apps downloaded worldwide each month. All in a year’s work.

Top tech trends of 2011
This infographic by G+ sums up the top tech trends of 2011. In particular, we see group-buying take-off in the form of Groupon, which expanded its international reach even as its Chinese site Gaopeng suffered. Geolocation apps also increased in popularity, with Foursquare claiming 15 million users while Gowalla was acquired by Facebook. Crowdsourcing through the likes of Quora and crowdfunding initiatives such as Kickstarter also took root.

The weekend is almost upon us again, so it’s time to take our weekly look at the 5 juiciest social media stats that caught our attention over the past 7 days.

Tumblr numblrs
Launched 4 years ago, Tumblr has achieved a staggering 900% growth in the past year alone to reach more than 33.3 million accounts and 12.25 billion posts. Tumblr has a hard core of loyal fans, with 2% of users accounting for 43% of total visits. Japan is Asia’s top country on Tumblr with just 2.8% of all unique visits, while the Philippines is second with 2.6%. 

Smartphones in China
97% of urban Chinese residents own mobile phones, of which 35% use smartphones. As a result, the market for mobile advertising in China has great potential, especially with 50% of smartphone users noticing ads, and 39% clicking on them.

Finding employment on social networks
More than 22 million Americans used social networks to find jobs this year, as recruiting software platform Jobvite discovered in their Social Job Seeker Survey 2011. 54% of job seekers are using Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter in their search, and more than 15% of the Americans surveyed secured a job through social networking.

Video hype for Nokia N9 launch in China
Nokia’s video-marketing campaign for their Nokia N9 launch in China generated quite a stir. The original ‘tweet’ by Nokia’s China marketing manager currently has 13,302 comments and 316,506 ‘retweets’ on Sina Weibo. Meanwhile, the video itself, launched through China’s biggest video-sharing site Youku, saw nearly 1 million views in just one day.

Small Businesses on Facebook
An astounding 96% of small businesses surveyed by engagement marketing company Constant Contact have a presence on Facebook, and 86% find Facebook to be an effective marketing tool. In terms of engaging with their audiences, 60% claimed to respond to all comments on social media platforms.

Got a stat to trumps these? Share it with us on twitter: @wearesocialsg