The report has surfaced two very important findings; one of which is B2C advertising prevailing over B2B advertising. The growth of ads by retail channels is way up above business to business advertising. The second finding showcases the importance of social media as a whole and some of the newly introduced Facebook tools like ‘Sponsored Stories’. This new feature by Facebook lowered brand’s CPA (cost per acquisition) by 32 percent. This is quite a significant discovery as the report shows how hard liners the brands have become for securing slots on Facebook platform. The reason is simple. It helps them to manage their fans effectively. Given this, if any tool facilitates brands by reducing their CPA, they will up their thumbs for that tool.

Maintaining the existing fan base is often difficult for brands. But in 2011 year on year improvement in campaign conversion rate of advertisers saw a mammoth raise (435 percent). CPM (cost per thousand impressions) and CPC (cost per click rate) also hiked 45 percent and 74 percent respectively. What do these figures signify? It demonstrates the recursive importance of social media ad spending. Once the value of search marketing ad campaign dropped, it is still on the falling side. But, social media, particularly Facebook, is still a flagship area where brands can and should invest.

Today he made a new announcement, which inaugurates this initial phase. In a post, Oestilen asked businesses to apply for being a part of the test phase. The post reads, “If you have not already, please be sure to submit your business for our test phase”. Oestilen asked businesses to hustle up in submitting their request stating, “To the thousands upon thousands of businesses that applied to be a part: THANK YOU! We won’t be able to accommodate everyone,”

It signifies that already different businesses began showing interest on Google+. Thus, it puts a challenge before Facebook, the social network that has a history of facilitating brands. Also, the announcement makes it competitive for businesses to get leveraged by Google+. Anybody can apply, but how Google will select the ones for initial test period, will remain strictly confidential. Perhaps, Google will run an algorithm to pick up few lucky ones. But what if we’d see that big brands (some of whom have already been mentioned in his last post) top the list?

The speculation will likely to get fueled then that Google+ will make easy ventures of recognized brands. If such a scenario takes place, Facebook will take a breath of relief, because their platform is mostly for self-serving. This is called keeping up the good work.

The infograph also shows that global e-commerce purchase in 2011 would be 5 billion, in which 1 billion would be exclusive share of US. In 2015 however, projected US share of global buying would be almost 50 percent of global e-purchase ($14 billion of estimated $30 billion).

In a Note on the Facebook Mobile Page, Facebook spoke of how to use the app. The Note reads, “People all over the world can download the app by visiting m.facebook.com and scrolling down to the download link, or by entering d.facebook.com/install directly into their mobile browser.” This is really a smart move by Facebook because it has over 250 million users to access the site via mobile devices. So, making it available to more than 2500 feature phones means more people will visit the site and stay longer on it, which is likely to result in increased brand engagement.

Facebook had launched an app for feature phones, earlier this year, in association with Snaptu and later went on to acquire the feature phone app developer in March. The launch of the new app seems to be a rollout of that partnership though nothing has been mentioned. Soon after the acquisition, Snaptu had mentioned, “We’ll be working hard to offer a richer and more advanced Facebook app on virtually every mobile phone.”

Facebook has taken some measures to make the app more usable and affordable. For that, Facebook has tied up with a number of carriers globally to give users free data access to the app for first three months. In India, Facebook has tied up with Aircel, Airtel, Idea and Reliance to offer free data access. Facebook is accessed by 23 million users in India and the number is increasing at a steady rate. With this app Facebook is expected to see even more usage in the country as a major share of mobile devices used are feature phones.

Just a year back, Twitter had around 150000 developers working in its ecosystem. And now it has 750000 developers, who are contributing to build the applications. To describe how dense Twitter’s network is becoming of third party apps, the blog post reads, “A new app is registered every 1.5 seconds, fueling a spike in ecosystem growth in the areas of analytics, curation and publisher tools.” The blog also tells us that from December 2010, over $500 million has been invested in companies that belong to Twitter’s eco-system, which is a reliable indicator of Twitter’s being a suitable platform for developers.

No doubt these stat figures signify Twitter’s growth as a platform to lure app developers. But in my view, it also solidifies the opinion that Twitter is largely dependent upon third party developers. In fact, the blog post stands in sync with this view as it reads, “Apps help people understand and make the most of Twitter”. The most recent additions like dev.twitter.com, the streamlined app manager or TfN, are all courtesy to third party developers.

Twitter needs to reduce the said dependence. Their social networking counterpart Facebook also aims to leverage those developers, but doesn’t compromise with the autonomy of its platform. So Twitter, would want to spend another rounds of millions after any other client like TweetDeck?

The major benefits of social media are that it makes possible real-time interaction, its new applications cost basically nothing and on top of all these, the simplicity in designing and plug-in installation of Facebook, Twitter and Wordpress.

The infographic shows how the presence in at least one social media outlet, facilitated top brands like JetBlue, RedBull, Coca-Cola, Dell etc. It also shows the reasons that brands use social media. Some of these reasons are immediate influence, brand loyalty, customer feedback, easiness and using the platform for free.

The infograph shows that amongst the surveyees, 61 percent thinks that LinkedIn is the best site for job haunt. 22 percent said that they used Facebook for professional networking while 4 percent spoke in favor Twitter. Another significant thing that the infographic comes up with, is how frequently users access the professional network. While 35 percent said that they use the network daily, 32 percent said that they visit LinkedIn few times a week. Only 30 users, implying 6 percent said they visit the network less than a month.

Another very important finding that the report surfaces, is 61 percent of the users surveyed don’t pay for LinkedIn premium account. LinkedIn should take a note of that. As long as users getting facilitated for free, they will continue frequenting the site.

Oestlien assured the brands that very soon (probably later this year), they will come up with a solution for brands. ‘Google+’ is just 9 days old, but already some top brands started showing interest in it. Taking this into account, Google said that over next few months, they will conduct experiments with brand-oriented accounts. In fact, Google wants to hassle up the process to facilitate brands as they opened a Google Spreadsheet to collect application from “non-user entities.”

The reason behind Google not allowing brands to use Google+ now has been adequately addressed by Oestlien, “How users communicate with each other is different from how they communicate with brands, and we want to create an optimal experience for both.” The fact that Google does not want to lower the standard of user satisfaction by allowing brands to promote their products on its platform is understandable.

The post by Oestlien reads, “The business experience we are creating should far exceed the consumer profile in terms of its usefulness to businesses. We just ask for your patience while we build it.” For now, Google said that they will work closely with companies to shut down non-user profiles that they have created, “In the meantime, we are discouraging businesses from using regular profiles to connect with Google+ users. Our policy team will actively work with profile owners to shut down non-user profiles.”

Along with the video calling facility Facebook has also introduced a new sidebar in the right navigation, which will show users the list of people, whom they message most. In this way, it will be easier for users to begin a conversation with them.

Other than the video calling feature and the new sidebar, the social network is also rolling out a group chat service. Group chat facility, as the name suggests, will allow users to chat with multiple friends in a single conversation. The chat window will allow users enjoy all of these as new buttons have been included for each. The new design is definitely user-friendly.

As I mentioned previously, Facebook has introduced the video calling feature to compete with the Hangouts’ feature of Goggle+. But, there is a significant difference between the two services. Hangouts allows multiple users to chat at single time but, Facebook’s facility only allows one-on-one calling as of now. So, the big question that everyone is asking now is, “Will Facebook provide a feature like Google+? The answer to that, according to me, is: Yes, they will.

The reason being my saying this completely justifiable. Facebook and Microsoft have been in a deep partnership for some time now, which has shown a lot of new features in this year itself. Now, Microsoft has recently acquired Skype, which allows multiple users to video chat but, for that one of the users has to be a premium (paid) customer. Most, analysts are suggesting that in due course Microsoft will allow every Skype user to utilize its video conferencing service for free. Once that happens we can also expect Facebook to allow a similar service.

Being a Facebook fan makes me happy to see such a feature yet, I am offended by a step that the social network has adopted. To use the video calling facility of Facebook, a user has to install an exe file on his computer. Being an open source evangelist, this step has not gone down well with me as no Linux user can use Facebook video calling facility without having to install an environment like Wine. There have been a lot speculation after the acquisition of Skype that, Microsoft will kill the facility for the Linux users. That is now evident in the present move by Facebook. Zuckerberg, being a believer of openness, should not have gone into a partnership with Microsoft that hurts the open source community.

The updated guide had four sections, which are: customer communication, brand exposure, traffic to your site and SEO. How well top social media outlets are scoring in those sections, is the benchmark to determine their performance.

The two most prominent social media networks: Facebook and Twitter managed to hold top ranks. Twitter scored well in all those categories. Customer communication and brand exposure are areas where performances of Facebook and Twitter are good. Both sites draw good traffic to other websites.

As for SEO, links from both Facebook and Twitter are no-follow on search engines, but even then Twitter possesses some social components, which according to the infographic, Facebook lacks. That’s why, Twitter’s performance in the SEO category is okay while Facebook’s is bad.

Other than the major social networks, there are some other social media blokes, the performances of which were evaluated. Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon are some of them. 2010 was overall a bad patch for Digg, but after a wholesome redesign of the some parts in the layout, it seems they regained control of the once lost user base. Not only that; advertisers are also showing interest to Digg, because in the category of brand exposure, Digg’s performance is good. StumbleUpon stumbled in the customer communication part. Otherwise, their performance is decent. For SEO of a site and drawing more traffic, StumbleUpon is a plausible option.

Reddit sees red signal in brand exposure section. In my opinion, this is a bad sign because infrequency of brands indicates that user base isn’t dense for that site. Poor Reddit, they need to sort out why the quality of their site is declining. Overall, the infograph is quite handy for online marketers as all four sections are essentially related to digital marketing.