Social Media Mavens : feature

Facebook Overtakes Yahoo as World's Third Largest Site

Linc Wonham — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 16:44:00 GMT

Facebook will head into the New Year as the world’s third largest website after passing Yahoo in the most recent traffic rankings released from comScore. The research firm’s November 2010 report credits Facebook with an estimated 648 million unique visitors worldwide, enough to finally push it past Yahoo and its estimated 630 million visitors in November.

Google remains the world’s largest Web property with about 970 million unique visitors in November 2010, followed by Microsoft with 869 million and now Facebook. In comScore’s October rankings, Yahoo and Facebook were virtually tied with 633 million worldwide visitors each. Facebook had been gaining on Yahoo throughout the entire year, so it is more or less appropriate that the rapidly growing social networking site take hold of the No. 3 spot as we move into 2011.

Facebook held the fourth position for nearly a year and a half after passing the Wikimedia Foundation sites that include Wikipedia back in August 2009. Other notable sites it has passed along the way during its meteoric global rise include MySpace in April 2008, Amazon in August 2008, eBay in January 2009, AOL in February 2009, and now Yahoo.

Facebook also accounts for almost one quarter of all display ads in the United States, and recently became the second largest video site in the U.S. behind Google.

Keep in mind that Facebook’s own official traffic numbers differ slightly from the comScore data, claiming closer to 550 million worldwide unique monthly visitors. No matter how you score it, the audience is a massive one and the site’s popularity continues to spread across the globe.

Better Insights on Facebook Pages

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 18:50:00 GMT

Facebook has launched a new feature of Facebook Page owners and FB Platform developers that provide additional metrics about Page content. If you've been looking for a way to better understand your social media followers - this is it.

Page admins (at least those with at least with pages liked by 30 people) can now see per post impression (PPI) counts for any posted item back to June 25th, 2010. The PPI can be seen in two locations - on the page wall directly beneath each post and now on the Interactions portion of the Insights page.

Geographic and demographic data is also now available. Demographic data (anonymized) is broken down into gender and age. Location data is based on the geographic location of the user as determined by their browser IP address and is limited to at most the top 20 countries and cities. All other demographic information is aggregated and non-personally identifiable. If that weren't enough, insights on media consumptions (video, audio, photos) is available.

There are a few other features that will also be interesting to social media enthusiasts, namely that the data can be exported from the dashboard - perhaps Facebook's first attempt at some data portability. Really interesting development all the way around and lots of good data to dig into - so get started!

Did you know that Website Magazine's Facebook page is closing in quickly on 19,000 fans? Help us push past 20,000 before the holiday - tell your friends!

Some Like-able Facebook Stats from Hootsuite

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 19:00:00 GMT

Hootsuite has added Facebook Insights to enable its pro members the ability see the interaction on their Facebook pages directly from the dashboard of the platform.

Users will be able to see new fans to their page, demographics (region, age, gender), amount of page comments, number of “likes”, new discussions, and the number of new wall posts. While a quick look into the actual Facebook page will reveal pretty much the same information, sans demographic data, for social media power users this is a great addition to HootSuite.

Hootsuite Pro members will also have access to historical comparison to see which way pages are trending. Printable reports which can be shared are also available. Pro plans at Hootsuite start at $5.99/mo – there is a 30-day free trial.