Bloggasm

In my latest article for Harvard’s Nieman Lab, I interview Craig Finlay, a hobbyist photographer who stumbled into a lucrative wedding photography business through Facebook:

The way Finlay described “this Facebook thing,” it seemed like it had occurred mostly on a whim. He and Mysi had been editing photos from Rebecca’s shoot and decided to throw some of them up onto the Facebook page they had created for their company, Soda Fountain Photography. They tagged the bride and the groom in these initial photos and went back to editing the rest of the batch. But a curious thing happened: When the photos hit the bride and groom’s Facebook walls, friends who had attended the wedding started going in and tagging themselves, thereby publishing the photos to their friends’ walls. In essence, every person who was at the wedding was promoting Soda Fountain Photography’s content — each picture with the company’s watermark at the bottom — to their social graph.

“Almost immediately, our clients were being generated on Facebook,” Finlay recalled. “Because there were the people in the wedding who were getting tagged, and I guess the fortunate thing about wedding photography is that the friends of your clients are the demographic you’re always trying to hit. They’re 20-somethings, and they’re either getting engaged or are engaged. So when you take photos and throw them up on Facebook, you tag the bride and the groom, and, yeah, a lot of people looking at the album are family members, but a lot of them are their friends too, and the people who are engaged really interact with your photography in a much deeper way than they could with just a pretty ad in a magazine. They’re clicking through dozens of photos that you immediately throw up on Facebook from the wedding and they don’t think they’re looking at an advertisement — they just think they’re looking at their friends’ wedding photos. But every photo has a watermark on it, so every time you look at it it’s like it’s being imprinted.”

Hitwise has leveraged its data sets and shown that 1 Facebook fan is apparently equal to 20 additional visits to a retailer’s website over the course of a year. So, if you have 1,000 Facebook fans, that means an extra 20,000 visits to your site.

1 Facebook fan is worth 20 visits to a company’s website, says report.

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What is amazing is where Facebook’s new members are based. The social network has tapped the United States and is focusing most of its efforts on growing overseas. A lot of Facebook’s growth over the past month has been in Brazil and India, two huge countries where Orkut, another social network, dominates. Orkut has more than 100 million active users, but nearly half of those are in Brazil, with another 40 percent in India. Only about two percent of the service’s users are based in the United States, which is why you may not have heard about it. What you have heard about, though, is Orkut’s parent company, Google, which should see Facebook’s move into its territory as a direct challenge.

With Orkut’s Network Breached, Facebook Nears 700 Million Users

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The average media site integrated with Facebook has seen a 300% increase in referral traffic.

People who sign in with Facebook at The Huffington Post view 22% more pages and spend 8 minutes longer than the average reader.

Users coming to the NHL.com from Facebook spend 85% more time, read 90% more articles and watch 85% more videos than a non-connected user.

ABCNews.com, Washington Post and The Huffington Post are said to have more than doubled their referral traffic from Facebook since adding social plugins.

By The Numbers: How Facebook Says Likes & Social Plugins Help Websites

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Facebook has introduced a new metric into its advertising dashboard, showing you the amount of people that saw your ad. While Facebook previously showed you impressions on an ad, this counted the total number of impressions. i.e. 1 person seeing your ad 10 times would count as 10 impressions.

Now through the ‘Reach’ metric (viewable on the summary diagram at the top of your Page, and the full reports below), you can see the number of individuals that saw your ad. This gives you an accurate view of the total reach of your ad, and the audience size you’ve reached purely through a branding perspective, not necessarily for who clicked on your ad

A Tour of Facebook’s Upcoming Ad Platform

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For the past few days, a mystery has been unfolding in Silicon Valley. Somebody, it seems, hired Burson-Marsteller, a top public-relations firm, to pitch anti-Google stories to newspapers, urging them to investigate claims that Google was invading people’s privacy. Burson even offered to help an influential blogger write a Google-bashing op-ed, which it promised it could place in outlets like The Washington Post, Politico, and The Huffington Post…

…But who was the mysterious unnamed client? While fingers pointed at Apple and Microsoft, The Daily Beast discovered that it’s a company nobody suspected—Facebook.

Facebook Busted in Clumsy Smear on Google

It looks as if Gawker fell for it

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An average of 40% of the traffic to the top 25 news websites arrives from outside referrals, the study found, with Google Search the single biggest driver, accounting for 30% of all traffic.

But social media – and Facebook in particular – is increasingly becoming a major driver of traffic to the top news websites.

On five of the top 25 websites, Facebook was the second or third biggest driver of traffic. The Facebook Open Graph API is clearly having an effect on global news sharing and dissemination, with the ‘like’ button now permeating cyberspace.

Facebook as traffic driver to top news sites on the up, but Google still holds fort

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