Twitter beats Facebook on mobile ad revenue

	While Facebook struggles to find ways to increase revenue, Twitter has got it down pat. It has been estimated that Twitter will earn $129.7 million in mobile advertising revenues this year, while Facebook will earn just $72.7 million despite a far higher user-base. Creating a mobile-first strategy for businesses is becoming increasingly important as the volume of smartphone and tablet owners continues to increase exponentially. Twitter grasped this trend early and now generates more ad revenue from its Promoted Tweets program via its mobile platform than on its desktop app. To read more click here.

Is Zuckerberg really “in over his hoodie?”

Facebook's stocks continue to slide amid growing scepticism regarding its future revenue prospects (especially after its less-than-impressive first quarter results & admission of a lack of mobile strategy). Questions are now beginning to surface as to whether founder Mark Zuckerberg is the right man for the job. Silicon Valley has always favoured the founder but some commentators claim that his strengths lie with creating technology - rather than managing and fronting a commercial business. The founder-as-CEO is becoming a hot topic in Silicon Valley. To read more click here.

Facedeals uses facial recognition to send deals to customers as they walk through door

			Remember the movie Minority Report? Well a team of developers have created a way for businesses to automatically send deals to customers that walk into the front door.  This technology uses facial recognition software to scan customers' faces using the Facedeals camera box. If the consumer has pre-authorised the Facedeals app on their Facebook account, the camera automatically checks the customer into the business and additionally scans your history of Facebook likes and customises a deal based on those likes.

Privacy will become a real issue here as Facebook has previously received backlash for its use of facial recognition software on its site.  To read more click here.

Amazon and Google trump Facebook in the trust stakes - but no one beats grocery stores

		A new poll has shown that more US adults feel comfortable sharing personal information via Amazon and Google than they do with Facebook.  Only a third or respondents said they were comfortable with how Facebook handles personal information related to the delivery of ads. But no one beat grocery stores in terms of trustworthiness, with 81 per cent of respondents saying they were comfortable with how grocery stores used personal information for coupons. To read more click here.

Amazon looks to users to socially-share their purchases

OK, I downloaded Aloe Blacc's "I Need a Dollar" covered by Pixie Lott.  Don't shoot me.

But what was more interesting was the fact that Amazon now allows me to share my purchase across Facebook, Twitter and e-mail.

This is the kind of retail social sharing that sites such as Blippy have built a business model around. Blippy is now known as the "Twitter of personal finance", facilitating discussion and comparison-shopping amongst its user base.

Amazon has been a pioneer in creating social content within the Amazon platform itself through user-based product reviews & customer discussions. However this new move allows Amazon to push content out into the establshed social networks.  And there are two key benefits.

The obvious one is greater brand visibility on Facebook/Twitter through increased social interactions.  But the second relates to search engine optimisation as social content becomes increasingly indexed and important to search algorithms.

I'm still not convinced that consumers want to share all their purchases socially  -  but we'll see.

And the Pixie Lott single was free.  Not that I am looking for an excuse, you know.

Facebook introduces Smart Lists to compete with Google+ Circles

You may have noticed when logging into Facebook recently that it's added functionality to the way that users can update their Status.  The Status box now includes options for location, friends names and additional control over which friends get to see different status updates.  Now some of this functionality was already available on Facebook - but this revision to the Status box makes it easier to control these features.

Additionally, Mashable this week also revealed some screen shots of Facebook's new Smart Lists.  This will automatically group friends into one of three categories: 'work colleagues', 'old classmates' and those 'that live within 50 miles' of you.  This is intended to mirror the Google+ Circles so that the user can more easily choose how to share information with different groups of contacts.

Users will still be able to create custom lists using an updated Friends List tool (see below).

Smart Lists are is currently limited to select users prior to its roll-out.

It’s the utility, stupid

Article first published as It's the Utility Stupid on Technorati.

Google+ is not a ‘product’ apparently.  It’s still a ‘project’.  And it’s out in what looks to be a limited beta release as ‘Field Trial’ – but which feels more like a ‘throttled release’ as new users can then start to pass invites on.  

Google clearly feels that this is all a work in progress. 

However, it doesn’t feel like work in progress. It has hit 10m users in a few short weeks making it one of the fastest growing network launches ever, according to Mashable. The interface is clean and slick – and Circles makes the concept of ‘groups’ easy to implement and manage.  Even the animation when you add a friend or contact to a group is a great little piece of interactive design.

And there are other features not found elsewhere.  ‘Sparks’ looks like it could build into a powerful content recommendation engine, especially once Google+ gains scale.  It also provides a good benefit for users to actually ‘Google +1’ content they find or that their friends may like.  It could also be strong opportunity to monetise the platform as brands looks to promote their own content.

‘Hangout’s are fundamentally video chat (though trying to get that to actually work is a little tricky) – and Facebook’s video chat via Skype looks like it could trump that feature right off the bat.

And I suppose that’s the problem with Google+ so far.  There’s no killer feature.  There’s no compelling reason why this should be my new social network of choice – no reason to give up Facebook.  And I don’t need yet another network in my life.

Even Google’s own FAQs include the question “Why don’t you have killer feature X?”.

So far, I wager that a large proportion of Google+’s growth has been driven by its limited access and exclusivity.  

It’s the power of scarcity. 

Everyone in the digerati wanted an invite and the power to send invites.  How many of Facebook’s News Feed updates were posted from Google+ - just to demonstrate one’s own personal sense of digital status?

But where’s Google+’s utility? Where does it add value to my life that no other platform does? Facebook created that social utility by connecting people with their friends - and it became the dominant social network by doing that better than anyone else.  And it continuously evolved functionality that was useful: from pokes, picture tagging, status updates to Like’s, Fan pages and Facebook plug-ins.

However, Facebook needs to continue being useful.  As Mark Choueke says in Marketing Week, unless it continues to evolve its utility, people will start to drift away from the constant wall of trivial personal updates and stilted brand updates.  (I’m really not sure I can take another brand asking what I am up to for the weekend, each Friday afternoon).

There is some interesting data that shows that although Facebook is growing globally, in some more mature markets Facebook is seeing a decline.  For example in the US (according to Inside Facebook) it lost 6 million users during May this year and in Canada it lost 8% of users (1.52million out of its 16.6m base).  

And this trend is mirrored in the UK. According to Hitwise, Facebook has also seen a declining market share losing ground to both Twitter and YouTube.   

Now, of course, this doesn’t for a second mean that this is even the beginning of the end for Facebook. 

But it does demonstrate the need to keep things fresh and, most importantly, useful.  It will be interesting to see how Facebook’s Skype partnership adds to its utility and how Google+ intends to create some significant space between it and Facebook.

Twitter's Facebook-style pages

Today Twitter announced that it's considering launching Facebook-style pages. 

There's a two-fold danger. 

The first is whether the strive for additional revenue streams means that Twitter starts to betray it's raison d'etre.  How will Twitter pages fit with its 140 character proposition? 

Secondly, Twitter pages start to become yet another property that brands feel compelled to get involved with - another platform to keep up to date and spend money on - without necessarily having thought through their objectives for them as another social media channel.

Twitter pages could easily become a brand solution in search of a brand problem.