Some new studies came out over the last little while talking about the benefits of using Facebook, how it effects customer loyalty and the truthfulness of online profiles.

I first found the studies at the Social Media Examiner, a great site and I recommend you drop by and check it out.

The first study put out by Neilsen Company talks about the time invested by users into Facebook.

The answer? 7 HOURS PER MONTH, just so you know Google users only spend about 2 hours on the site per month. Compare that to television at 144 hours per month. Yikes!

This came as no surprise but people like to share things on Facebook, this makes the site incredibly viral. In fact Facebookers like to share more than other Social Networkers from other sites. You can read more detail on that at TechCrunch.

Originally, I was going to write about the fact the Facebook has overtaken Yahoo in traffic, BUT, it looks like there’s bigger news to be had. Facebook overtook Google in Traffic the first week of this month(March). That makes Facebook the most trafficked site in the US. You can read about that here.

Another interesting study showed people tend to be more honest about themselves on Facebook with their profiles. This means you’re getting the real person not some idealized avatar of a person. This also means you can target your market easier since they have been more honest about themselves. You can read about that in more detail here.

This last study conducted by Harvard Business Review gives me mixed feelings. I know I’m such a deep person to have feelings about a market study.

Anyhoo, the study showed that Facebook fans of a company in this case a Cafe chain, are more loyal, spend more and are, well, better fans of the company. Which probably explains why they became fans on Facebook. But here’s the kicker out of the 13270 customers emailed and invited to join the page only 2.1% became Fans after 3 months of effort.

That’s a really low percentage, given the high number of people on Facebook? Now maybe they did not provide the right incentive, content and enticement? I love tossing out stats without context but an average direct mail campaign gets a 1% – 3% response rate and Email on average gets a 5% click through rate.

Now for the good news, those that became fans, came to the Cafe 20% more often, referred the Cafe to friends more often and became more emotionally attached to the Cafe. All really good things, but it really does not tell us what to do. Were these clients predisposed to be the best clients? Is that why they became fans to begin with. If they were more likely to refer the Cafe why did the Facebook site only develop into a few hundreds fans and not go viral? I’m sure we’ll get these and other answer on the next episode of Taxi. But until then were left with what the questions, “What we do with a Problem like Maria Facebook.”

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In the fifth part of the series we perform the dreaded switch from a Group to a Page.

In past videos I talked a little about the difference between a Page and a Group, my recommendation was to start a Page but for this experiment I would be creating a Group. Well we’ve done that, but before the Group gets to big, let’s switch it to a Page so we can focus on promotion and apps.

Here’s the video!

You can find the rest of the series here:

http://www.makingyoufindable.com/category/facebook/

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In the forth part of the series we talked about increasing membership.

There’s not much point in having a Group page unless of course it makes a group. So we’re going to talked about the things you can do to help increase the number of people that find your page and join it.

Watch Part 1

Watch Part 2

Watch Part 3

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In the third part of the series we start to cover adding content and customizing the page.

We talk about:

Fan Pages vs Group Pages
Member Growth
Improving Content, Info and Introduction
Promotion of Page

Watch Part 1

Watch Part 2

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In the second part of the series we start to cover adding content and customizing the page.

We talk about:

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I see a lot of questions on how to use Facebook.

One great way to use Facebook is by building a community page, it’s easy, viral and local.  All the things you want in a promotion.

In this series we start with nothing, and build a community page live, you’ll see the failures, and the success as the group gets built.  That means you can build yours while watching the series.

TIP:  You may consider using a Fan Page instead of a Group Page.  Both have their pros and cons, however, I choose a Group Page for this series just for experimental purposes.  Fan Pages offers a little more flexibility, Group Pages are super easy.

Here’s the first video:

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In life we run across things that are difficult.  Sometimes they seem impossible.  But with a little help, and a never give up attitude you can get where you want.  At least that’s what the Squirrel proves.

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So I’m surfing the web and run across the recent report:

Admob Mobile Metrics

Which tells us that 91% of Iphone users would recommend the device to others.  They also talk about the PalmPre(WebOS) and Android but for some reason they leave out Blackberry(RIM)?  Now I’m not saying Blackberries are the be all, end all.  Seriously, I own an Iphone and currently am a recovering Crackberry addict but come on Blackberries still have a larger market share than Iphone, Andriod and Palm.

How do you do a mobile State Of The Union type report and leave them out of the mix?  What’s even more interesting, and by interesting I mean I did’nt have a funny YouTube video to watch, is the fact that on page 7 of the report the Blackberry starts to pop up, and is ALWAYS scoring better then the PalmPre, which begs the question why ignore it the way they did?

So my Question to you, if you use a Blackberry, “Would you recommend a Blackberry to others?”

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Well another way of saying that is 50% of tweets are not in english.

I was reading Techcrunch and few stats popped out.

1. Twitter now processes 50,000,000, yes 50 MILLION tweets per day.

2. 50% are not in english, more or less.

So if we do some quick math, let me see here, carry the four, yep, that’s 25 million english tweets per day or:

9,125,000,000 (9 Billions Tweets a Year and Growing!!!)

Honestly, do we really have that much to talk about?  I love twitter , I use it, I get my news from it, I tweet my news and news which is important to me from it.  This post will go out to the tweet universe for people to read.

What’s my point?

Once again I will state loudly, SOCIAL MEDIA IS HERE, IT IS NOT GOING AWAY, LEARN TO USE IT AND INTEGRATE IT IN YOUR BUSINESS.

Nuff, said!

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Hi Everyone,

I did a quick review for everyone of a new service running at no cost.

The service is called Etacts.com and it will tell you the last time you contacted someone in your Gmail or Google Apps account.

If you’re building a relationship and referral based business this tool is perfect.

Watch the video and you’ll see exactly what I mean.

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