WebProNews

Facebook Borrows $100 Million for Growth Purposes

Facebook is borrowing $100 million to accommodate growth on the site. The money, from venture loan firm TriplePoint, brings the amount raised to around $350 million. The site has grown quickly and needs around 50,000 more servers to handle the load. Facebook has over 70 million active users and around 109 million monthly visitors.

MySpace, Facebook Still On Top

If MySpace were to lose its top spot among social networks, it'd have a long way to fall. Though US visits to the powerhouse were down five percent since last year, MySpace still commanded nearly 74% of the social networking market, according to Hitwise.  Facebook, long in second place but up 32%, pulled in nearly 15% of US social networkers, a share that towers over its nearest competitor's.

Found: The Point of Twitter

Hopefully, we're over wondering what the point of Twitter is and we can move on to how, exactly, using it or other social media can be good for business. Sometimes the biggest obstacle is just wrapping your head around something.The short and skinny of what is to follow is this: 

The Rich Are Visiting More Social Networks

According to The Luxury Institute's latest WealthSurvey, "The Wealthy and Web 2.0", wealthy online consumers ( average income $287K and net worth just over $2 million) are flocking to social networks.

The Growth Of Twitter

An interesting stat posted on the Twitter blog shows which are the top ten countries with the most people using the Twitter social network as determined from Twitter’s public timeline.That’s how I describe Twitter, incidentally - a social network, not the original descriptor ‘micro blogging tool.’ My perception of Twitter has evolved.

Web 2.0 Mapping and Social Networks

Here's details of an event of interest next month... Web 2.0 Mapping and Social Networks - 2008/01/23 14:18Event Fee: FreeWeb site: http://web.meetup.com/49/Event date: Tuesday February 19, 2008 @ 7:00pm - 9:00pmEvent location: Menlo Park, CADescription: We are thrilled to present a very special group from NASA Ames Research Center – World Wind! Our Meetup group is about sharing, teaching, learning, and networking around current and future web-based geospatial and social networking technology.

Digital Marketers Want Better Tracking Tools

Only 19 percent of interactive marketers can make campaign changes in less than 24 hours according to a new report from Sapient "Interactive Marketing Survey."The Interactive Marketing Survey found that marketers lack the tools to optimize their marketing efforts across the full spectrum of digital channels. More than half felt "only somewhat confident" or "not confident at all" in their firm's ability to track campaigns on multiple channels in real-time.

Chasing Social Media Influence

The concept of opinion leadership - that 90 percent of the world is influenced by the other 10 percent - came out of a study conducted by Lazarsfeld, Berelson and Gaudet.back in 1944. Chasing the Influencers is the search for that 10% and has long been a part of a PR and marketing. In that early study opinion leaders are defined as people who are more influential within their social networks than others. Isn't that interesting - within their social networks. The more things change the more they stay the same.

Remember Hakia and Its Social Network?

Hakia, a semantic search engine, launched a social network of sorts back in October. The purpose of the network was to allow users to connect with others who typed in the same query. While I’ve always wondered why you’d want to do that unless a search engine’s results were lacking, I figured it was about time to see how that idea was going after almost three months. Pluses:

Despite Facebook Rise, MySpace Still King

All the press and the industry observers talked about last year was Facebook, which made it seem like MySpace was soooo 2006. Social networkers, though, must not have been paying too much attention.According to data from Hitwise, MySpace pulled in 76 percent of US visits to social networking websites in 2007, and 95 percent of them were return visitors in December. This can be interpreted that not only is MySpace commanding the vast majority of the social networking market, but also inspires some pretty fierce loyalty.