I most certainly would!

It seems that Facebook is in the reviews game with their questions about your favorite places and apps.  Is Facebook the sleeper that will kill off Yelp and other review sites?  If past history is any indicator, they are the king at amassing user generated content.

Not much more needs to be said about this. Gotta wonder how this ad was approved by Facebook. The guy is naked and she probably is, too. What do you think the advertiser was targeting– old guys who say “creeper” in their profile? This is worse than the “date a cougar” ads from a few weeks ago.

3 months ago Microsoft spent $100 million to launch BING search.  And now Yahoo! has followed suit, spending another $100 million for their own branding campaign.  All the while Google and Facebook are laughing at the big company mentality for marketing– to spend money on traditional advertising.

If your search quality hasn’t changed, then invest the $100 million to build a better product, not to just advertise.

Yahoo’s new ad campaign is called “It’s You”, which harkens back to the Life Engine campaign of several years ago– lots of purple.  What I want to know is– how is the new Yahoo! about me, as they claim?

If you’ve got 6 minutes and 31 seconds, give this a shot from my friend Alex, who has the most popular paper airplanes site on the web.  If you’re one of those folks who likes to watch cooking shows, but doesn’t actually get around to following along– don’t worry, you can do this no sweat.  The plane is called the Cobra– and it took me only one sheet of paper (proof below) to do it, although I had to pause and rewind a couple times.  Flies perfectly as claimed– like a dart.

Check out Alex’s personal blog, as well as his cocktail making site.  If you’re really brave, try making the sweaty bollock recipe, which has 3 shots of absinthe.  If you don’t know what bollock are– look it up.  Perhaps making cocktails and paper airplanes don’t mix!

Some pages on his site, such as the types of paper airplanes, don’t have page titles  (SEO ooops!)– but all is forgiven for the man who is in charge of Facebook’s own SEO and online marketing. You can learn a lot from this man– not just about paper airplanes and cocktails.

You may have heard the phrase “Kill two birds with one stone”, regarding taking one action to produce two results. Twitter and Facebook have teamed up to create a highway directly to one another, allowing users to update one status and be published to both sites. Most people are aware of how you can have your Twitter updates post to your Facebook status. Some people know that you can hide people who spam your stream, but not many know you can post your Facebook statuses to Twitter.

Would you like to talk about efficiency? This productive measure comes at no cost, sending your statuses via fiber optics at “status per 100 milliseconds”. The highway is perfect for users with high social networking priority that would like to save time and have more flexibility.

One AWESOME example:

You may have Facebook mobile, but you do not receive status updates via text message. This is where Twitter has an upper hand; those subscribed to a “tweeter” via mobile device will now be notified of posted Facebook status. This is a win-win situation, because this highway has two lanes and can also travel the opposite direction. For example, you text your tweet to the designated number registered with your phone, and it shows up as your Facebook status aswell. This is perfect for non-internet browsing mobile devices.

Looking for customization? Feel free to share everything between Facebook and Twitter, but lucky for us picky folks you can choose what information you would like to share. You have options to share status updates, links, photos, notes, and event creations. Statuses and updates via Facebook and Twitter are very important to keep your friends, clients, fans, and coworkers informed. Hop online and buckle up (for safety), because you’re about to experience the smoothest and fastest ride social media has to offer.

Businesses can benefit from this, too. Online sites like BidFire, a Real-time auction website like eBay, are primed  for these quick transactions. Twitter allows access to their APIs that can be used to post messages when a user does something Like buy a Nintendo Wii for $10, which then can be automatically posted to Facebook with a neat URL to your website. When users link to their social network accounts, you can dramatically increase visibility just by simply offering a way for people to tell what a great deal they received. People like to brag to their friends, so why not tap into that?

A few days ago, I posted a Facebook status message, asking “Who wants a free SEO analysis?” 23 people responded and I chose one winner. Yesterday, I chose the winner and posted the analysis here.  And now, not even a day later, I do a search on Twitter and see pages and pages of people re-tweeting the blog post.

Funny thing is that I never promoted this on twitter to begin with. It started from just a Facebook status message and then a post of my blog.

You should search on your name to see what comes up.

You might be surprised.
You might learn something.

For example, look at who is mentioning me by typing this:

http://twitter.com/#search?q=dennis%20yu

Given the popularity, I think I’ll probably offer on free SEO analysis weekly. If you want one, just fan me on Facebook at facebook.com/dennisyu, then add your site to the list.

Update:

I now do a search on my name on twitter every few days to see what’s happening.  Now I see 100 mentions every time I do a blog post, even though I don’t mention it on twitter.  That means bloggers like us have to pay attention to twitter whether we like it or not.  At conferences, we get to see the live twitter feeds to get a sense of audience interest.  Quite lively!

My apologies in advance for the math here– I’ll keep it to a minimum to explain the points.

Below is a Google Analytics screenshot from a funeral planning site.  Facebook traffic represents sources 4, 5, and 8.

4) apps.facebook.com: This is self-serve PPC traffic from ads that show up on apps.  Most plentiful but has a bounce rate of 90.13%– about as bad as you can get.
5) facebook.com/referral: These are from people click on our links and posts– organic traffic.  66% bounce rate, which is high, especially compared to the site overall bounce rate of 40%.
8 ) facebook.com/cpc: Facebook PPC ads that show up other than on the apps.  Bounce rate of 81%.

We’re probably paying 15 cents a click for Facebook traffic, but the 80%+ bounce rate means we’re losing 4 out of every 5 folks on the landing page.  With Google AdWords, we’re paying 50 cents a click, but bouncing only 42%– in other words, losing 2 out of every 5 visitors.

So with Google, we’re paying 3 times as much per click, but keeping twice as many folks past the landing page.  On a per kept visitor basis, Facebook is still a better deal.

For the analytics smart-alecs out there, let me respond to your points:

• landing pages are the same: True, you’ll get different bounce rates if you send to different pages. Plus, you can’t compare a homepage bounce rate against a landing page bounce rate– they have different goals.  Well, we sent everyone to the homepage, as silly as that is– but it’s still an apples-to-apples comparison.
• not all clicks are the same: A higher bounce rate is likely to be a lower conversion rate, even if you adjust for the bounce.  Maybe– although it is true that EPC (Earnings Per Click) is what matters at the end of the day, not cost per click or bounce rate.
• data is not statistically significant: Okay, so the 80% and 90% bounce rates might actually vary 5-6% should we run a few thousand more clicks.  But given that we’re spending real money, there’s no need to blow a thousand dollars to find out that our estimated 80% bounce is more truly 77%– it’s still bad.

Were I Facebook, one thing I’d do is allow separate bids for application traffic versus non-application traffic.

Remember a few years ago when Google allowed advertisers to set separate content and search bids?  This is the same thing.

A guest post by Adam Sachs, co-founder of Ignighter, a group dating site with great relationship advice and a fun place to work

I’m Adam Sachs and I run the world’s largest group dating site. Since our initial launch as a Facebook Application in January 2008 and subsequent relaunch as a destination site in August 2008, we’ve amassed a significant inventory of group daters using our free service.

However, if you’re simply growing a free user base at a steady, continuous pace (read: you haven’t detonated a viral bomb like only the Facebooks and Twitters of the Internet have) then after a while, the free model starts to seem unsustainable. Acquiring new users on a free site has a cost. User acquisition could be costing you money (PPC ads, live sponsored events) or even just costing you time (Commenting on blogs, marketing via Twitter). But until you can establish a lifetime value for a new user, then you are simply shelling out for marketing while seeing a virtually nonexistent ROI.

With no ROI and no value associated with each user who registers for your site, it’s only a matter of time before you run out of money, time, and the ability to keep acquiring them. Your investors probably won’t be too happy either.

It’s taken Ignighter a while to come to this realization, but now that we have, we are beginning to experiment with incorporating paid functionality into the website. Introducing a paid model to Ignighter doesn’t just benefit the company however; we predict it will benefit our user base as well.

Below are a few Pros and Cons that we predict to encounter when transitioning from a free to paid service. We can revisit these pros and cons in a few months and see how accurate they proved to be.

Pros: Money is finally coming IN the door.

1. Money means more users. If you are making more per user than you are paying to acquire them, then the goal is to spend as much money as possible to acquire them. I’d pay $25 to get $35 back, wouldn’t you?
2. Money means better users. When you offer a free service, you get registrations from people of drastically varying levels of interest and relevance to your site. When people on the not-so-interested-in-meeting-new-people-but-it’s-free-so-I’ll-try-it-anyway end of the spectrum register, they’re actually adding what we affectionately call “shit inventory” to the site and hurting the experience of the registered users who want to use the site for its intended purpose.

Incorporating a paid level will naturally introduce a tiered system of usership to the site, facilitating an experience that groups users based on their intentions and expectations. Asking people to pay will also help to make your users more passionate about the company. Paid users will now be part of a community that they’ve invested in and helped to create.

Money means happy investors. This one is pretty self-explanatory.

Cons: It’s not so easy

1. It’s not so easy to convince someone to be one of the first to pay for your service. Before you can establish a track record of value that you’re providing to the user it can seem like you’re asking them to pay taste-tester to the King of Zamunda.
2. It’s not so easy to build the damn thing. At Ignighter this fundamental shift is requiring a ton of web development and business development resources. This kind of thing can’t be half-assed, you have to give it your full attention and planning.
3. It’s not so easy to accept that it’s going to work beyond a shadow of a doubt. But isn’t that what startups are all about?

Guest Post by Nicholas Abramovic. Nicholas helps singles meet new people at Zoosk – the largest dating application on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and Hi5. Nick also covers affiliate marketing, advanced ppc tactics and other fun stuff at many body theory.

Facebook’s self-serve advertising platform now allows advertisers to target whether users have already added your application or not yet added it. This is a huge play for companies such as Zoosk Online Dating, Zynga Games, and other application developers.

Why is this important?

A lot of companies use application networks such as SocialHour and RockYou to get users to click off of other applications and get them to view your application. This is pretty easy, and as we have all learned from the lessons of SocialHour getting banned by Facebook – these ads can be pretty deceptive and users sometimes have no idea that they have added your application.

By allowing application developers to target new and existing users, you can setup different bids for what the value of a new customer from Facebook is worth, and what the value of someone returning to your application is worth (especially for companies such as Zoosk and Zynga which operate on a subscription/gifts currency where using the application is king).

You can find out more about this at Facebook’s official developers blog. A word of caution: I’ve noticed that this targeting is accurate about 15% of the time, so this new feature although very welcomed to the big players of Facebook applications, this is still very much a work in progress.

Official Story: http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=263

For those who haven’t seen this before, a hilarious view of what Facebook might look like in 20 years.  But the real question is– what will us folks who are in our 20′s and 30′s be doing when we’re 50 or 60?  Will we be using social networks to find discount caskets?  We’ll still need services as senior citizens, so how will we deal with that in an ultra-connected online world?  Blackberrys and Iphones that are integrated with hearing aids?  Social security payments that are made directly to our PayPal accounts?  What are your thoughts?