29 Sep Fake Likes, Real Gifts on Facebook. Twitter
In my Saturday recap, we’ve got Facebook getting real by getting less fake. Twitter is increasingly clever on ad sales and Myspace is making a comeback attempt that isn’t being ridiculed. Lots of stuff happening this week, so here goes:
Facebook Now Allows Real Gifts to Be Sent
We now know that 50% of consumers value a brand’s Facebook page more than the brand website, and we know that Facebook used to push virtual gifts. But now Facebook is letting people choose, mail and pay for real physical gifts. It’s an F-commerce play to be sure, but also a way for FB to get users credit cards on file (like Apple’s AppStore) and get their home addresses. A big move by Facebook.
Fake Likes Are Being Purged
While Facebook gets more real in the gifts area, they are also purging fake likes on brand pages. This has made some brand pages lose large numbers of likes, as you can see in this image. Clearly some pages are impacted more than others. Those who bought fans or were impacted most by malware are affected most.
This is part of an increase in security that Facebook announced last month. Facebook says that less than 1% of likes would disappear from any page, “providing they and their affiliates have been abiding by our terms.”
Twitter Now Allowing More Search Engine Indexing
Twitter has, in some ways, been more clever with their monetization strategy than Facebook has. Now they are allowing Google, Bing and others to index Twitter’s own search results page. Why? Because that will allow those results to show up in search engines, thereby sending more traffic to Twitter search results. And those search pages are used to display Promoted Tweets. More eyeballs for their inventory.
One bonus note
Is Myspace coming back? Justin Timberlake (who now owns the network) released this snazzy new video of a completely rebuilt Myspace. It has the social community talking more about the network than we have in years. Will it work? We’ll see. All we have is the video so far.
