Facebook: 375 Million Users Play Games

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This week at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Facebook wasted no time in explaining how to build up a strong audience for cross-platform gaming.

During a panel at the event earlier this week, engineering manager Aaron Brady broke down some interesting statistics for the site, indicated in a blog post. An average of 375 million people play Facebook-oriented games on a monthly basis, through both desktop and mobile devices. For good measure, cross-platform play is huge, having grown 2.5 times the level of mobile-only players, and 1.5 times over routine desktop players.

The stats also indicate that cross-platform play across both devices also grew quite a bit between September and November 2013, with games like Candy Crush Saga leading the charge.

Needless to say, Facebook’s gaming portal isn’t going to slow down anytime soon, if at all.

Source: GigaOm

Twitter Hints It May Lose The @

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Vivian Schiller, Twitter’s Head of News, unleashed some information that elaborated on some previous hints that CEO Dick Costolo had made about some changes to how we interact with one another on the site. Signs are pointing to Twitter removing the @ and #– replies and hashtags.

These fundamental elements are the building blocks of Twitter, and Twitter doesn’t appear to want to use that functionality anytime soon. When Facebook finally took a cue from Twitter to utilize tags and hashtags within posts, it appears Twitter wants to make theirs simpler just like Facebook.

What’s more, it appears that the alpha version of Twitter for Android shows that Twitter has been actively experimenting with this change.

Tomos Evans, Director of Social Media at Ayzenberg Group feels Twitter is under pressure.

“The potential removal of the @ reply is surely a response to the increasingly stagnant growth of Twitter. To compete (and now to answer underwhelmed shareholders) there’s a logic to Twitter’s desire to simplify its unique language. The change would appear to be purely ‘grammatical’ but foreign grammar puts many learners off a new language, and I’m sure Twitter hopes any simplification will draw new users to the platform,” said Evans.

When it came to what this move could mean to marketers, Evans was positive. “For brands and brand managers, the removal of something which intimidates consumers should be seen as an opportunity to foster growth and engagement.”

 

Source: TheNextWeb

 

WeChat Savors Huge User Base

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While WhatsApp continues to be the world’s leading messaging app with over 450 million active users, its rival, WeChat, isn’t too far behind.

Tencent released its latest earnings report this week, indicating that the combined monthly active users between the domestic WeChat app and its Chinese counterpart Weixin have reached 355 million active users by the end of 2013. That’s a 121 percent year-on-year increase, and also a six percent rise from quarter-on-quarter.

While Tencent didn’t provide a breakdown of where users were active depending on region, it did report that it doubled its international reach to 100 million users within a three-month span last year. For good measure, it also passed 100 million downloads through Google Play earlier this year.

No doubt those numbers will continue to rise, making it an even closer race between WeChat and WhatsApp.

Source: The Next Web

Facebook Launches Video Ads Soon

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After spending so much time advertising on other media channels on the Internet, Facebook is just about ready to give video a shot. The company announced last week that it will begin debuting 15-second video advertisements in its News Feed over the next few months.

This follows a few months of testing of the service with the clips, running with muted sound until someone scrolled over them to get more information. The goal of the campaign was to make sure the ads were informative, yet not intrusive to those who simply wanted to use the social site.

Bloomberg estimates that the services will launch in late April or early May, but Facebook declined to comment.

Source: GigaOm

Share A Photo, Get More Retweets

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A new interactive chart from Twitter shows just why they want brands to begin thinking “photo first.” Photo tweets were retweeted 35 percent more than regular old text tweets. Video, while not as effective as photos increase the likelihood of retweets by 28 percent. The chart below also includes the effectiveness of adding hashtags, digits and quotes. The perfect tweet formula is likely a culmination of a few of these.

 

Source: Twitter

Energy Drink Asks For Selfies

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Would you take a photo of your groggy, mussed-haired, spittle laden self for a chance to win a 6-pack of energy drinks That’s exactly what 5-Hour Energy asked their followers to do with their #ShowUsYourTiredFace social campaign.

“We realized that it’s the Monday after that hurts,” said Melissa Skabich, the director of communications for 5-Hour Energy in a statement to Digiday. “So, we thought, ‘What about posting a photo of your tired face ’”

The campaign incorporated a few of 5-Hour Energy sponsored athletes, including former Nascar drive Michael Waltrip and current driver Clint Bowyer. Getting all of Twitter to share arguably their most unflattering photos has already increased followers by 9 percent. It helps that the campaign cleverly coincided with daylight savings time, when everyone is feeling the loss of an hour of sleep.

Facebook Drives Most Social Sales, Reddit Grows

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Shopify looked at 37 million social visits to client stores to get a bigger picture of which social sites brought home the bacon. While Polyvore had the highest average order value, Facebook converted more visitors into purchases at a higher rate. The big surprise Pay special attention to Reddit, which is seeing more order growth than every other social site, although LinkedIn and Pinterest aren’t doing too shabby either. The top products are clothing or novelty items– think a turkey hat for babies and Sriracha-tinged candy canes.

 

Source: TechCrunch

The Bar/Video Game ‘Geek’ Experience

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With “barcades” – a combination of bar and arcades – on the rise, it’s no surprise that conventional bars are looking to get in on some gaming action as well. Amongst them is Folsom Street Foundry in San Francisco, a bar that hosts Tuesday night gaming parties that are ideal for players and those in the industry alike.

The event features 80’s video game music playing in the background, along with a custom arcade game emulator, game systems set up for multiplayer play featuring such games as Halo and Mario Kart, and live broadcasts from Twitch, including programs like Twitch Plays Pokemon and Hearthstone. Card games are also offered, for those who prefer the old-school approach.

An outside team called Showdown eSports organized the event, with gaming nights proving to be “proof of concept” when it comes to attracting a “geek”-style nightclub audience. “This is a test of, are gamers willing to come out to a bar to do fun things that aren’t available elsewhere ” said co-founder C.J. Scaduto. “People like to dance, they go to a dance club. This is more like a geek’s paradise.”

These events should continue onward for the time being. It seems like a game marketer’s paradise, and hopefully one that will spread to more cities.

Source: Recode.net

Oreo’s Twitter-Made 3D Printed Cookies

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Miniature platform where the cookie is born.

Perhaps when you think of personalized cookies, the kind you imagine are of the homespun sort with the addition of your favorite nuts or candies. At South by Southwest Interactive, it appears Oreo thinks in terms of hyper-personalized versions of their famed sandwich cookies with the added benefit of another ingredient—the Internet.

Oreo is creating these real-time snacks using data collection to create actually edible 3D printed cookies. Depending on what’s trending on Twitter, the flavor of the cookie will change, but attendees can choose from a dozen different choices.

While it takes about 2 minutes to create the personalized cookie, tweet your experience with Oreo’s hashtag #eatthetweet.

Oreo continues to prove its real-time marketing prowess and their ability to think outside the sheer blue plastic box.

Some might be approaching these 3D future-cookies with a little trepidation, and that makes sense. If you’re not a SXSW and just itching to find out what the cookie-making process is like, you’ll want to view the video below.

 

Women Lead On Social Media

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Finances Online and Ruby Media put together this insightful infographic combining research from the Pew Research Center, Burst Media and Nielsen into one place showing how women are leading the way to the “visual web.” While it’s no surprise women comprise the majority of users on Pinterest, Instagram and Tumblr, it might surprise you that they use virtually every major social site more, with one exception: LinkedIn.

Woman are also more likely to use social media on a daily basis and therefore it makes sense that they might engage with brands on a more frequent basis. Take a gander below to see the gender disparity online.

 

Source: MediaBistro; Image Source: Soshable