Tag: facebook marketing

The largest social network in the world has patented tech to identify those whose influence is the most powerful.

Facebook is always looking for a new way to monetize, particularly when it comes to the lucrative area of social media marketing, and now it has started in yet another direction as it has patented technology that will allow it to spot the top “influencers” among its users.

This is all a part of Facebook’s broader strategy to keep ahead of what its users want while they use the site or apps.

Once it has determined what its users are into at any given time, then the next phase of its social media marketing strategy is to discover those people who will purchase such a user base. It can therefore successfully market content that its users will be able to discover and share. The outcome is that groups of consumers are formed for interested marketers to be able to target. The big data analysis at Facebook has given the company the ability to identify the individual users who are most responsible for creating the largest responses in a group; the “influencer”.

The company has now patented the codes necessary to discover the influencers who give social media marketing the most potential.

The patent for this marketing technology was first filed in 2011by the head of Ads at Facebook Inc, Andrew Bosworth. The company was able to obtain the patent only a week later. It is somewhat similar to other patents that are held by other industry giants such as Microsoft Corporation, Yahoo! Inc., and Google Inc. According to many analysts, the Facebook patent is especially ingenious for “Influencer Marketing”.

The marketing code from Facebook differs from that of other giants in that it provides a highly simplified method of spotting the celebrity influencers. The analogy from the company is that it finds the “expert”, first. That account will then encourage a share from the influential celebrity, creating a number of follower sharing explosions that are quite strong in themselves. The competition’s social media marketing strategy is more focused on the size of an influencer’s connections or the strength of that influencer’s followers.

This is causing the smartphone based social media marketing revenue at the company to spike.

Facebook has been making a concerted effort to improve the experience that it provides to the users of mobile devices, and based on the ad revenues that it is generating through its social media marketing business, it looks as though those efforts are paying off.

Over half a billion Facebook users currently access their accounts exclusively over smartphones and tablets.

Facebook recently released that data as a component of its earnings presentation. By the close of last year, that social network recorded 1.19 billion active monthly users over mobile devices. This represented an increase of 26 percent over the figure that was recorded at the end of 2013. This tremendous rise in mobile traffic has meant that Facebook has also been able to bring in considerably greater earnings over mobile focused social media marketing ads.

The ad revenue generated from mobile devices makes up the majority of Facebook’s marketing income.

The company reported that the last quarter of 2014 brought in $3.59 billion in overall advertising revenue. Of that, 69 percent came from mobile ads, with the remainder being generated from the desktop and laptop side of things. This means that almost $2.5 billion was brought in through mobile ads, alone, in a period of three months. Year over year, that represented an improvement of 53 percent. It also proved to be the first quarter in which the mobile advertising revenue at Facebook broke the $2 billion level.

This type of healthy mobile marketing figures are critical to businesses such as Facebook, that have business models that are based on advertising. While internet users continue to use their browsing on laptops and desktops – and their banner ads – to smartphones and tablets – with their apps and mobile browsers that require different forms of advertising than the traditional types.

This has required Facebook – and other businesses hoping to generate meaningful revenue from ads displayed on mobile devices – to have to work very hard in order to create a strategy that will encourage users to actually click and take action on the links that are posted. The most recent effort that Facebook has made in this vein has been in opening up the social network’s user data up to brands that would be using the platform for placing ads.