Using Hashtags in Social Media Marketing | SiteProNews

Using Hashtags in Social Media Marketing | SiteProNews

Expert Advice for Facebook Advertising | SiteProNews

Expert Advice for Facebook Advertising | SiteProNews

PIXLEE, PONGR, STIPPLE, AND CURALATE: FOUR NEW WAYS TO IMPROVE ONLINE MARKETING

By Alex Befekadu
Fri, May 3 2013 6:36 pm | 0 Comments

Four New Services That Ease Marketing Media Online

With the digital age in full swing, staying on top of new online services can be a nightmare. Finding legitimate services can greatly enhance your online marketing approach, and a sense of your demographic. Jennifer Alsever ofINC shares four new services that collect, track, and display online photo’s with little effort.

Pixlee
Best for: Creating photo albums

This service lets you crowdsource thousands of user-generated photos and display them online in curated albums. Sign up for an account and create a photo album on your site or on Pixlee.com. You can invite customers to upload pictures directly to the album or via email, Instagram, and Twitter. Then, you can add the album to Facebook and Tumblr. Pixlee’s software will pick the best photos based on the photographer’s popularity, where the photos were taken, and other factors. You can log on to your Pixlee dashboard to see how many photos you’ve collected, how many views they have received, and other metrics. Cost: Starting at $500 a month

PongrBest for: Creating loyalty campaigns

Looking for ways to solicit user-generated images of your products? Pongr lets you create loyalty campaigns on its website. You dole out points to fans who submit images by emailing them to your Pongr address or submitting them with the service’s free iPhone or Android app. People can also accrue points for sharing images and cash them in for prizes that include gift cards and iPads. Your company’s Pongr page displays the images, a leaderboard, and a store for redeeming points for prizes. Cost:Free to create a photo gallery and campaign; $4,500 a month for premium services, including access to CRM data and customized landing pages

Stipple
Best for: Tagging photos

Use Stipple to tag photos of your products with a variety of information, including prices, maps, and links to your online store. When someone mouses over or touches the image, the information automatically appears. The data stays with images as they are shared across the Web. You can check your Stipple dashboard to see how many people have viewed the content and on which sites. You can also use Stipple to tag images for use in traditional online ad campaigns. Cost: Free for social-media campaigns with up to 1,000 engagements, then $250 a month and up

Curalate
Best for: Tracking analytics

Curalate helps track how other people use the product images from your company’s website, Pinterest account, or Instagram account. Go to your Curalate dashboard to see a variety of metrics, including which photos are driving the most traffic to your website and which ones are being shared the most on Pinterest and Instagram. The service also identifies your most influential customers and lets you respond to pins, repins, and comments about your images from your Curalate dashboard. You can also use Curalate to create promotions on Pinterest. Cost: Roughly $1,000 a month

http://business.transworld.net/128704/news/pixlee-pongr-stipple-and-curalate/

Get Noticed on the Web

By Jerry Bader 

Website Engagement Techniques: The Caricature Effect

Marketing is all about getting noticed, getting remembered, and motivating people to action. Whether it's a website, display ad, or video, it must first grab people's attention, it must stop the viewer from going onto the next website, turning the magazine page, or clicking the stop button. In order to accomplish that increasingly difficult task, you must understand the Caricature Effect.

The Caricature Effect

The Caricature Effect simply stated says that what we notice is variation from the norm. Caricature artists exaggerate reality because that is how we visually distinguish one person from another. Human beings are preprogrammed to look for patterns and variations in those patterns, it's how we recognize who people are, and it is a basic survival mechanism that helps us recognize danger and distinguish friend from foe.

By distorting an individual's prominent facial features the caricature artist mimics the human brain's way of remembering who's who. Our brains are not cameras that take pictures and file them away for future reference. Our memories are malleable, they change and alter over time and experience, and as a result the things we remember best are the things that stand out, things like Bob Hope's ski-jump nose or Albert Einstein's wild white hair. The reason caricatures are so effective is because they emphasize the distinguishing differences that we recognize and remember. So how do we use this fundamental, hard-wired human characteristic to further marketing agendas?

What We Notice Is Variation From The Norm

Getting noticed is job-one of any marketing vehicle, so in order to get people to stop, look, and listen we need to use all the available communication elements at our disposal.

When developing a video campaign we use concepts that demand the mental processing of information by shocking, stimulating, puzzling, or tickling the funny bone of the viewer. These techniques force the audience to think, process, and decode the message, and by generating this mental activity we embed our client's message in the audience's consciousness. Depending on the brand and/or product, implementation can range from subtle to obvious with the trick being to make people sit-up and take notice by forcing them to think.

Pattern Recognition - The Same But Different

Human beings have evolved to watch for patterns and when an audience recognizes a familiar scenario they leap to a conclusion. It's a way of making quick decisive decisions that can either help or hurt communication. Properly used pattern recognition can lead your audience where you want to take them, but if the pattern is too obvious or hackneyed, it can lead to viewers dismissing your message.

Let's face-it, consumers have become increasingly jaded by too many ads that yell at them like a Billy Mays commercial, or promise improbable results like so many diet schemes, or scare the hell out of people with legal disclaimers warning of everything from headaches to heart attacks like most prescription drug ads. These feeble attempts to standout like a pair of John Daley golf slacks only succeed in reminding the audience how completely desperate, or disengaged the advertiser really is.

If you want people to remember your message you have to alter the pattern by varying from the norm so that it forces people to mentally process your information. It's as simple as a story with a twist like how a comedian sets-up a punch line, or how a magician sets-up an illusion.

In other articles I've written extensively about techniques for using video but here let's discuss something even more universal - photography. It is one of the most economical ways to create the kind of mental stimulation that makes people remember your site and your message.

Photo-Visual Engagement Techniques

Most every website has photography of some sort on it, but like most video implementations, it is rarely used to its full potential. Obviously, do-it-yourself snapshots reek of amateurism but even professional royalty-free images can be as innocuous as DIY snaps are unprofessional, and as we have stated, bland, featureless images are just not going to stimulate anyone's memory.

Cinegraphs

Cinegraphs are photographs that move. They are created by combining a series of still images into a gif animation. The best cinegraphs use subtle movement like hair or clothing blowing in the wind to cause the audience to take a second look. What appears at first to be a regular photograph creates a "Did I just see it move?" reaction, and that's the kind of subtle yet powerful feature that can get people to remember your site, your product, and your brand. Like any technique you have to know how and when to use it in order to enhance your presentation and reinforce your message. Just parachuting in a technique for technique's sake is no better than a meaningless royalty free image used as filler.

Sequence Images

A sequence image is a still image that combines a series of images into one photo. Unlike cinegraphs, the image doesn't move but it does provide a kinetic quality by showing a series of varying poses all combined into one photograph. This kind of image can be very striking and powerful and can cause your viewer to take a moment to decode the story it tells.

Selective Color

Color is another area that often gets forgotten. Different colors have different psychological effects depending on the context in which they are used. In addition to the color choice, using color as a consistent marketing communication element helps enhance and embed your identity and brand image. Many Internet entrepreneurs pay little or no attention to color imaging and it is really unfortunate as it is often an inexpensive but effective way of making a profound impression.

Photographs today are generally full color images but if you're not controlling the color in your images then you're missing a great chance to make a memorable impression. Of course lack of color (black and white photography) can be just as powerful if used properly. Jack Daniel's is a brand that uses black and white and selective color extensively in its marketing.

There are several ways to use selective color in your photographic imaging. Jack Daniel's uses a lot of black backgrounds or B&W photos and copy combined with color product shots of the bottle that has a B&W label but is filled with the golden elixir.

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About The Author
Jerry Bader is Senior Partner at MRPwebmedia, a website design and marketing firm that specializes in Web-video Marketing Campaigns and Video Websites. Visit www.mrpwebmedia.com, www.136words.com, and www.sonicpersonality.com. Contact at info@mrpwebmedia.com or telephone (905) 764-1246.

Pakistan - Key Statistics, Telecom Market and Infrastructure, Regulatory Overview, and Forecasts

Synopsis

Pakistan’s telecom market had been struggling for a long time with the transition from a regulated state-owned monopoly to a deregulated competitive structure. The government set out plans to increase fixed-line teledensity from 2.5% at the end of 2002 to 7% (around 10 million fixed lines) by 2010. This target became impossible to achieve in time and by 2012 the fixed subscriber base was actually declining. After peaking at 4% in 2008, fixed penetration had fallen to 3.5% coming into 2012. In the meantime, though, the focus had changed; the whole telecom landscape in Pakistan had shifted with the phenomenal expansion of the country’s mobile market. Over the same planning period – 2002 to 2010 – the number of mobile subscribers jumped from less than two million to 100 million. Despite a tightening of the national economy during 2009 the mobile market continued to expand at an annual rate of between 5% and 10%. And it had increased to 120 million by early 2012. While mobile penetration had passed 70%, internet penetration remained low. While broadband growth had almost been negligible for some years, 2008/09 saw a promising upsurge in broadband subscriptions; this pattern in broadband growth looked to be continuing, boosted by the spread of competition throughout the market and the increased adoption of wireless broadband solutions. By the start of 2012 broadband services made up around 40% of all internet subscriptions. This report offers a set of statistics on the Pakistan telecoms market, as well as information on the overall regulatory regime and regulatory developments.

Key developments:

Tighter restriction on number of SIMs per person introduced by PTA; with the delays in issuing 3G licences continuing, the PTA was targeting end-2102 for the auction; Pakistan has launched its first communications satellite, Paksat-1R; broadband subscribers had increased to 40% of the total internet subscriber base; dispute with regulator over origination charges resolved; the government has decided to ban MNP, citing threats to national security.

Companies covered in this report include:

Pakistan Telecommunication Co Ltd (PTCL); Mobilink (PMCL); Ufone (PTML, PTCL’s subsidiary); Telenor Pakistan; Warid Telecom; Zong (formerly CMPak); WorldCall; TeleCard; Dancom Pakistan; FLAG Telecom Group; Special Communication Organization (SCO); National Telecommunication Corporation (NTC).

Table of Contents

• 1. Synopsis
• 2. Key statistics
• 3. Country overview
  • 3.1 Background
  • 3.2 Economy
• 4. Telecommunications market
  • 4.1 Overview
  • 4.2 Foreign Direct Investment (FDI)
• 5. Regulatory environment
  • 5.1 Overview
  • 5.2 Background to development
  • 5.3 Regulatory authorities
    • 5.3.1 Ministry of Information Technology (MoIT)
    • 5.3.2 Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA)
    • 5.3.3 PTA’s administrative actions
  • 5.4 Telecom sector liberalisation
  • 5.5 Regulatory developments
    • 5.5.1 Restriction on number of SIMs
    • 5.5.2 Operators accused of tax evasion
    • 5.5.3 PTCL accused of anti-competitive practices
    • 5.5.4 Dispute over origination charges resolved
    • 5.5.5 Management of subscriber base
    • 5.5.6 Special regions of Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJ&K)
    • 5.5.7 Third Generation (3G) licensing
    • 5.5.8 National numbering scheme
    • 5.5.9 Number portability (NP)
    • 5.5.10 Infrastructure sharing
    • 5.5.11 Security
    • 5.5.12 Censorship
• 6. Telecommunications infrastructure
  • 6.1 National telecom network
    • 6.1.1 Overview
    • 6.1.2 Fixed line statistics
    • 6.1.3 Forecast – fixed line market – 2015; 2020
    • 6.1.4 Opening up of market
    • 6.1.5 Rural services
    • 6.1.6 Universal Service Fund (USF)
    • 6.1.7 Mobile services
    • 6.1.8 Fibre optic networks
    • 6.1.9 Broadband networks
    • 6.1.10 Payphones and Public Call Offices (PCOs)
    • 6.1.11 Wireless Local Loop (WLL)
    • 6.1.12 Next Generation Networks (NGNs)
  • 6.2 International infrastructure
    • 6.2.1 International gateways
    • 6.2.2 Pakistan-India link
    • 6.2.3 Submarine cable networks
    • 6.2.4 Satellite networks and systems
  • 6.3 Infrastructure developments
    • 6.3.1 Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP)
• 7. Notes on forecasting
• 8. Related reports

• Table 1 – Country statistics – 2012
• Table 2 – Telecom revenue and investment statistics – 2010
• Table 3 – Telephone network statistics – 2011
• Table 4 – Internet user statistics – 2011
• Table 5 – Mobile statistics – May 2012
• Table 6 – National telecommunications authorities
• Table 7 – Pakistan’s real GDP growth rate – 2005 - 2013
• Table 8 – Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in telecom sector – 2002 - 2011
• Table 9 – Fixed lines in service and teledensity – 1991 - 2012
• Table 10 – Fixed wireline subscribers – 2004 - 2011
• Table 11 – Fixed wireline v. fixed wireless (WLL) subscribers – 2004 - 2012
• Table 12 – Fixed wireline subscribers by operator and market share –2011
• Table 13 – Forecast fixed line subscribers – 2015; 2020
• Table 14 – Growth in Public Call Offices (PCOs) – 1999 - 2009
• Table 15 – WLL subscribers – 2005 - 2012
• Table 16 – WLL subscribers by operator and market share – March 2012

• Chart 1 - GDP growth rate - 2005-2013
• Chart 2 - FDI in telecom sector - 2002-2011
• Chart 3 - Fixed lines in service and teledensity - 2001-2012(e)
• Chart 4 - Fixed wireline vs. fixed wireless subscribers - 2004-2012
• Chart 5 - Growth in Public Call Offices - 1999-2009
• Chart 6 - WLL subscribers by operator and market share - March 2012

• Exhibit 1 – Long Distance International (LDI) licensees – 2011
• Exhibit 2 – Local Loop (LL) licensees – 2011
• Exhibit 3 – Wireless Local Loop (WLL) licensees and status- 2011

Related Reports

• Pakistan - Mobile Communications, Broadcasting and Forecasts
• Pakistan - Broadband Market, Internet Services and Forecasts
• Pakistan - Major Telecommunications Operators
• Global - Industry - Wholesale Market Insights
• Global - Mobile - Smartphones, Touchscreen Tablets and Handset Market Insights
• Pakistan - Telecoms, Mobile, Broadband and Forecasts
• Global Broadband - The Fibre Future Looks Bright
• Worldwide Telecoms - Key Industry Statistics and Insights

https://www.budde.com.au/Research/Pakistan-Key-Statistics-Telecom-Market-and-Infrastructure-Regulatory-Overview-and-Forecasts.html

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn in Pakistan

Facebook Pakistan Statistics

Facebook monitoring helps to improve your business and social media marketing strategy in every country. Currently, there are 5891220 Facebook users in the Pakistan, which makes it #26 in the ranking of all Facebook statistics by country.

Also, feel free to try our professional social media monitoring tool Engagement Analytics – monitor the situation on the market, track and analyze your fans' engagement on your Facebook page, identify key influencers, response rates, and much more. Easily generate the data, compare them with your competitors or with the top brands in your field.

Pakistan General info

Total Facebook Users:	5891220
Position in the list:	26.
Penetration of population:	3.32%
Penetration of online population	31.84%
Average CPC:	$0.14
Average CPM:	$0.06

PRO Analytics for Facebook pages

TOP 5 brands in Pakistan

Brands	Facebook users
Ufone	393747
djuice pakistan	228990
Zong	206445
Samsung Pakistan	189718
Dell Pakistan	170448

TOP 5 media in Pakistan

Media brand	Facebook users
Coke Studio	1003630
Geo TV	336431
Samaa TV	64263
Pakistan Music Idol	59424
Lux Style Awards	52382

Users & Demography for the Pakistan

Last week

Last 2 weeks

Last month

Last 3 months

Last 6 months

Our social networking statistics show that Facebook penetration in Pakistan is 3.32% compared to the country's population and 31.84% in relation to number of Internet users. The total number of FB users in Pakistan is reaching 5891220 and grew by more than 1001000 in the last 6 months.

Comparing these nearest countries by penetration of Facebook users shows that Pakistan has 0.02% higher FB penetration than Vanuatu and 0.05% lower FB penetration than US Virgin Islands.

TOP places in Pakistan

View TOP places

User age distribution on Facebook in Pakistan

Pakistan Facebook demographics is other social media statistics we monitor. The largest age group is currently 18 - 24 with total of 2 945 610 users, followed by the users in the age of 25 - 34.

Male/Female User Ratio on Facebook in Pakistan

There are 68% male users and 32% female users in Pakistan, compared to 56% and 44% in Japan and              48% and 52% in Netherlands .

On the graph below you can see that the biggest gain in the last 3 months was recorded by the age group of 18 - 24. 

 http://www.socialbakers.com/facebook-statistics/pakistan

Twitter Revolution in Pakistan? 

Dramatic expansion of the nation's middle class in the last decade has spawned telecom and media revolutions in Pakistan. Number of radio stations, television channels, mobile phone subscribers and Internet users have all experienced unprecedented growth since the turn of the century.

The level of Internet penetration is Pakistan is still low. In a population of 177 million, only 18.5 million (10.4 percent) are connected to the Internet, though government officials quote a slightly  higher figure of 20 million. Although it's twice that of India's Internet penetration of about 5%, Pakistan's penetration percentage is less than those in Tunisia (33.4 percent) and Egypt (21.1 percent). However, Internet use in Pakistan is growing at a rapid rate, particularly in urban centers where 40% of the population lives, which are also home to the middle class which often forms the backbone of mass-scale uprisings. Mobile Internet use shot up 161 percent in 2010 alone.

Pakistan figures prominently in the population of users of Facebook and Twitter, two of the most popular social networking sites.

In terms of Facebook users in Asia, South Korea saw the largest increase of 65%, between March 01 2010 and June 01 2010. Other countries with double-digit growth rate are Thailand with 28.3%, India 27.7%, Japan 21%, Pakistan 12.9%, Malaysia 12.3%, and Vietnam 10.4%. Compared to figures extracted in March 2010, total Facebook users in Indonesia and Taiwan have shown decline, according to Grey Review.

According to Alexa, Twitter.com is the number twelve website in the world. It also ranks at number twelve in the United States. Outside the United States, Twitter is the eighth largest website in South Africa. The United Kingdom, Pakistan, and the Philippines all have Twitter as their tenth largest website, according to The Next Web.

Pakistan saw the beginnings of online civil and political activism in 2008-2009 when the lawyers, according to Woodrow Wilson Center's scholar Huma Yusuf, "used chat forums, YouTube videos, Twitter feeds, and blogs to organize the Long March, publicize its various events and routes, and ensure that citizen reporting live from the march itself can be widely circulated to counter the government-influenced coverage of the protest on mainstream media outlets (such as state-owned radio and private news channels relying on government-issue licenses".

With Pakistan's youth bulge and rapid growth in online user population, it is natural to ask if an Egyptian or Tunisian style youth-led revolution is on the horizon in the South Asian nation? Can the current disgust with the the failed political, military and intelligence establishment catalyze a mass youth uprising against the established order?

 http://www.defence.pk/forums/current-events-social-issues/108901-twitter-revolution-pakistan.html

LinkedIn: Pakistan makes it to Top 20 with More than 700,000 Members

By Jawwad Jafri of Converge Technologies

LinkedIn, the World’s largest professional networking website has more than 700,000 members from Pakistan.

This places Pakistan in the 18^th spot just behind Sweden but ahead of Denmark and Philippines.

Though the penetration rate is not sizable enough, but given the huge head count of Pakistani internet audience, Pakistan is easily placed as one of most populated communities on LinkedIn.

While the growth of social mediums like Facebook and Twitter has often been analyzed and debated, LinkedIn continues to grow in Pakistani market without causing a major uproar.

According to Alexa, LinkedIn is the 10^th most visited website in Pakistan.

Source: SocialBakers

LinkedIn is helpful in multiple ways. Firstly, it helps people connect with their professional network without exposing their personal lives to everyone like on Facebook. Members can communicate with each other through private inbox messages.

One great feature on LinkedIn is the Groups. While the concept of groups is nothing new, the quality of Groups on LinkedIn is far superior to other websites. Each specialty area has a niche group and if not you can always create one. Experts from around the world are available to help and guide each other which makes the experience extremely rewarding.

Apart from the experience and learning for members, there are more perks of being a LinkedIn member. Headhunters are increasingly turning towards LinkedIn to screen and shortlist their candidates. The members  who are highly active on Groups and establish themselves as “Subject Experts” get easily shortlisted. Also, the recommendations that each member accumulates for his past performances play a vital role in getting shortlisted by headhunters.

The major competition for LinkedIn in Pakistan comes from Rozee.pk which is the 19^th most visited website in Pakistan. Rozee.pk focuses only on job opportunities and is the favorite of local crowd when it comes to online job application.

However, LinkedIn is emerging as a tough competitor even in this space. The power that LinkedIn has and Rozee.pk lacks comes from the professional network and recommendations that is the core of LinkedIn.

For young professionals who are looking to move up the ladder in their career, LinkedIn is an extremely helpful resource which should not be ignored.

http://propakistani.pk/2011/06/21/linkedin-pakistan-makes-it-to-top-20-with-more-than-700000-members/

Facebook shows relentless global growth

In country after country, Facebook is toppling the incumbent local social network in what seems like an unstoppable march to global dominance.

After overtaking Microsoft's Windows Live Profile in Portugal and Mexico in early 2010, Facebook eclipsed StudiVZ in Germany and Google's (GOOG) Orkut in India later that year, and soon unseated Hyves in the Netherlands, according to metrics firm comScore. Now Facebook is poised to triumph in what has been viewed as its ultimate popularity contest, with comScore indicating the network is likely to dethrone Orkut in social media-mad Brazil when its December data is released.
Facebook's relentless spread is a vindication of founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg's growth-first principle, under which the social network has focused primarily on adding users, not building revenue, since its beginning. Facebook will surpass 1 billion users in the next few months, analysts say, and that population will be a huge asset it can tout to investors as the company prepares for an initial public offering of stock as soon as spring.
"It's been really surprising to us to see how quickly Facebook has grown, not just in Western countries or English-speaking countries, but pretty much around the world," said Carmela Aquino of comScore. "I think part of it is the network effect -- when you have a big enough mass of people beginning to jump on a social network, it's only a matter of time that their friends get on the same network, and it starts to spread."
Facebook is now used by more than half the population in the U.S. and a number of other countries, according to analytics company Socialbakers, but its growth is slowing in North America and much of Europe as it approaches a saturation point. Still, as Facebook prepares for its IPO, the Menlo Park-based social networking company's massive expansion in countries like Brazil, India, Mexico, South Korea and Vietnam suggests the social network has a bright future.
For investors, Facebook's rise in Asia, South America and other developing nations "is a proof point that they can make it everywhere in the world," said Jan Rezab, CEO of Socialbakers. He believes the social network's user population could swell from more than 800 million to 1 billion as soon as April, a threshold that would be a selling point for potential buyers of its stock. "I think they are going to announce it with the IPO; I think that's the strategic thing to do," Rezab said.
Facebook, which started in 2004 as a way for students at Ivy League universities and Stanford to socialize and didn't open up to the public until 2006, first saw a majority of its traffic coming from outside the U.S. in 2009, according to Socialbakers. Now more than four out of five Facebook users log on from other countries.
Other online social networks also have a global draw. U.S.-based Twitter and LinkedIn pull a large majority of their visitors from outside the U.S. Even the most popular Russian social network, VKontakte, draws 43 percent of its traffic from outside Russia, according to a recent comScore study on the growth of social networks, which now reach 82 percent of the world's online population, or 1.2 billion people.
Just two years ago, 46 percent of visits to LinkedIn, the professional social network, came from outside the U.S., according to data comScore prepared at the request of this newspaper. Now 62 percent come from outside the U.S.
That sense of a borderless world for successful social networks is nowhere more true than in Brazil, the world's fifth-largest country, where Google's Orkut had been the entrenched king for years. Orkut had six times the volume of Facebook's monthly traffic as recently as January 2010. But while Orkut continued to grow, Facebook's Brazilian traffic erupted in 2011, according to comScore.
People familiar with the Brazilian Internet market say there were many factors in Facebook's sudden rise in the South American nation of 200 million people, including Facebook's availability in the local language and the globalization of people's social ties.
Compared with Orkut, "Facebook is much more universal, and there are a lot of ex-Brazilians living outside Brazil," said Ron Czerny, CEO of PlayPhone, a mobile gaming platform that uses Facebook and Orkut to promote its games and has offices in Silicon Valley and Brazil. "The fact that they can connect to their friends and family, that helped (Facebook) a lot."
Czerny, who is Brazilian, said the availability of games on Facebook in the Brazilian dialect of Portuguese was another big boost. The aura of American hipness and fashion that many Brazilians associated with Facebook also held sway with many people, said Czerny and others.
At the beginning of 2010, Facebook was not the leading social network in 13 of the 43 international markets tracked by comScore. That has now dropped to six of those countries, including China, where it is blocked by the government.
Facebook believes there were other factors in its global adoption, particularly the software application launched in 2008 that allows users to collaborate to rapidly build a model that translates Facebook into their local language.
Facebook also made a key move in its purchase last year of mobile technology company Snaptu, which made software that allows more than 2,500 models of more basic-feature phones to access Facebook with much of the same functionality as an iPhone or Android smartphone. That opened a gateway to Facebook in countries where few people can afford a smartphone or a PC to go online.
Rezab also said the linguistic translation abilities of Facebook are key because it helps Facebook feel like a local experience instead of a Silicon Valley import.
"The majority of the content on Facebook, or YouTube for that matter, is purely local," Rezab said. "These networks succeeded by being globally local, if you know what I mean."

Contact Mike Swift at 408-271-3648. Follow him at Twitter.com/swiftstories or facebook.com/mike.swift3.

 http://www.mercurynews.com/portlet/article/html/fragments/print_article.jsp?articleId=19723521&siteId=568

People on Facebook

• More than 800 million active users
• More than 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
• Average user has 130 friends

Activity on Facebook

• More than 900 million objects that people interact with (pages, groups, events and community pages)
• Average user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events
• On average, more than 250 million photos are uploaded per day

Global Reach

• More than 70 languages available on the site
• More than 75% of users are outside of the United States
• Over 300,000 users helped translate the site through the translations application

Platform

• On average, people on Facebook install apps more than 20 million times every day
• Every month, more than 500 million people use an app on Facebook or experience Facebook Platform on other websites
• More than 7 million apps and websites are integrated with Facebook

Mobile

• More than 350 million active users currently access Facebook through their mobile devices
• More than 475 mobile operators globally work to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products

Source: https://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics