How Facebook's Rising Popularity Can Help The Digital Marketing World

The whopping $500 million investment of Goldman Sachs in Facebook seems to be supported by a new JP Morgan report, which contains comScore data. This report made it known that around 70 percent of users from the United States had signed-in to the Palo-Alto, California based social networking channel from August to October. These figures are up from 48 percent, seen during the same period in 2009.

This huge gain is a bonanza for digital marketing advertisers, who have used Facebook as an avenue to keep prospective customers engaged. Compared to the increase in Facebook users, Google and Yahoo have seen miniscule growth for the same period. Google experienced a rise of only two percentage points, year-on-year, for the August-October period, moving from a share of 79 percent to 81 percent of all Internet users. Yahoo fared marginally better, moving from 79 percent to 84 percent Internet users, for the same three-month duration.

Another useful statistic for digital marketing purposes is the percentage of time spent by US Internet users on various websites. According to digital marketing statistics, people spent a higher percentage of their total time on Facebook, compared to Yahoo or Google. In fact, this social media channel increased their market share two-fold for the August to October, year-on-year period, from five percent to ten percent. During this same period, Yahoo's share decreased by three percentage points, from 12 percent to 9 percent, while Google remained steady at 4 percent.

This digital marketing report has also discovered that in October, Facebook gained on Google as a traffic referral site, by referring interested users to leading digital marketing websites like Amazon and eBay. Google's referrals reduced a bit for these websites, even though it still held a sizable lead over Facebook. For example, Google was accountable for 19.6 percent of traffic on Amazon for October. This is a marginal decline from 20 percent, for the same period in 2009. Correspondingly, digital marketing giant Facebook increased traffic referrals to Amazon, growing from 1.8 percent to 7.7 percent.

These digital marketing statistics imply that the massive investment of Goldman Sachs in Facebook could have a strong footing. Their $500 million investment in Facebook, increases the social networking website's valuation to approximately $50 billion.

Michael Lazerow, the CEO of Buddy Media, a digital marketing research firm, has said that the new investment in Facebook helps achieve two main goals: It provides them with funds to expand their business rapidly, and it offers a commitment to purchase additional shares from current shareholders of the business. This commitment helps ensure liquidity to existing shareholders, counting employees as well, without adding more names to the capitalization table.

Qudos Digital is a leading digital marketing consultancy and can be contacted on 020 8891 2077 or info@qudosdigital.co.uk.

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