Turns out that according to Shareaholic, Facebook is the number one source of referral traffic with 25.6% of the market share in December and 26.4% of the market share in January. Other sites such as StumbleUpon, Google and Twitter also contribute to the numbers.

Newcomer Pinterest is generating a good amount of referral traffic. According to a report from Shareaholic, this site is generating more traffic than sites like Google Plus, LinkedIn and YouTube put together.

In December, Pinterest had 2.5% of the market share while in January they contributed 3.6% of the referrals. This growth is especially impressive when you consider that in July last year they sent only a miniscular 0.17% of referrals.

StumbleUpon, which holds the second position for referral traffic had 6.5% of the market share in December, but has fallen to 5.07% in January.

Facebook and StumbleUpon’s relatively large share of traffic referrals has been corroborated by reports from StatCounter in the past.

Although Google Plus contributes a very small amount of the total share of referrals – just 0.22% – other Google sites such as Google news, Google Images and Gmail continue to be major sources of traffic.

Designated administrators of company profiles on LinkedIn will now be able to post updates of no more than 500 characters. This will have to be done through the ‘Overview’ tab on the company’s profile page.

Posting status updates on LinkedIn

Updates will appear in the news feeds of users who follow that particular company. The followers will then be able to not only comment on the update, but they will also be able to ‘Like’ or ‘Share’ the update with their friends directly from the company page. This feature is exactly the same as that on Facebook Pages.

Facebook Pages allow companies to also share videos and images and ask their fans questions. The LinkedIn feature is limited to plain text updates and links, which is quite in keeping with the more formal, business orientation of the network.

Companies will be able to share breaking news, employee moves and available job opportunities with their followers in a more professional manner on LinkedIn. Followers of the company will be kept up to date with all the information about the companies they are interested in.

For quite some time now there has been a demand from several companies to allow this kind of instant interaction between the company and its followers. Ryan Roslansky, director of product management at LinkedIn says, “Nearly half of our members follow over 2 million Company Pages on LinkedIn. This is a great way to build engagement with customers, potential employees and prospects alike.”

The new service is a social news product and it was officially launched yesterday, shortly after an ex-employee of LinkedIn, Mrinal Desai, blogged about it on TechCrunch.

According to Desai, this new feature could help to turn LinkedIn into the Wall Street Journal of the social world. While Twitter and Facebook have been competing with each other to be the most popular social network for some time now, this new feature on LinkedIn could give LinkedIn an edge over the two, especially in the business world.

Mrinal Desai reportedly also recently received an email from the URL ‘news@linkedin.com’. This could well be a precursor to the formal launch of what he called “LinkedIn Headlines”. This email contained all the most-shared news on his network.

LinkedIn Headlines news via email

So far, it has been observed that LinkedIn is used mainly by sales personnel and people who recruit new staff for their companies. If this new feature is publicised well, it could make LinkedIn a far more popular and well-used social network.

LinkedIn has also recently added a new feature called Skills, which allows users to learn more about any skills that they are interested in.

Skills, in conjunction with LinkedIn Today will allow users to collect more information on topics ranging from the highly technical to general, which is something that sites like Facebook and Twitter would find difficult.

Update: Screenshot of LinkedIn Today

The largest spending was seen in November ($14.5 billion) and December ($18.1 billion). Cyber Monday – the first Monday after the Thanksgiving holiday – broke all records with $1.028 billion being spent in a single day.

Among electronic items, flat panel TVs and mobile devices were the fastest selling, followed by computer hardware.

Online Consumers

Group buying through sites such as Groupon and Living Social gained tremendous popularity during the year. Social networks also continued to grow. Facebook became the number 1 site in August 2010, for time spent online, beating sites like Google and Yahoo! It now accounts for 12.3% of the total time spent online in The U.S.

The amount of time spent on leisure activities online also grew in 2010. Portals represented 20.2% of the share of time spent online, while social networks accounted for 14.4% and entertainment sites for 12.6%.

Social Networks

The growth of social media caused web-based email usage to reduce from 12.5% to 11.0%, especially among the younger generation. Social networking accounts for 14.4% of all time spent online, but its share much higher for youngsters. Women also tend to spend more time on social networks than men.

Facebook also now accounts for 10% of the U.S. page views and has gained millions of new users. MySpace, on the other hand, has seen a sharp decline, losing 27% of its users. LinkedIn, Twitter and several new social sites continue to grow gradually. While it has lost some users in the 35-54 years demographic, the number of users below 18 years and above 55 years have grown significantly. On the other hand, Twitter saw maximum gain in the 18-34 years demographic.

Search Marketing

The search market has also seen innovation with the introduction of instant search by Google. Google continues to be the market leader in the States, with over 60% of the market share, while Yahoo! had 16% and Microsoft had 12% in December 2010. ‘Facebook’ was the most searched term, with 1.9 billion queries in 2010, followed by ‘YouTube’ with 790.7 million searches.

Online advertising has grown by 23% between December 2009 and 2010. Leading brands have now started reallocating a larger share of their ad spend to online advertising. Over 1 trillion display ads were shown on Facebook and 529.4 billion ads on Yahoo! The strategies being used for display as have also improved resulting in better user response especially through retargeting. The online video and TV market are also growing, which is a fact that advertisers should take note of.

In the entire Asia pacific region, social media has started affecting the buying decisions of users in a significant manner.

Online product reviews have become very popular and are next in line only to recommendations by family and friends. Products such as consumer electronics, cosmetics and cars are frequently reviewed here.

Interestingly however, different countries vary greatly in the way they share reviews. While the Koreans are most likely to post positive reviews the Chinese are most likely to post negative reviews of any product.

The report also shows that blogging is most popular in Japan, with over 1 million blogs being posted there every month. Twitter which had only about 200,000 users in Japan last year now has over 10 million users, which is 16% of the Japanese Internet population.

In China more than 80% of social media content is through bulletin boards, and new comers indulge in social gaming while the more experienced tend to share content. Virtual product placement in social gaming is very popular and social media celebrities like Sister Phoenix and Mr. Yuan are more popular than real celebrities.

Though Orkut is the most popular social network in India, Facebook is fast gaining in popularity. Twitter is also growing very fast and over 57% OF Twitter users in India, have joined in during the last year. Online product reviews are also very popular here.

In Korea, 95% of the Internet population accesses their social site Naver every month. The elections in June also saw the growth of mobile social media.

Australia has the highest global average for time spent on social media with users spending over 7 hours per month. Activities relating to sports and parenting are frequently discussed here. LinkedIn has also grown in popularity by 99% in the last year.

LinkedIn is now going a step further to endear itself to its identified niche market segment by helping corporations recruit appropriate people for various positions. Until now, human resources personnel had to bookmark the portfolios of candidates who seemed to be appropriate or interesting for a particular post, and then save these for reference at a later date when required.

Now LinkedIn has started a new service for their Premium users, called ‘Profile Organizer’. As the name suggests, the service will allow users who pay for advanced features on LinkedIn to bookmark and save the profiles that they find interesting.

Not only can users bookmark interesting profiles, but they can also create files to categorise their contacts. This way, users can have different folders for personnel in different departments, such as manufacturing, sales, marketing etcetera for easy reference at a later date.

These folders can be categorised under different headings such as occupation and location. The details stored in the folders are not accessible to others, so users can make their own notes about each applicant. Details such as the hobbies and interests of a candidate, as also the details of any interaction with them can be stored here.

The service will be available to regular LinkedIn users for a 30 day trial period. Business members will be allowed an upper limit of five folders, while Business Pro and Pro members can create up to 25 folders. Users can test this new service on:

LinkedIn.com/organizer

The study was conducted across 2,000 users of LinkedIn, approximately 50% of them being Americans, and the rest from other countries. The survey also studied about 52,000 of their first level connections.

A majority (about 66%) of LinkedIn’s users are decision makers or other senior executives in their organisations, which is a much higher percentage than that for users of other networks.

The study also established a correlation between income and the number of connections of each user. Users having an annual income of $200,000 to $350,000 were almost seven times more likely to have in excess of 150 connections, as compared to users with a lower range of income.

Users in the study were divided into four broad categories, namely “savvy networkers”, “senior executives”, “late adopters” and “exploring options”. About 30% of users or 9 million were classified as savvy networkers, 28% or 8.4 million as senior executives, 22% or 6.6% as late adopters, and the remaining 20% or 6.1 million as exploring options or those who are actively looking out for new jobs.

28% of LinkedIn’s users who get classified as executives have an average income of $104,000, while the 30% who called themselves savvy networkers have an average annual income of around $93,000. Even the new comers in the field have an income of upto $88,000.

Validity of these statistics does rely on user integrity, which is often questionable on most social sites, as has been noted before – a lot of men and women lie about age, salary, status and physical appearance.

It is nevertheless more likely that users of LinkedIn are better off, more influential and constantly receiving requests for new introductions. The network thus ends up being a great site for sales persons looking to boost their income and advertisers looking to target top-level executives.

FaceTime Communications has been conducting studies through NewDiligence, measuring the impact of social media. Employees at the companies surveyed responded by emphatically stating that they have a right to download whatever applications they choose, to help them do their job.

Employees in 60% of the companies considered under this study, were found to be using 8 or more applications from the social medium.

Frank Cabri, Vice President of Marketing and Product Management at FaceTime says, “This year’s study reveals [that employees'] social media habits have extended into the workplace and may be contributing to security and data leakage incidents.”

51% of employees surveyed said they visit social media sites in relation to their work at least once a day. 73% of IT managers said they have to deal with at least one security incident, such as viruses, Trojans, worms or spyware due to the use of social media sites, amounting to about 34 such incidents per month.

Employees are also known to use the social media sites for personal purposes while at work. While LinkedIn is most commonly used social network for work, YouTube, Facebook and MySpace are frequently accessed for personal use.

It goes without saying that companies have to spend time and money to repair malware attacks and corporate data leaks caused by the use of Web 2.0 and social media applications by their employees. On an average it takes about 22 IT employee hours to repair one incident. At an average of $70 pay scale, this amounts to over $50,000 wasted per month. The cost involved for larger organisations is estimated to be in the range of $125,000 per month.

In 2008, 93% of all the companies surveyed had employees using social media applications, compared to 85% just a year ago. Surprisingly, only about 40% of the respondents claimed that they monitored and managed applications such as P2P communictions software, and only 25% of respondents bothered to secure Web 2.0 applications.

Needless to say, IT managers and employees are often at loggerheads with each other over the use of these social media sites.

FaceTime Report on the Collaborative Internet

Interestingly though, a couple of days after the FaceTime study was released, a study by Demos found that attempts to control employees’ use of such software could damage firms in the long run by limiting the way staff communicate. This could leave employers facing a conundrum – should they ban social networking in the workplace or not?

This will be possible because LinkedIn possesses a lot of detailed information about their clients, and this data is also regularly updated. By accessing this data, through LinkedIn’s new service, it will be possible for advertisers to decide which of these clients they wish to target for a given ad campaign. Users will also be happy, as they will be seeing ads which are relevant to their needs, and thus they will not waste time on irrelevant ads.

Director for advertising sales, at LinkedIn, Steve Patrizi says, “the LinkedIn audience network offers advertisers one of the most accurate audience data sets available on the web, along with the confidence of knowing that their brands will only appear on sites with high editorial standards”. This service should prove to be effective as LinkedIn is a social network dealing in business and careers and has almost 30 million members worldwide, and is growing at half a million customers every week. as its members find new ways to interact with each other and solve many business related problems.

Scott Spry, COO, Phoenix Marketing International, a client of LinkedIn Surveys, says, “LinkedIn Surveys has allowed us to quickly and cost effectively obtain feedback from real professionals who provide authentic perspectives.”

LinkedIn has been able to raise funds to the tune of $22.7 million from various investors such as Goldman Sachs, Sap Ventures, etc. for this venture of theirs as these investors feel that this service will be capable of creating value and transforming industry.

The annnouncement came just one day after Yahoo! announced its intention to support Google’s OpenSocial platform. Microsoft has never been truly open, and so joining any alliance like OpenSocial or even forming a truly similar initiative of its own is out of the question. Microsoft has however taken some big strides to improve data portability and allow users better control over the use of their information.

Several new APIs and tools that help third-parties develop more applications were announced during MIX08 last month. And now a new ‘Windows Live Contacts API‘ has been launched to allow users to transfer and share their contact lists, without any security concerns.

Social networks partnered with Microsoft through this initiative will gradually shift to using Windows Live Contacts API instead of using the method called ‘screen scraping’, which was not a very secure means and exposed users to spam and, worse still, identity fraud.

Users will be given ultimate control in deciding which of their contacts, if any, get shared with each of the participating social networks.

Read the full announcement from Microsoft

Microsoft has also created a new site where users from the partner social networks can download Live Messenger and invite their friends from the social networks to chat with them. This would normally seem a surprising move from Facebook, given that they are likely to launch their own chat client in the near future. However, Microsoft’s stake in the company has probably influenced the decision to support a competing product.

www.invite2messenger.net

So what does News Corp gain with this acquisition? If the rumors are substantiated, this acquisition could be used to retain and regain both users as well as readers. This is possible through an integrated incorporation of news content in LinkedIn and layering its network’s features on the online site of Wall Street Journal. The declining business classifieds of Wall Street Journal and its other newspapers can also be bolstered by this acquisition. News Corp’s move has quite an advertising potential.

News Corp is recently attracting marketers with the launch of more in house ad network tools through its acquisition of MySpace.

Social networking sites are fast becoming one of the most sought after media distribution channels. In this light, the integration of Wall Street Journal and LinkedIn by News Corp can be a positive step forward.

LinkedIn would definitely gain more mainstream attention through this merger. However comparisons are inevitable with that of the acquisition of MySpace. To begin with, LinkedIn users are not as active as those of MySpace and the traffic is less. But on the other hand, the users of LinkedIn belong to a select professional group with steady incomes. All in all, in order to cash on this new acquisition and give some competition to Facebook, News Corp should think of technologically upgrading LinkedIn. A few more social features will be a nice idea, because there might be more potential in a site that offers more than just an educational and professional background of a person.

OpenSocial will be accessible at the URL: http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial, which will go live on Thursday.

When launched, OpenSocial will consist of three common APIs, defined by Google with input from partners, which allow developers to access core functions and information on social networks:

• Profile Information (user data)
• Friends Information (social graph)
• Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)

Unlike the most popular social networks, OpenSocial will allow developers to code using ordinary JavaScript and HTML. This will help it gain tremendous popularity as it precludes the need for application developers to learn and code in various proprietary languages created by the numerous social networks.

Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle are the platforms that have already agreed to partner with Google on OpenSocial. Application developers Flixster, iLike, RockYou and Slide are also on board. Interestingly, all these application developers have seen great success on Facebook.

Hints that Google might plan to expand further into the social networking arena surfaced last month when a leaked video showed Google employees discussed the company’s plans to introduce more social features into Google Reader.

Advertising on Social Networks

Google has not mentioned any specifics at present about whether or not advertising will be accepted, but it is obvious that this will be their way to gain access to most of the popular social networks without needing to buy them outright!

Once a number of developers build popular apps that get included by scores of users on their profiles, Google will be able to easily set up revenue-share schemes, similar to AdSense for regular content publishers, which will allow developers to include ads in their apps and make money for themselves and Google with minimum effort. The image below shows what this might look like conceptually:

Rather than using brute force to gain access to a number of users, Google has used a cunning method to reach the same attractive user base without spending too much money. They were probably not too bothered when Microsoft bought a stake in Facebook either.

The success of such an ad placement strategy depends on two factors: (1) whether the host social networks will allow applications to carry ads that don’t earn them any money, and (2) whether Google will provide enough incentives for the developers to include ads alongside their applications. For now, one can only wait and watch how Google will monetise this new channel.