A few weeks ago, I logged on to Facebook to see if any of my friends had dared to challenge me in another game of word twist. As was expected, due to my unprecedented dominance in the game, no one had. What was not expected, however, was an inconspicuous link at the top of the page telling me to try the “New” Facebook. So, I decided to check it out.

This “New” Facebook had an entirely different layout, putting many elements of friends’ Profiles on various tabs and allowing for greater control of what your friends see on your profile. In my opinion, the change was an upgrade. Gone were the days of needing to scroll past super pokes, ninja and pirate fights, graffiti, aquariums, and the latest roshombo matches to write on the walls of friends who don’t seem to know how to click “no” to application invites. In general, things felt cleaner and easier to use. Not everybody sees it the way I do though. When I showed it to my boyfriend, he was appalled at the changes. He had gotten used to Facebook’s layout and did not want to go through the hassle of learning a new layout and figuring out how to do what he wants to do on Facebook. Luckily for him, Facebook was kind enough to put a link at the top of the “New” Facebook allowing you to go back to the “old” Facebook experience. He eagerly went back to the familiar styles he has come to love. Facebook is clearly being cautious with this release, providing links to allow users to give feedback and input prior to the full release. A friend who signed up for Facebook last week was even introduced to the “old” Facebook, rather than pushed to the new, indicating Facebook is not ready to make the new site the standard. The “beta” testing style of this release made me curious as to how many Facebook users have decided to check out the “New” Facebook since its rollout.

Since it’s rollout, the “New” Facebook has progressively attracted more visitors as the weeks of summer roll by. As of the week of August 10th, more than half of all Facebook users have at least checked out the new site. By the week of August 17th, that visitor count had topped 60% of all Facebook users. Because Facebook has slowly rolled out this new site, inviting more and more people to check out the “New” Facebook each week, this chart only tells us half the story. It is also important to look at how many users checked out the “New” facebook and then decided to go back to the old style in the same session.

Facebook users using the “New” Facebook are slowly trending towards only using it, rather than clicking to go back to the old. This has leveled off in the last couple of weeks, holding steady at about 40% of Facebook users checking out the new site deciding to click back to the old. Having 60% of users continue on to use the new site is good news for Facebook, as it indicates users are beginning to come around to the new style. It is clear that Facebook has learned and grown from its last major new release. For those of you that don’t recall, in Sept. 2006 Facebook suddenly unveiled its “mini feed”which shocked and scared off many of its users with its openess and seemingly invasion of privacy. This time around, Facebook is letting its users get accostomed to the new style at their own pace, as well as allowing them to provide feedback regarding the new design. Hopefully for Facebook, this will result in more satisfied users, while –in my opinion–providing users with a cleaner, more streamlined Facebook experience.

I was playing around with the fancy new chat feature in Facebook a couple nights ago, and started talking to my college buddy from a few years back. Soon I was chatting with my boyfriend’s mom, and eventually started talking to my 11 year-old cousin. I started to realize just how clear it’s become that Facebook is no longer just for college kids. In fact, social networking is beginning to spread to the population regardless of age. As detailed in the recent Compete webinar on Segment-Driven Marketing, 92% of marketing professionals say their company uses segmentation to manage their online advertising and /or search marketing. Judging by the amount of ads for hip, cool prepaid phones, trendy clothing and “hot shoes,” I’d say companies see Facebook and other social networking sites as the perfect place to target that “young adult” audience. With people of every demographic beginning to use these sites, is this really a smart way to spend their ad budgets?

I made use of Compete’s Behavior Match product to find out. I know from discussions with our clients that wireless carriers specifically are very interested in the young adult segment, so I thought I’d do some analysis on the young adults we’ve seen shopping carrier sites. I created a segment of “Young Adult Wireless Prospects”, defined as anyone from 18-34 who were seen visiting a wireless carrier site (but not seen as acting like a customer of that site), and looked at which sites they over-index on as compared to the internet population as a whole.

*Read as: Young Adult Wireless Prospects are 1.5x more likely to visit Facebook than the average internet user.

While Young Adult Wireless Prospects do over-index on Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube it is not by a staggering amount, as on average Young Adult Wireless Prospects only visit the big social networking sites 1.4 times as often as the general internet population. One can’t deny that getting your message and name out to the millions of people visiting these sites is an impressive thing (though expensive), but in terms of segment-based marketing strategies, I think the wireless companies may be missing the mark.

There is another category of sites Young Adult Wireless Prospects over-index on; Computer and Website Personalization sites appear high and often on the Behavior Match indexing report. Specifically, Young Adult Wireless Prospects over-index on sites designed to help you make your MySpace page or Facebook profile “cooler.”

Personalization sites for the social networking sites generally have a higher concentration of the Young Adult Wireless Prospect crowd than the social networking sites themselves (and are also all ad-supported). But would these consumers be susceptible to marketing messages? Are they engaged on these sites?

This chart is looking at the number of visits each domain sees on a monthly basis. Visits are a good way to measure if a site is seeing enough repeat visitors to make advertising on the site effective. We can see that Freeweblayouts.net and Freepagegraphics.com see a lot of repeat visitors, with around 4 million and 3 million visits a month, respectively. Imikimi.com isn’t far behind with about 1.5 million visits and the rest are tight around the 500,000 mark. It appears as though these sites are more than just a one-stop shop for their users.

So what does all this mean? Major websites will always be a good place to advertise, but when it comes to behaviorally segmenting Young Adult Wireless Prospects, there could be a more efficient way to go about it. Within the category of Computer and Website Personalization sites alone, there are a few sites that receive over a million users a month and on which Young Adult Wireless Prospects are 3.5X more likely to visit than the internet population in general. Messaging on these sites could be a perfect way to efficiently target a key segment in the wireless industry, while still getting the message out to millions of people.

Lately, I seem to be getting more invites to view a Google document (rather than a Word document). I guess I’m not surprised though. It has been just over a year since Google Docs and Spreadsheets was officially released, and it has been just under a year since Microsoft released Office 2007. As many know, Office 2007 includes a whole new interface that is unfamiliar, and potentially frustrating, to the veteran Office user. Google Docs and Spreadsheets have also undergone changes, with a major user interface overhaul in June and the release of Google Presentation in September. After receiving my 4th invitation to view a Google document in 2 weeks, I decided to take a look at traffic to Google Docs and Spreadsheets, since its bundled release in October 2006*. The chart below depicts overall traffic to Google Docs and Spreadsheets, and includes the break down of those that viewed a document and those that viewed a spreadsheet.

This chart shows us three things.

1. The user interface overhaul and subsequent intense marketing in June seems to have ignited traffic to Google Docs and Spreadsheets.
2. Usage of Google Docs is consistently comparable with usage of Google Spreadsheets.
3. In its first full year, Google Docs and Spreadsheets has seen an 84% year-over-year increase.

After looking at the traffic, I wanted to go a little deeper in analysis. Another measure of a site’s success is the average stay on that site, defined as time spent per visit (in minutes).

Here we see that while traffic to Google Docs and Spreadsheets may be comparable, Google Spreadsheets originally saw much higher attention than Google Docs. Attention evened out when traffic increased in June, suggesting that people are not only viewing both Google documents and Google spreadsheets, but are equally engaged with each. Increased engagement indicates that people intend to continue to use these applications, and they are not novelties.

I expect this trend to continue, and the growth of Google Docs and Spreadsheets to be substantial. Google Docs and Spreadsheets are free and easy to use. In addition, they offer online sharing and collaboration, which is becoming a complete necessity in today’s workplace. The more people share links to their documents, the more people will be exposed to Google Docs and Spreadsheets. Google doesn’t have to do much, as Docs and Spreadsheets are viral by nature and should continue to spread. Google can move on to saving the world (such as with this project), while users continue to spread the news about a possible alternative to Office 2007.

*Google Spreadsheets was released in June 2006, but then bundled with the Google Documents release in September.