Just a year before the first shares to be issued, which Facebook’s owners hope to attract over 100 billion dollars, the popular network has registered its first decline in the number of users in the U.S., Canada, UK and other mature markets, where this website is the number one site in the social networking industry. According to a report released by the Inside Facebook website, the network lost nearly 6 million users in the U.S. and around 1.52 million users in Canada May this year.

Despite the decreases in what seem to be already saturated markets, the network is still growing, especially in countries from Asia, South America and Africa. Also according to Inside Facebook, in early June there were registered over 687 million people and the numbers seems to be in a continuous growth worldwide.

According to some analysts, once Facebook reaches a market share of 50% of the population of a country the growth stops, but so far Facebook has managed to protect itself from significant declines. On the other hand, the social network spokes-persons said several times that the data provided by Inside Facebook is not real, the company continuing its upward trends in terms of growing its users in all countries.

However, it seems that more and more users choose to close their accounts, and according to PCWorld and The Telegraph there are some real motives why people are leaving Facebook, such as:

-          Privacy: people hate data leaks, facial recognition features and anything related to intimate data

-          Advertising: users started to being annoyed by excessive ads used on the social network

-          Future: any shared picture, any message, any video can become a threat in the future, not only for a person’s image but also in professional life

Whether or not Inside Facebook’s information is real, one thing is sure: this social network has managed to reach an impressive popularity level, but is this the highest place it can go?

Yet another interesting study revealed from HitWise. After April’s graphs related to Bing gaining more market share in the UK, this month’s data relates to how social networking websites are gaining/losing market share within the UK Internet users and main focus is on the most popular video sharing website – YouTube.

If in April 2010 YouTube had about 16.92% share of visits on social networking sites, this year it has grown and passed the 20% mark – 20.03%. Easier said, if in April 2010 1 of 6 visits to social networking sites were on YouTube, now it counts for 1 in 5 visits – in the United Kingdom.
However, Facebook is still the most popular social networking site from UK with around 54.80% share in April 2011, a slow growth from April’s 2010 53.84%. Although Facebook is way ahead YouTube, since 2008 the video sharing website has been growing steadily in popularity, going from 8 to

number 3 in only 3 years.
What these facts tell us: Facebook and YouTube should be used in each and any social marketing campaign due to their popularity. Even though from an SEO perspective they might not be so “helpful”, in the end it is traffic/conversions what makes a business grow and earn money and by using these 2 channels in an appropriate manner things can definitely improve in terms of visitors/popularity

For the last few months, many voices claimed that two of the most popular social websites nowadays – Facebook and Skype – are to be “united”, of course, for an approximately $4 billion sum. Even if this transaction will not complete, Facebook and Skype already started sharing some “goodies”, each from each other – while Facebook created an application that allows users to call their friends through Skype service, Skype added a “News Feed” from Facebook.

Although this merge could literally mean a great threat for Google’s Gtalk (imagine Facebook extending its services from only text to text and voice, that would be huge for the social media environment), it seems that another huge bidder tries to get its claws on Skype. Microsoft,  as we mentioned, are set to buy Skype for an incredible amount of money – that’s $8.5 billion! We are talking here about over 3 times more money than eBay paid in 2005 and this could be a great step forward for both Skype and Microsoft.

Why this move, you might probably ask yourself? The answer is quite simple: guys at Microsoft want a larger piece of Internet searchers with their search engine – Bing – and what other way to start this other than acquiring the most popular online voice service available nowadays? With tens of millions of users worldwide, this could be a huge hit for the Internet industry and could shake some big players like Google.

Social media is a great way for any online business to establish a virtual relationship with its customers and there are very few companies that do not have a Facebook/Twitter profile to use in their online marketing strategies. However, throwing a bit.ly link on Twitter and waiting for the “goodies” to flow is definitely not a good method to make the most out of your tweets, therefore here are some great tips related to how a good tweet should look.

Create an “answers day” – write down whatever question your potential customers asked you on Twitter and try to give your best answers; make this a “weekly task”.

Share updates – whether you jumped on the first page of Google, hired a new guy to deal with your servers or just launched a new page of your website, share all these news with your followers

Case studies related to your niche – this is a great way to get lots of re-tweets and attention, however you should do some heavy research for something good to come out of your “closet”

Discounts, deals, coupons – people like paying less for a product/service so anytime you are launching a new “lower prices” offer do not forget to tweet about it

Tweet about events you are attending at – whether we are talking about webinars, interviews or even you company’s Christmas party, tweet about it and engage with your customers

Always share news – these do not have to be related to your business or your niche, anything that is hot could bring you some wanted attention so keep an eye on what is popular every day

Solve problems – one of your customers has not got your discount? Solve his problem and reply to him with a tweet; show your followers that you cater for your clients and for your business’ conduit

According to weeklyworldnews.com, a website specialised in featuring news and gossips to its readers, Facebook is to be closed on 15 March 2011. The website stated that Mark Zuckerberg announced at a conference in Palo Alto that managing the most popular social networking site has become way to stressful and in the same time this has ruined his life.

They also added that the whole website is to be shut down on March 15 and no user will be able to access the Facebook account. Moreover they added that in a private phone call interview Mark said that people should stop using Facebook and go outside and try making new friends. To add more credibility to this news, weeklyworldnews.com “revealed” that Mark does not care about all the money he is going to lose and also they suggested that according to Facebook Corporation all users should remove their personal information from the website.

This “news” created a lot of buzz in the online environment, Google trends went up, thousands of tweets and the most important thing, lots of links. To be more precise, this article created one of the perfect linkbaiting examples we were talking about in our previous posts: over 9,000 comments and 390 links to this article, in just 2 days.

That is right, this news was launched with the sole purpose of getting the website noticed and attracted links like magnet (still doing this, we think that in the next days the number of links will increase to almost 1,000, we are keeping an eye on this).

In the end, Facebook is not even close to be shut down. Recently, Goldman Sachs and Digital Sky Technologies invested over $500 million in this social networking site and there is no way that Facebook to be closed in the following years.

As social media is a big part of everyone’s online strategy, it would be a smart move to make your work easier by using different social media tools that would definitely make a difference. Whether we are talking about Twitter, Facebook or even WordPress plugins, these will all be great to add in your social media arsenal.

So here they are below:

1.      BackTweets

An easy to use tool, basically all you need to do is enter a website address into the search and BackTweets will highlight each and every tweet that mentioned that very link you are searching for information about. Very valuable when you are trying to see whether your linkbaiting campaign was a success or not.

2.      HootSuite

Managing all your social media accounts can be a real hassle sometimes, and this is where HootSuite makes a difference. It manages all your accounts, has a feature through which you can track results, can export results and so on.

3.      Sexy Bookmarks

As sharing is one of the most important parts of your strategy, Sexy Bookmarks is a WordPress plugin that allows users to share a story through different social media channels, thus improving your chances of being “liked” or “shared” online.

4.      SocialMention

Just go to this website, type your brand name and see whether your brand was mentioned on social media channels or not. Although this is a great tool, we still prefer Google Alerts for online brand management.

5.      Omgili

Trying to increase your exposure on industry-related forums? Omgili is a fantastic tool for doing this. Search for discussions based on your keyword, find associated keywords see how popular a term is (by Search Buzz) and many other goodies. A must-use tool for everyone trying to leverage presence on forums.