As promised in our LSA conference coverage last week, here is a deeper dive on Facebook’s positioning and possible directions in local. I covered the topic in a bit more depth in my monthly Search Engine Watch column, including more comments from Facebook director of SMBs, Dan Levy.
This gains relevance in light of Facebook’s redesign …

Various companies have built SMB websites and landing pages by scraping the Web. PaperG comes to mind. How about using Facebook. BIA/Kelsey data from our Local Commerce Monitor shows that more than 40 percent of U.S. SMBs have Facebook pages. Many, however, still don’t have standalone websites.
Exai, a spin off of TrafficMedia, is …

Facebook’s Fred Huang spoke about the SMB mission with Facebook at SMB Digital marketing today in Chicago. He noted that the SMB product roadmap is about helping them spend less time managing their page, make it easier to have their voices heard, and attract more customers.
Post targeting and scheduling helps them schedules out content in …

Facebook investor and press events have become spectacles unto themselves, where distilling signal from noise is a tricky task. But that’s what we’ll flesh out here in the aftermath of the company’s first earnings call post-IPO…a call that featured an appearance from Mark Zuckerberg, nothing overly substantive from Facebook execs and persistent questions about the …

What happened to the theory that Facebook Credits would become a universal virtual currency, competing against the likes of PayPal and others? Facebook very quietly closed the program down a few weeks ago, reverting to a more standard model that enabled spending and credits to be made with local currencies around the world (similar to …

Are deals still being driven by shares, posts, likes and other social media features in an era of Groupon and LivingSocial Super Bowl ads? Yes, definitely, according to Second Street Media, which held a webinar with The Washington Post last week to discuss social media and deals strategies.
Referrals, “like-gating” and brand building via social …

In the run-up to Facebook’s ballyhooed IPO, BIA/Kelsey has released Wave III of its U.S. Social Media Advertising Forecast, which reveals overall market acceleration in 2012 and 2013, and steady growth in locally targeted social spend.
From 2011 to 2016, U.S. social ad revenues will climb from $3.8 billion to $9.8 billion (21 percent CAGR). Several …

via CNN
If anybody wonders whether the considerable “legs” of Facebook justify a valuation now set for $83 billion, have a listen to a terrific BIA/Kelsey webinar on Facebook’s IPO, featuring Trada CEO Niel Robertson Wildfire CEO Victoria Ransom and Plink Cofounder Peter Vogel (and BIA/Kelsey analysts Jed Williams, Matt Booth and Jeanne Dattilo).
People have to …

Among the myriad questions swirling around Facebook’s imminent IPO (other than “when will it actually happen?”), the two most pressing are: 1) Can the social network actually support an assumed $100 billion valuation? and 2) How?
BIA/Kelsey sought to answer both by pairing financial modeling and strategic analysis. We recently published a comprehensive report exploring the …

Facebook’s acquisition of mobile photo app Instagram earlier this week wasn’t especially surprising (though the $1 billion price tag may have been). Mobile is a fertile, untapped channel for the social giant, but a growing risk factor the longer the opportunity remains unrealized. And with $5 billion to $10 billion in cash reserves expected after …

By now, there isn’t a single page of Facebook’s S-1 filing that hasn’t been exhaustively picked through and dissected in advance of the social network’s spring IPO. But what about the metrics that were underreported or unreported altogether? Moreover, which metrics really matter as a gauge of the current health of Facebook’s business and its …

By now, much of the connected universe, and certainly all of technolphilia, is aware of Facebook’s IPO, which seeks to raise up to $5 billion (and perhaps eventually $10 billion) when its shares go public this spring. The net effect is a valuation of $75 billion to $100 billion for the 8-year-old social network.
Mining the …

Facebook and Yelp are downsizing their separate deals initiatives after launching them with some fanfare. Facebook is now limiting its deals to users who check in to businesses, and Yelp is sharply reducing the number of deals it features, while continuing to support self-serve efforts that are integrated with other Yelp ad products.
Are these …

Facebook touts itself as a platform that allows and encourages partners to further build out its social graph. In Deals, it has now found its most significant partner yet, inking a deal with American Express to push socially curated deals to cardholders.
Cardholders will link their AMEX accounts to Facebook’s “Link-Like-Love” application. They will then …

Writing about Google+ wasn’t an option. When an 800-pound gorilla makes a frontal assault on Facebook, Skype AND Twitter, sending the tech punditry into breathless buzz and sparking curiosity about the potential seismic effects on social networking, well, that warrants ink. The question wasn’t if…but how. What hasn’t been said already (10 times over)? Where …

Not a day passes without the question “Can Google Get Social?” popping up in the tech punditry. After several ill-feted answers (Buzz, Wave), the search leader has a new social reply: Google+.
Actually, it’s the Google+ “project.” VP of Social Vic Gundotra says that’s an important distinction, as this is an evolving set of tools and …

We’ve been focused so much on deal a day that we sometimes forget it is just part of the mix when it comes to successful SMB promotions. Seth Gardenswartz of SpaBoom, a provider of promotion services for spas and restaurants, held a helpful webinar last week that stressed the six “common elements of successful promotions.”
The …

Businesses should post on their Facebook page three times a week. That’s the word from Emily White, Facebook’s director of local.
In an interview with USA Today, White says: “The general rule is, you’re in pretty good shape if you’re posting three times a week. That gets you to a pretty sweet spot. Any more would …

BIA/Kelsey projects that total U.S. social advertising revenues will surge from $2.1 billion in 2010 to $8.3 billion in 2015, growing at a 31.6 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR). Driven by Facebook, social networks will command a majority share (51 percent) of all display ad impressions by 2015.
The inaugural social advertising forecast is part …

Facebook today launched its Deals product as an “alpha” in five markets: San Francisco, San Diego, Dallas, Austin and Atlanta. The effort plays up Facebook’s social connectivity, making it simple to “like” and share deals, and promote throughout the site. The launch comes at a time of rapid expansion in the deals space. Google Offers …