Facebook users who click through from the social media site to news and media websites are more loyal to these sites than those coming from Google News, it was revealed last week.

Stats collated by Hitwise showed that of the five most popular print media websites in the week ending March 6, more than three-quarters of Facebook users were returning visitors. This figure compares to two-thirds from Google news.

A Hitwise spokesperson is reported as saying: “Interestingly, visitors from Google are less likely to be returning visitors than average for either Google News or Facebook. This reinforces the long-term value to news and media organisations of working with the likes of Google News and Facebook.”

So many business are now keen to learn how to reach as many potential customers and clients via social network sites, such as Facebook.

Facebook is a great place for marketing and raising your brand awareness because a) there are tons of folk on Facebook, and b) it’s a nice, friendly place to do your networking.

One good example of how to expand your potential client base has been demonstrated recently by Microsoft in one of the company’s many marketing strategies for Bing called Farmville.

Farmville is a real-time farm simulation game that is available as an app on Facebook. It has become hugely popular and accounts for some 20% of all Facebook members (amounting to 1% of the world’s population according to Wiki).

Therefore, Bing is likely to be on-target with its claim more people use Farmville than Twitter. Many Farmville users also share a wealth of activities within the app.

Here’s how Bing did it: Users of Farmville were offered free “farm cash” if they became a fan of Bing on Facebook, which in turn encouraged continued user interaction with Bing.

The results were:
- 72% of users who clicked on the engagement became fans
- 59,000 people published the story to their news feed
- 70,000 clicks were received on secondary feeds
- In 24 hours, Bing had 400,000 new fans

Have you thought about starting a campaign through Farmville?

Social networkers are spending almost twice as long on the likes of Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn than they were a year ago.

According to a report by Nielsen web users across 10 countries spent on average five and a half hours on social networks in February – more than two hours longer than the same time last year.

And it’s the Italians and Australians that lead the way on social networking sites, even beating the American average. While US web users are on average social networking for six hours and three minutes a month, the Italians are at it for 25 minutes longer, while the Aussies are at it for 22 minutes longer.

The report also revealed that Facebook trounced all other social network sites by wide margins.

Google has made even more progress on it search specifics as its added support for microdata for use in rich snippets. Rich snippets can relate to bits of content such as reviews, people profiles or events, making search results look more interesting and also more informative.

You’ll need to get your web designer to do a bit of HTML coding for this to work but it should be fairly straightforward. As a post on the Webmaster Central Blog states: “It’s easy to add markup to your pages using a few HTML attributes like itemscope (to define a new item), itemtype (to specify the type of item being described), and itemprop (to specify a property of that item).”

And: “Once you’ve added markup to a page, you can test it using the rich snippets testing tool to make sure that Google can parse the data on your page.”

So if you’re a business that is interested in boosting its traffic potential (aren’t we all) then you are advised to find the time to get the rich snippets coding sorted.

A new report reveals the continued growth of ebay traders. The IMRG/IMRWorld survey of 458 ebay retailers showed:

*Annual turnovers of between £100,000 and £3.4million
* Average turnover for survey respondents of £242,000
* Average number of employees is eight
* 44%employed three or more people.

This revealed that the UK has over 120,000 online businesses on eBay alone, generating sales of €1.9 billion per year.

At the same time an eBay survey shows that internet sales drive exports, by making it possible for SMEs to export around the world.

Overseas sales are big business for British eBay sellers, with exports making up one in six of their sales. Of these, 88% of businesses sought growth by engaging in cross-border trade in the last quarter of 2008.

An e-retail index reveals just how fast on-line businesses are expanding in the UK, generating many new jobs and driving new export business.

The latest report from the e-retail body, IMRG, shows:

* 600,000 British jobs are now either directly in or supporting e-retail and e-commerce.
* The UK has 150,000 on-line retail businesses
* E-retailers employ six times as many staff as when they started trading
*78% of on-line retailers surveyed expect to recruit staff in the next year
* 39% expect to take on more staff within three months
* 88% of eBay retailers sought growth through cross-border trade in the last quarter of 2008.

It is only 16 years since the first UK e-retailers started in business – and since then the “Compound Average Growth Rate” (CAGR) of employment in on-line retail has been 19% (18.9%). If growth continues at this rate, it’s predicted that there will be one million e-jobs by 2013, and almost three million by 2020.

James Roper, chief executive of IMRG is reported as saying: “It’s clear that being competitive in the on-line marketplace is critical both for businesses and the economy. E-retail is making a huge contribution to the UK’s wider economic health, creating revenue, new employment and opportunities for people to purchase goods at lower prices.”