Facebook users most likely can’t go one day without seeing a someecard pop up in their News Feeds. People love them. Brands love them. They’re funny, snarky, honest — and ubiquitous throughout Facebook. Someecards Co-Founder and CEO Duncan Mitchell told AllFacebook that the site sees somewhere between 1.5 million and 2 million visits per month from the social network. But how did it all get started?
Vine has added sound and motion to the popular microblogging website, Twitter. Learn how to bring your information to life in our Vine webcast on Wednesday, June 19 from 4-5 pm ET. In this one-hour webcast, Gemma Craven (left), EVP, New York group director at Social@Ogilvy will discuss best practices for using the visual social platform and share some of her team's successful vine videos. Register here. 
Contrary to an erroneous report in The Guardian last week, Facebook isn’t losing users in the U.S. They’re just changing up their habits. According to figures provided to AllFacebook by Nielsen, Facebook users are shifting more of their social network time to their mobile devices and away from desktop. In March 2013, U.S. visitors to Facebook’s mobile application (Android & iOS) spent an average of 6 hours, 49 minutes on the site, compared to 6 hours, 44 minutes on average on desktop.
Facebook’s total monthly active users and daily active users continued to trend upward in the first quarter of 2013, reaching 1.11 billion and 665 million, respectively, as of March 31, but growth in the core markets of the U.S. and Canada has slowed considerably, with the bulk of new MAUs and DAUs coming from Asia and the rest of the world, not including Europe.
According to market research firm Nielsen, the use of Facebook is declining in the U.S. and on desktop. As Facebook makes a mobile push, it appears more people are accessing the site through their phones and tablets. However, Nielsen said Facebook has lost 10 million users in the U.S. over the past year. It will be interesting to see what Facebook Co-Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announces later during the company’s first-quarter earnings call.
Facebook has been making a push to get users to like more pages. It appears to be working. As Socialbakers notes, the average Facebook user in 2009 liked 4.5 pages. Now that figure has risen to 40. In the U.S., Facebook users like an average of 70 pages.
Wrapp, a mobile social gifting application, connects Facebook users through gift cards. If a user wants to celebrate a Facebook friend’s new job, or thinks they could use something from a store, he or she can send a gift card through Wrapp. So far, it has become quite popular. Wrapp announced that since its launch a little over a year ago, users have redeemed more than 1 million gift cards.
As Facebook mentioned in its 10-K filing, the site still has a serious problem with fake profiles, used to bolster shady pages’ fan metrics. It appears that the social network did some cleaning up in January, as several countries (notably the U.S. and Indonesia) lost a great number of users last month, according to Quintly. All around the world, more than 4 million users’ profiles were deleted in January.
Since 2010, PayPal has been one of the main methods of payment for Facebook developers. But as Facebook grows, the company is changing its PayPal policies for new developers in emerging markets, such as China, Brazil, and India. According to TechCrunch, developers in several countries must show extra identification as a means of authentication, such as photo IDs or incorporation papers, in order to be paid via direct deposit.
Facebook finally introduced Pages Manager for Android recently, but only to users in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. On Wednesday, Facebook rolled it out to users in the U.S. and the U.K., as well as all Google Play-supported countries.
In an effort to get a leg up on Facebook marketing, many like-obsessed pages resort to buying fans — fake profiles which only exist to boost pages’ numbers. Now that Facebook has broken down fans by country, VentureBeat notes that it’s easier to see which pages have acquired fans honestly, and which ones flat-out paid for them.
