Facebook Home Hits 500K Downloads In Five Days, Pales In Comparison To Instagram’s Android Shift

It would appear that Facebook Home has just surpassed 500k downloads on Google Play since launching on the platform five days ago on April 16. The app’s Google Play listing notes the milestone, and Ben Evans confirmed on Twitter.

Facebook Home isn’t so much of an app as a user interface for the phone, putting Facebook smack dab in the center of Android user’s smartphone experience. Users with Facebook Home can post status updates and view the newsfeed straight from the lock screen, and conduct messaging without ever being interrupted thanks to Chat Heads.

In essence, it’s Facebook’s push past being an app like every other app and being a central force of the smartphone, a launch pad. Hopes are seriously high, as foreshadowed by Zuckerberg’s sweaty brow at the announcement, but word had originally circulated that users weren’t all that into Facebook Home around launch day.

Clearly, that’s not true as the app has garnered over 100,000 downloads a day since launch. Still, these aren’t blow-out numbers. Remember when Instagram launched on Android, and hit over 1 million downloads in a day? And then hit over 5 million downloads in six days? Yeah, those were blow-out numbers.

You also have to consider that Facebook has over a billion users, so 500K doesn’t really move the needle.

But in Facebook’s defense, the Home application is only available on select devices, including the Samsung Galaxy S III, Galaxy Note II, HTC One X, and the HTC One X+, along with the Facebook Phone itself the HTC First.

Oh, and Facebook is now quite happy for Instagram’s success on Android, after that slight $1 billion acquisition.

Tags: facebook home, facebook, instagram

Just Who Uses Social Media? A Demographic Breakdown

You think you know social? How about who uses it? Well, you might not know it as well as you would have guessed.

A new study from the Pew Research Center and Docstoc shed some light on just who uses social and on what platforms. Some of the findings seem in line with what you would probably guess, but others were surprising.

If you think the smarter, more attractive sex is more socially prolific than us men, well ... you're right. Women use social media 9% more than men do. Despite having more distractions, people living in cities have the most social media activity, at 70% of the population. Perhaps it's the connectivity of large-city life.

In terms of racial and ethnic groups online, Hispanics lead the pack at 72% engagement, with African-Americans trailing at 68%, who are ahead of Caucasians at 65%. And in a strange twist, despite being somewhat economically disadvantaged, 72% of adults with annual household incomes below $30,000 use social networks, more than those with higher wages.

How about most popular social networks? That would be Facebook, with 67% of adults using the Zuckerberg-founded service. A distant second was LinkedIn with 20%, with Twitter coming in third at 16%, and Tumblr falling dead last at 6%.

Take a look at the details below:

Facebook Unveils a Radically Redesigned News Feed

Facebook announced Thursday it is giving its venerable news feed a new look and feel.

The new news feed represents the first major overhaul of Facebook's core service since the launch of Facebook Timeline at the end of 2011.

"The news feed is one of the most important things we've built," Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during the press event. Likening news feed to "the most personalized newspaper," Zuckerberg added that "the stories around you deserve to be displayed with more than just text."

"How we're all sharing is changing and the news feed needs to evolve with those changes. This is the evolving face of news feed."

The new news feed features three major components:

• Bigger Images
• Multiple Feeds
• Mobile Consistency

A New Focus on Imagery

The new look is a radical departure from the Facebook of old. It's mobile-inspired and consistent across devices.

When it comes to the feed itself, the focus on stories is now much more visual. Greater emphasis is given to images — which are now much larger. Photos now make up nearly 50% of news feed stories and are now front and center.

If you see shades of Instagram — or Google+ — in the new feed, you aren't alone. We see them too. Facebook says it is following trends on where design is headed and it is clear that trend includes big photos and a clean, navigable design.

More Feeds, More Control

As for the "feeds" aspect of news feed, users now have access to more types of feeds and have more control over how those feeds are displayed.

Users can subscribe to different types of feeds, including feeds from all friends, close friends, music, photos, games and those who a user "follows."

And, for those of us who hate how Facebook sorts news feed content, a chronological view is now available.

It's not clear how these new feeds will affect promoted stories and content or the longer-lasting impact it may have on brands and pages.

Mobile Consistency

The new news feed design was inspired by mobile. It takes significant cues from the Facebook mobile apps for phones and tablets, adding a new side navigation bar and more white space.

Understanding that more users are accessing Facebook from mobile than ever, Facebook is focused on making the overall experience more consistent, regardless of platform.

The new feed will start rolling out today on web.

Let us know your thoughts on the changes in the comments.

What Facebook's New News Feed Means for Marketers

Facebook on Thursday unveiled its first major redesign of the News Feed since 2009, making the page more visually rich, and giving users new options to filter what they see by different feed categories like Music, Photos, Games and Close Friends. At first glance, the changes appear to be a win-win for users who want more control over their Facebook homepage, but the redesign may prove to be more of a mixed bag for marketers.

For brands, the biggest positive about the new changes is that there is suddenly more real estate for in-stream ads. Facebook has expanded the size of the News Feed itself and shrunk the right and left rails surrounding the Feed. "Having a larger canvas to work with will be a real benefit to marketers," said Debra Williamson, an analyst with eMarketer. "[Marketers] have always wanted more real estate and Facebook has always been more reticent to give them more play. By expanding the News Feed, that by default gives advertisers more room to play with as well."

A Facebook rep confirmed to Mashable in an email that Sponsored Posts will appear in-stream in the new News Feed just as they do in the current version, only "richer/bigger."

Greater real estate isn't the only big perk for marketers. Facebook is emphasizing visual content like pictures and videos in the feed, which provides brands with the opportunity to get creative. Williamson expects that brands will be able to capitalize on this by increasing their use of imagery in Sponsored Posts and eventually, if not inevitably, turning to video ads. "We didn't hear Facebook talk about video ads in this presentation," Williamson says, "but certainly Mark Zuckerberg has alluded to the fact that there will be more video in the News Feed, so there's an opportunity for brands to display video."

Beyond that, Facebook's decision to streamline the News Feed design across desktop and mobile is also a boon to marketers. According to Dan Slagen, SVP of marketing at Nanigans, this move "reduces friction" for advertisers planning out campaigns for mobile and desktop by ensuring a similar experience on each. "You are able to take one message and put it in the mind of a consumer and you are really able to drive that message home," he says.

However, the situation gets murkier for brands and marketers when it comes to the manynew subfeeds that Facebook has introduced. Until now, content from brands and publishers appeared in a user's News Feed right along side posts from friends and family. With the additional feeds, users have a quick way to focus on only what their friends are sharing (through the All Friends category), or even more specifically, on what their closest friends on the social network are sharing. Any user who choose these options is effectively opting out of seeing content from publishers, businesses and influencers whose pages they follow, but who they are not in fact friends with.

"The friends-only feed could get a lot of the volume, which may be a concern," said Simon Mansell, CEO of TBG Digital. "It might affect our ad delivery in the short-term if everyone starts using it."

"The friends-only feed could get a lot of the volume, which may be a concern," said Simon Mansell, CEO of TBG Digital. "It might affect our ad delivery in the short-term if everyone starts using it." That said, Mansell argues it's a necessary risk for Facebook to take to ensure the quality of the "core platform experience." Marketers may still choose to advertise in those feeds, but Mansell says they'll need to think harder about how to do so: "If you're trying to focus on your friends, you have to be careful how brands interrupt in there."

On the other hand, the additional feeds finally provide brands and advertisers with a way to better target the appropriate audience on Facebook. Before, a Sponsored post from Sony might show up in a user's News Feed regardless of what the user was doing in that particular session. Now, a company like Sony might only choose to place a Sponsored Post on the Music or Games feed, where it's presumably more relevant to that audience. Likewise, if users check their Following feed, it essentially means they've opted in to see content from brands and publishers, which means promotional content placed in that feed might see greater engagement from users.

"With most changes like this, it is always going to affect some people positively and some negatively," said Mauricio Aguayo, senior social strategist with Rokkan. "The user is now much more in control about what they want to see and they will be much more prone to engage with it because they've in essence raised their hand and asked to see this publication. But for awareness purposes and pushing content out, it may be a little negative." Aguayo speculates that Facebook may eventually offer brands and publishers the option to surface their posts in other feeds besides Following for an additional cost.

Facebook, for its part, suggests in a blog post that the new Following feed will benefit brands and publishers: "Thanks to a new 'Following' feed on the right-hand side of the home page, people will be able to discover more content from the Pages they like and the people they follow."

For better or worse, Facebook has also effectively downplayed the presence of ads in the right rail in order to place more emphasis on ads that appear in-stream. Not only is that problematic for marketers who rely on the sidebar ads as a cheaper way to reach users on the social network, but Williamson says it also undermines what has historically "been a pretty big contributor to Facebook's ad revenue."

The assumption going forward, according to several of the marketing experts we spoke with, is that providing more real estate and more prominence to visual content will help Facebook command greater ad rates. While that's good for a public company still looking to show meaningful revenue growth to Wall Street, it also means advertising on the social network will likely become significantly pricier and more competitive in the future.

Image courtesy of Facebook 

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