Social Gaming

It is my understanding that Zynga is one of the most popular social gaming providers. They have over 70 million daily active users. They provide facebook with the applications like Farmville, Mafia Wars, poker and others. They have a team of investors who invest millions of dollars, the biggest one yet being $29 million.

Social gaming is about connecting with others through games. Its about competing with your friends, even if they are not physically with you and it is casual. It is not "hardcore" gaming, but I have seen many people become addictive to these games, especially farmville for some reason.

It was announced that the iPhones are now going to have social gaming platforms. To me this means that social gaming is a force to be reckoned with if Apple is investing in it.

People are even spending money on social gaming, gift certificates for farmville can be bought at 7-Elevens, and these social gaming sites are making hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. An interesting note is that some of the most popular social gaming games, are those that you have to pay in order to really advance, and the crazy thing is, is that people ARE!

I used to play farmville, but than got absolutely bored of it, and I can't even fathom why someone would actually spend money in. Maybe its the little kids who they are targeting for those gift cards?

A study was done by mashable.com and they determined that average social gamer is a 43 year old woman. Facebook seems to be the platform of choice for social gamers, and it is expected that the social gaming industry will make $1 BILLION in revenues this year, with over 100 million people social games.

After learning about the social gaming industry I was actually shocked that the majority players were middle aged women. Maybe thats why some social games are able to charge customers, because this age group usually has a larger amount of disposable income?

Gone are the $,$$$,$$$ Superbowl Ads???

According to Gary Vaynerchuk businesses need to recognize the ROI of Social Media. The connections that are formed because of Social Media far surpass traditional modes of advertisement, and they are WAY cheaper.

This automatically made me think of the millions of dollars companies spend on Superbowl commercials, because they reach such a vast audience. There are people who watch the Superbowl just for the commercials. With the expansion of Social Media is it possible that Superbowl commercials may longer no cost an extravagant amount of money?

I want your opinion

Your facebook status, tweets and whatever other statuses are great ways to get opinions and questions answered by the public. I witnessed on a family members facebook status a few days ago a huge heated debate over healthcare. It was pretty interesting to read what people thought and how passionate they were about the subject. Joe Kraus views social networking as heading this way more and more. People can easily answer questions that their friends have in seconds without ever even talking with them.

Social networks are ever expanding, and they are changing how we use the internet. Blogs are becoming increasingly popular avenues to access information. The internet is a changing landscape just like the world, and it will become more and more public the longer it is around.

So someone Stumbled Upon Your Page? So What?

Small companies need to figure out ways to properly use programs such as google analytics to make sure that the time and money they put into their companies is worth it. Who is looking at your site, what are they getting from it? Are they browsing for awhile or leaving right away?

Companies need to know why people are visiting their websites, and what the value is. If the company just has a website to have one, why?

Getting Started With Online Marketing – Web Analytics – Part I | Whatever it Takes | Fast Company

The Death of the Pageview - ReadWriteStart