Social Gaming: Farmville Takes Over

Wonder why you get several wall posts about your friends finding lost cows and growing corn?

It's the phenomena of social game. Online games that allow you to interact with others.

Social games are web-based games played on social networking websites. Here are some statistics about social gamers:

• 65% of social gamers are women
• 64% of social gamers play everyday
• Facebook is the most popular social network to play social games
• 62% of social gamers play with real friends, 56% play with friends they have made online, 37% play with strangers
• Want to know more?

Zynga, Playfish, and Playdom are the biggest social gaming networking sites. Zynga created Farmville and Mafia Wars played on Facebook. Farmville has 61 million users, making it the most used social game available today.

And these games are only growing more popular. Today was the Social Gaming Summit of 2010, where panelists had the opportunity to talk about the future and growth of social gaming. Rick Thompson, co-founder of Playdom, predicted that 90% of internet users will be social gaming in the near future.

To play social games today, check out the Social Gaming Network.

To hear more of my thoughts on other blogs...

http://mashable.com/2010/02/17/social-gaming-survey/

http://blog.sgn.com/?p=37&cpage=1#comment-66

The problem with trying to determine ROI for social media is you are trying to put numeric quantities around human interactions and conversations, which are not quantifiable.

For our Dandeloin Marketing project for our Social Networking in Business class we are facing this very problem as we prepare to present how we used social media to market a e-book about "how to increase your chances of going viral."

When using social media, analytics only can take you so far. How can you determine where people clicked from, was it facebook or my gmail status? How many people came because I asked them to, how many people were generally interested? As social marketing becomes more popular it is important for people to know how to track how and why people are coming to their sites so they can determine was their ROI is.

Foursquare

Remember when Twitter seem like a fad? Now everyone has a Twitter account. Foursquare is the next Twitter.

Foursquare is a location based social networking service allowing users to "check-in" to specific locations using their smartphones. Foursquare is a game; you earn points for "checking-in" and the person with the most points at a specific location becomes the mayor of that spot. However simple it sounds, Foursquare is quickly rising in popularity and provides users a new way to enhance their social network.

Foursquare also provides businesses the advantage of free advertising. Restaurants are now giving away promotions every time someone "checks-in".

Check it out! Foursquare

Web Analytics - Part 1

Web Analytics - Part 1, a good place to start is what are web analytics? At the basic level web analytics tell you how successful your website is.

A five steps process will show you how to analyze website effectiveness with the help of web analytics:

1. Define goals for your website
2. Determine how you are going to measure goals (metrics)
3. Collect data using web analytics
4. Analyze data
5. Repeat

Check out Google Analytics or Yahoo Analytics if you are interested in learning more about how your website is performing.