After months of rapid growth, Pinterest’s traffic took a turn for the worse in April, dropping 25 percent. But May is looking better for the online Pinboard. New statistics show a steady climb in the number of people who use the Facebook app every month, while the amount of daily activity has more than doubled.
Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews. 
Named the third most popular network in America in March 2012, the social bookmarking site Pinterest was one of Facebook’s early success stories with its Open Graph tool for third-party developers. But Pinterest’s Facebook app hit a sharp decline in average users during the month of April.
Without question, the social gaming market is the newly hot space in the game industry. Some of the leading developers have emerged as companies only in the last few years and in that time have managed to gather tens of millions of both dollars and users from these games. With these outstanding numbers and increasing sociality of games not only on the web, but on mobile and console platforms as well, it seems like a very attractive market to enter. However, for all its potential, it’s a place that many independent developers and traditional game publishers are having difficulty being successful in. The reason for this is because these games are overwhelmingly financed by microtransactions of virtual goods, and knowing how to inspire users to pay you for virtual goods is something that’s not easy to master.
According to a Business Insider article in January of 2011, Facebook has over 600 million monthly active users, which got us at Social Times thinking: how many of Facebook’s monthly active users are also monthly active Zynga users? If our math is correct, around 40% of Facebook users are also Zynga gamers.
CityVille, after dethroning FarmVille from its high horse, leads the social gaming industry with 75 million monthly active users. Who else is on the top games list?
As the Facebook gaming wars continue to heat up, analysts seek as many ways as possible to measure each companies’ gaming success. Monthly Active Users (MAUs), Daily Active Users (DAUs), Page Views, Monetization… the list goes on. There are as many ways to measure an application’s success as there are applications in the Facebook directory. That said, the dimension of user loyalty has always been interesting to me, and the concept of the users-to-fans ratio for a given application does a good job of indicating what percentage of users play the game and publicly demonstrate their affinity by signing up as a fan.
Read more
