I’m pleased to announce that long-time ReadWriteWeb blogger Marshall Kirkpatrick is officially now our Co-Editor, sharing editor duties with yours truly Richard MacManus. When I founded this site almost 7 years to the day, I was the lone blogger. Today ReadWriteWeb has a team of around 20; and in particular our writing team has grown a lot over the past year.

Given this expansion, we’ve decided to split the Editor role into two: Marshall will lead our daily news team, while I will continue to lead the feature and channel writers.

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Marshall also continues in his other role of VP Content Development here at ReadWriteWeb, which is closely aligned with our editorial program.

You can see our entire team on our About page and you can also follow us all on Twitter.

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In continuing to look at the way that Facebook has become a driving force behind online news consumption, Heather Hopkins of Hitwise has dove into the numbers again, this time examing how Facebook users compare with others in return visits.

According to Hopkins’ article, Facebook not only drives a high amount of traffic, higher than Google News, but its users are far more loyal, as well.

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Hopkins took a look at the data earlier this month, noting that Facebook drives three times as much traffic to broadcast than Google News, and now we find that these users are also repeat offenders. That is, they don’t just visit once, they come back for more. From the Hitwise blog:

Hitwise data indicate that visitors from Facebook are more loyal to News and Media websites than are visitors from Google News. In particular, among the top 5 Print Media websites in the week ending March 6, 2010, 78% of Facebook users were returning visitors compared to 67% from Google News. The figures are almost identical for Broadcast Media, with a 77% returning rate for Facebook compared to 64% for Google News.

Why do we care about this metric? Because “visitors aren’t as valuable if they don’t come back. Advertisers and retailers need some assurance that visitors will return again and again.” Hopkins notes that even visitors from Google.com, often the leading source of traffic to these sites, are outpaced by those from Facebook when it comes to return visits. But why is this?

Hopkins doesn’t get into the “why” behind the numbers, but we’d be willing to wager that it has something to do with a few reasons. First, content posted by peers is more likely to be compatible with an individual’s world view. Second, their trust in friends as sources might lead them to return for more.

Google, on the other hand, can give great results just the same as it can lead you to the most worthless pages you’ve imagined. It doesn’t offer that one thing we can all trust – the valued opinion of a friend. It’s also possible that the friend making the recommendation in the first place is a return visitor who repeatedly recommends the articles they read.

Whatever the reason, the numbers tell us one thing for sure – news outlets need to focus on making sure it is as easy as possible for readers and viewers to share content on Facebook. Or, as Hopkins so succinctly puts it, “with recent Pew Research showing that Newspapers have seen ad revenue fall 26% during the year and 43% over the past three years, understanding where to find loyal readers is becoming increasingly important.”

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Internet users who click on links posted on Facebook that lead to news and media websites are more loyal to those portals than those coming from Google News, according to new data from Hitwise.

Among the most popular top 5 print media websites for the week ending March 6, 78 percent of Facebook users were returning visitors compared to 67 percent from Google news. The same was true for broadcast media, with 77 percent returning for Facebook compared to 64 percent for Google News.

Heather Hopkins, Senior Online Analyst, Hitwise, collected the numbers using clickstream data. The metric reports the percentage of visits by source (i.e. Google, Yahoo! Google News, Facebook, etc) that were new versus returning. New visitors are defined as those that haven’t visited the site within the past 30 days.

"Interestingly, visitors from Google are less likely to be returning visitors than average for either Google News or Facebook," said Hopkins.

"This reinforces the long term value to News and Media organizations of working with the likes of Google News and Facebook."
 

A little more than a month ago, Google introduced click-to-call phone numbers in local ads on smartphones.  Now, the popular program’s undergoing an expansion as Google’s made it easier for large companies to take advantage of the offering.

A post on the Inside AdWords blog explained today, "[W]e’re bringing the same click-to-call benefits to national advertisers through phone extensions.  Phone extensions allow you to add a phone number that will be displayed whenever your ad is triggered, regardless of the user’s location."

Here’s the upshot, then: "This enables customers to connect with your business by phone directly from the ad and can be especially useful if you have a call center to handle customer inquiries."

Advertisers should profit as a result of this development, considering that phone calls are more likely than clicks to lead to purchases.  Google looks set to make a lot of money, too, since this move will encourage corporations with big advertising budgets to give click-to-call ads a shot.

Perhaps the only losers will be the companies that don’t adapt quickly.  They’ll risk losing sales to competitors with more eye-catching and actionable ads.

A little more than a month ago, Google introduced click-to-call phone numbers in local ads on smartphones.  Now, the popular program’s undergoing an expansion as Google’s made it easier for large companies to take advantage of the offering.

A post on the Inside AdWords blog explained today, "[W]e’re bringing the same click-to-call benefits to national advertisers through phone extensions.  Phone extensions allow you to add a phone number that will be displayed whenever your ad is triggered, regardless of the user’s location."

Here’s the upshot, then: "This enables customers to connect with your business by phone directly from the ad and can be especially useful if you have a call center to handle customer inquiries."

Advertisers should profit as a result of this development, considering that phone calls are more likely than clicks to lead to purchases.  Google looks set to make a lot of money, too, since this move will encourage corporations with big advertising budgets to give click-to-call ads a shot.

Perhaps the only losers will be the companies that don’t adapt quickly.  They’ll risk losing sales to competitors with more eye-catching and actionable ads.

Google has put together a one-minute guide to using its Search-based Keyword tool. The tool was launched just over a year ago in beta. It lets paid search advertisers see what keywords they may be missing out on based on searches on their site.

"Millions of people use Google each day to find products and services by searching on various keywords," says Dan Friedman of Google’s Inside AdWords Crew. "This means that by including all keywords that are relevant to your product or service in your campaigns, you can ensure you can ensure that you will reach a greater set of potential customers. To help you do this, you can use the Search-based Keyword Tool to quickly identify relevant keywords which aren’t yet included in your AdWords campaigns."

The guide follows:

Earlier this year, Google made some improvements to the search-based keyword tool. The company not only expanded the reach to Australia, Canada, China, Japan, and New Zealand in addition to the US and the UK, but users can also now select the currency they’d like to see suggested bids in on the setting page.

Google also added some customization features to the tool this year that could lead to more targeted results for users. These include language/country-specific results and ad/search share filters.

Related Articles:

> Google Improves Search-Based Keyword Tool

> Google Launches Search-Based Keyword Tool

> Internal AdWords Tool Raises Rumors About Rankings

Twitter’s own homepage is still the most popular tool for users to update their status on Twitter. Around 46% of all updates are made directly on the site. Social media analytics and monitoring service Sysomos analyzed 500 million tweets it collected over the past 5 months and found that TweetDeck is the most popular third-party client. TweetDeck has a comfortable lead with a 8.48% share of the market, followed by Tweetie, Twitterific and Seesmic.

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Compared to Sysomos’ last study of Twitter clients in June, Twitter.com’s share fell from 55% to 46%. As Twitter’s growth is slowing down, then these numbers make a lot of sense. New users tend to use Twitter’s web interface at first and then migrate to a third-party client. If Twitter.com’s market share among Twitter clients is dropping, then this can be seen as a strong indication that the number of new signups is going down as well.

TweetDeck: The Client of Choice for Active Twitter Users

TweetDeck doesn’t just have the largest number of users, it is also the tool of choice for the most active Twitter users. Sysomos analyzed the number of tweets posted by active users based on their primary Twitter application. On average, TweetDeck users send out 1.24 tweets per day, followed by Seesmic users (1.18 tweets/day) and HootSuite (1.11 tweets/day). Users of all the other popular clients like Tweetie, Twhirl and Twitterific update their status less than once a day. Those who prefer Twitter’s own web interface only send out 0.67 tweets per day.

How Many Clients Do You Use?

Sysomos also analyzed how many third-party clients Twitter users normally use. Looking at active Twitter users only – those with at least 50 tweets in the last 5 months – the study found that 82% only used a single application. 14% used two applications, 2.35% used three and then the numbers drop off quickly. Only 0.01% of all active users used 6 or more clients. Chances are that a lot of active users use different mobile and desktop clients (Tweetie on the iPhone and Seesmic on the desktop, for example). This would explain why quite a large number of users use two clients.

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Facebook recently announced the Live Stream Box, which lets webmasters integrate a real-time social viewing experience on their site. A spokesperson for Facebook tells WebProNews, "Yesterday, CNN.com, MTV.com and other major networks implemented the technology for Michael Jackson’s Memorial, where about 1 million users posted approximately 800,000 status updates in just a few hours."

Today Facebook has announced another social widget that webmasters can use to bring the Facebook experience to their site. It’s called the Fanbox. "Facebook Page owners can now add the Fan Box, a Facebook Connect-enabled widget, to their website with a few lines of code to bring content from their Facebook Page into their site and convert visitors into fans on Facebook," the spokesperson says.

To include the Fan box, you only need to grab a few lines of javascript from your Facebook page. Simply click "Add Fan Box to your site," which is located underneath your page’s profile picture. Once you click it, you can choose whether or not you want to include the stream and fans. Further customization options can be found here.

This could be a great way to increase your number of fans on Facebook. In turn, this can of course increase traffic to your site, and theoretically, it can continue in that fashion.

Keep in mind, the Fan Box comes equipped with a nice "Become a Fan" button, which might look nice on your site. You can see how this can easily lead to a nice boost in Facebook fans. More info on the box here.

Research reported by StatCounter says that Microsoft’s new Bing search engine has taken over Yahoo for the second place slot in search market share. Clearly, it’s getting a lot of attention since it just launched, so let’s keep this in context.

"It remains to be seen if Bing falls away after the initial novelty and promotion but at first sight it looks like Microsoft is on to a winner," says StatCounter CEO Aodhan Cullen. "Steve Ballmer is quoted as saying that he wanted Microsoft to become the second biggest search engine within five years. Following the breakdown in talks to acquire Yahoo! at a cost of $40bn it looks as if he may have just achieved that with Bing much sooner and a lot cheaper than anticipated."

According to StatCounter, in the US Bing reached 16.28% of market share, with Yahoo at 10.22%, and Google still sitting comfortably at 71.47%. On a global scale, StatCounter data finds that Bing at 5.62% has taken a smaller lead over Yahoo! (5.13%), with Google sitting at 87.62%.

There is no doubt that many people who normally use Google (or even Yahoo) have used a Bing a little within the past week (myself included), but clearly not all of them are going to abandon their Google habits in favor of Bing. It will be very interesting to see how this pans out once the initial hype dies down.

The real question is whether or not Microsoft’s big marketing budget will pay off in Bing usage. Clearly brand is the biggest obstacle Microsoft has been trying to clear for years in terms of search. You can check out a couple of the new Bing commercials here.

It took a couple of months, but most of the important traffic-tracking companies are now in agreement: Google Maps is more popular than MapQuest.  Hitwise is the latest source to confirm this standing.

Fresh Hitwise info puts Google Maps in the lead starting earlier this month.  As of Saturday the 11th, its win still wasn’t overwhelming (compare market shares of 39.38 and 39.14 percent), but the lines representing the two services seem to have been on pretty fixed paths as of late.

(Credit: Blumenthal)  

Mike Blumenthal noted, "It is of interest that starting on March 14th, Google Maps shows almost a month of sustained gains while Mapquest shows an equivalent drop.  It would be a reasonable to assume that the date coincides with the start of Google’s expanded Local rollout."

It’s hard to imagine how MapQuest could compete with this move; even partnerships with Yahoo, Microsoft, and Ask would leave it auditioning in front of a smaller audience.  The switch in ranking seems rather likely to be permanent, then.

It’ll be interesting to see if anything’s said about this when Google announces its first quarter financial results in two days; more than a few advertisers may be eager to follow the leader.