The ClickZ website reports on a recent study in the US into the "like" activity of 42.6 million Facebook users on 32,000 of its customers' Facebook posts, focusing on the pages for consumer packaged goods (CPGs) and quick serve restaurant (QSRs) brands.

For QSRs, they showed 62% higher engagement rates per post - which were calculated by combining likes, comments, and shares - than other brand sectors. Meanwhile, CPGs have garnered 41% higher engagement than the average brand.

In all sectors, images/photos outperformed video and text on Facebook by 22% and 54%, respectively, in terms of engagement. For CPGs in particular, the advantages to images are more dramatic, as they outdid video by 204% and text by 86%. For QSRs, the study showed that images got 136% more engagement than video and 182% more than text.

Other figures reported by the research showed that posts made before noon get 65% more engagement than ones posted in the afternoon. CPGs get 21% more engagement in the morning, while QSRs attracted 12% more.

In addition to this, data for all brands showed that the best day to post is Friday, with Sunday and Saturday being the worst. For CPGs, Thursday generates the highest engagement rates, while Wednesday creates the lowest. However QSRs should post every Wednesday apparently, which is the most successful in terms of response.

The Media Post website has revealed the results from a new comScore survey for August that shows Facebook gaining top position amongst major sites in terms of time spent, with a total of 41.1 billion minutes, with Google second with 39.8 billion minutes. Yahoo dropped to third, with 37.7 billion and this portal / search engine also saw its share of time spent in the third quarter drop to an all-time low of 9.3%.

The comScore report also says that Google's number of global users passed 1 billion for the first time last month, although Yahoo reportedly edged out Google to become the top site in monthly traffic, with 179 million unique visitors. Google had 178.8 million, followed by Microsoft with 165.3 million.

Facebook remained the fourth-ranked site, at 148 million, which was up from 145.5 million recorded in July. These figures of rising traffic combined with increasing time spent on the site bodes well for Facebook's efforts to monetize its vast inventory and user base.

Facebook has said it is adding new metrics to help advertisers measure the social context of ads by tracking the proportion that include endorsements from friends on the social network. That means telling advertisers what percentage of their ads people "Liked" or used to engage with a Facebook Page, event or application. Research company Nielsen reported earlier this year that people are 68% more likely to remember an ad and twice as likely to remember what it said when they see a friend has interacted with the ad on Facebook.

In a separate article by The New Yorker, a detailed profile on Facebook's co-founder, Mark Zuckerberg provides a fascinating insight into his background and the rise of this social networking phenomenon, in advance of a new Hollywood film that is soon to be released about the early days of the company.

There has been widespread coverage in the press and on blogs and Twitter over the past week regarding the launch of Facebook Places. In response to the growing trend in location services, such as Foursquare and Gowalla, Facebook has now entered the fray and is offering a new service to their millions of users (although initially this is just working in the US).

This article from Advertising Age gives a good summary of the new service and how this can be used as a potential marketing tool. However, as always happens with Facebook services, there are also considerable concerns about the privacy settings with the new Places tool, and how friends can also log your location, without your knowledge - as described in this second piece.

The new Facebook Places services certainly adds another resource to the options available from the social networking site, but how it will be used by users and the benefits to marketers remains unclear at the moment.

Two recent articles on the ClickZ website look at some of the recent developments and trends with advertising on Facebook. The first looks at the way some large US and Canadian companies are beginning to use Facebook for advertising by incorporating the web version of their weekly newspaper circulars into their Facebook pages.

For example, ShopLocal serves Facebook users the a 'virtual circular' for the nearest branded store based on the current city in their profile. Users can enlarge and print barcode-enabled coupons, as well as author comments underneath each of the specials. They can also click a "share" button for each individual coupon/special to include in their newsfeeds. Examples from other retailers are also included in the article.

The second piece reports that Facebook is currently testing ratings and reviews within adverts on the site, including the use of Facebook's thumbs-up "Like" icon, a user rating between 1 and 5 stars, a short comment, and then the user's name. At this stage it's not clear how long the ratings and reviews ads have been tested or whether they will be rolled out in the future.

However, if these 'socially-enhanced' ads do eventually become a core component on the site, it would certainly draw the interest of marketers since the inclusion of a friend's rating and review of a product or service could in theory increase click-through rates and conversions.

Another major milestone has been reached by Facebook, the social networking giant. As covered by many global media sites, including the BBC, Facebook has announced that it has now registered its 500 millionth member. In addition, the site has also gained around 100 million new users in the last six months.

As the site continues to expand around the world, largely through word of mouth, the rapid increase in users is expected to reach the next milestones of 750m users, and then 1 billion, in the next few years. Despite recent concerns about privacy on the site, it is clear that many people are not deterred and are either testing the site for themselves or becoming active users.

The CNN website includes an article about the new "Like" button which has recently been introduced by Facebook. If this new feature takes off, then the article suggests that this form of "social links" will create a potential problem for Google in the way that it measures links between sites, and how these could have a significant impact on the 'link value' used by its algorithm to help determine the order of search results.

By using the new "Like" button, websites can drive visitor traffic from Facebook by including Like buttons on their pages - every Like posts an update to a user's Facebook page. In addition, a website can customize its experience for users so that if you're logged into Facebook the 'liked' content can be ranked by the source as well as by friends on the social networking site.

Since these "social links" are related to a specific user they can potentially work better than the standard links that exist between websites. Facebook wants to replace this open system of links between pages with the "social links" (or Likes) that it controls. As the article explains, Google and other search engines won't have full access to all these Likes, so the company best positioned to rank on the web will be Facebook.

Some experts are therefore concerned that Facebook will begin to 'stockpile' all of the personal information and preferences of users. This can help place Facebook in a much more dominant position to control the search results on the main search engines and so companies will rush to implement the new "social plug-ins" from this networking site. Consequently Facebook may build a stronger base to 'organize the web' so that optimisation of Facebook's 'Like' buttons and user base will become a new focus for SEO.

The article concludes that advocates of the 'Open Web' have reason to be concerned and privacy experts are also raising red flags. Google is expected to be concerned and will fight any structures that will affect their search algorithms, although ignoring the role of these "Like" buttons may be one option. Because without access to the 'stitches that bind web pages together', the article suggests that the search engine could falter.

An article on the Forbes website says that Facebook, the largest social networking tool in the world, is dominated by women.

Using data from a number of recent surveys and advertising tools, the report says that the 400-million member site is 57% female and attracts 46 million more female visitors than male visitors each month. Women are more active on Facebook, having 8% more friends and participating in 62% of the sharing activity. Women are also seen as the majority of users on many of the other large social networking sites, such as Twitter, MySpace and Flickr. In contrast, men are most active on sites like Digg, YouTube and LinkedIn, which are more content-oriented and promotional than discussion-based.

The article explains how data shows that women don't just visit different sites from men, they also use social media differently than men. While women often use online social networking tools to make connections and share items from their personal lives, men use them as means to gather information and increase their status.

Social networking website Facebook has once again run into a backlash from changes being made to its privacy policy. As reported by the BBC, the new conditions were introduced earlier this week with a pop-up box asking members to review and select their privacy settings. However, like previous changes to privacy and usage conditions, the change is attracting a large amount of negative feedback.

Digital rights groups and bloggers have responded with criticism of Facebook's changing policy, claiming that these are unnecessary and encouraged users to share their updates with the wider online community, as well as making content available to search engines. However, Facebook has responded by saying the changes should help members to manage updates they wanted to share, not trick them into revealing too much.

This is not the first time that Facebook has received such a response to changes, which reflects the extent of membership and usage of the site around the world. However, although it might damage their reputation in the short term, it remains to be seen whether this backlash has a long-term affect on usage of the service.

Facebook began testing the latest privacy changes during 2009 before introducing them site-wide. The changes let users decide who should see their updates, whether all 350 million Facebook members should see them, and if they should be viewable across the web. A spokesman said the changes to privacy made it easier to tune the audience for an update or status change so default settings of openness should have less impact, although users still have the ultimate choice of what to place on their profiles or updates.

The Wall Street Journal covers the latest announcement from Facebook that it has now reached 300 million users, another sign of the continued growth of this popular social networking site. This means that an extra 50 million users have been added since July, when the 250m mark was announced, so the upward growth curve continues at a rapid rate.

Of course all these users are not regular users of the site, but it still makes for an impressive user base of registered names, with 70% reported to be based outside of the US now. Facebook also claim to have moved into a positive cashflow situation now and are expected to earn more than US$500 million in revenue in 2009 - another significant growth in the past year, up more than 70% on the 2008 figure.

Facebook, the market-leading social networking site, has been forced to change its global privacy policy following negotiations with the privacy commissioner in Canada. A report by the BBC says that Facebook was recently found to breach Canadian law by holding on to users' personal data indefinitely and has therefore agreed to make changes to the way it handles this information and be more transparent about what data it collects and why.

The other main stumbling block that has been an issue for some time has been the inability for users to deactivate or delete their account, but this is now being changed so that it will be possible in the future. The decision could also have implications for other social networking websites.

As well as updating their privacy policy, Facebook has said it will make changes that will give users more control over the data they provide to third-party developers of applications, such as games and quizzes. These changes will require applications to state which information they wish to access and obtain consent from the user before it is used or shared.

An article in Business Week considers how the use of real-time websites may start driving online business in the future. Following the success of Twitter, the ubiquitous micro-blogging site, the report interviews an investor of this site along with over 20 other companies that are developing the "real-time Web" - the term used to describe the rapidly increasing number of live social activities online, from 'tweets' to status updates on Facebook, to the sharing of news content, web links, and videos.

The real-time web is being considered by some as the Internet's 'Next Big Thing'. Although this emerging sector is so new and currently unfocused in its longer-term potential, apparently many startups are now staking claims in this field and drawing interest from investors.

It is yet to be seen how these websites can turn a healthy profit and drive future growth in the web. Twitter is still exploring ways to generate revenue from its huge user base, while Facebook has struggled to turn its rising popularity into profits. However, with the growth of high-speed Internet connections, a growing number of mobile devices with full web browsers, and new technologies that enable instant transmission of messages and data, the opportunities for real-time communications are growing and now need to be applied to a profitable business model.

Both Twitter and Facebook have been subject to some extreme attacks in the past few days from online hackers who are targeting these high profile social networking sites with the aim of causing disruption to their service. As reported by the BBC, Twitter was taken offline for more than two hours whilst Facebook's service was "degraded" as both sites were subject to so-called denial-of-service attacks.

These attacks can take various forms but often involve a company's servers being flooded with data in an effort to disable them. Such attacks often use networks of computers - known as botnets - which are under the control of hackers, often as the result of previous viral attacks or 'Trojan horses' that have infected computers around the world. The strategy is often employed by protestors against, for example, government websites or to disrupt high profile sites for publicity.

Facebook signed up its 100 millionth member last August and is expected to reach 200 million shortly, representing a staggering growth rate that has seen the numbers double in 8 months. This article by the New York Times reviews how Facebook has developed and the challenges it now faces to maintain this momentum and to maximise the potential revenue from this membership base.

Facebook has developed its own momentum as well as a passionate user base that has reacted poorly in recent months to proposed changes by the company to privacy controls and also the recent redesign of users' home page. It is also facing increasing competition from newer start-ups like Twitter, the micro-blogging service which is attracting current media focus, plus there will be a growing issue between the original users of Facebook - young, tech-savvy early adopters - who move away from the service as it attracts a wider (and older) user base.

The BBC website has reported that the popular social networking site, Facebook, is coming under an increasing number of threats from hackers who are trying to obtain personal information about users of the site. Apparently there have been five separate security problems in the last seven days. The hackers are reported to be creating fake messages padded with details of Facebook members in the hope that they can obtain information and access to users' details by capitalising on the trust and social links that drive the network.

They are also taking advantage of the hundreds of applications that have been developed for Facebook's users, with one malicious application has tried to trick people into adding it by claiming that their friends were having trouble looking at their profile. If the application is added it spams itself to every Facebook friend that a member of the site has. So far, however, security experts say that these rogue applications have been scary and a nuisance more than anything else, but this remains a big concern for the operators of Facebook, and their millions of users.

Facebook had also been under attack from a virus with a new version of the 'Koobface' virus targeting members of the site again, with the previous attack at the end of last year. The new variant uses a Facebook message to try to get people to visit a fake YouTube page and install the malware. To make it look more plausible, the virus posts the image from a Facebook member's profile on the video page. Once installed the malicious program hunts for cookies on a victim's computer and uses the details it finds in the small text files to log into other social sites that person may be a member of.

An article by The New York Times reports on plans by Facebook to extend its reach across the Internet by allowing users to access other services with their Facebook login. Now described as the world's largest social network, Facebook has launched 'Connect' which gives users the chance to login to other websites and to see their friends’ activities on those sites. The new Connect service also gives members the opportunity to broadcast their actions on those sites to their friends who use Facebook.

Coverage on these additional sites remains limited at the moment and are mostly US-focused websites, but the intention is that major Internet properties will begin to share at least some of their usage data so that users don't need to enter the same identifying information again and again on different sites. Such programmes will help the emergence of a new “social web”, where interaction and 'chatter' amongst friends will infiltrate those sites that have been entirely 'unsociable' to date. It can therefore also be used as a way for recommendations to drive user traffic and activity across the Web in a more seamless fashion.

These moves raise the sensitive issue of privacy again with these services and how the data might be used by Facebook and the other partner sites to 'monetise' the traffic and behavioural data being captured. This remains new territory for the web whee boundaries are being tested and where Facebook has previously fallen foul of the privacy lobby with its 'Beacon' advertising network which was dropped in the face of criticism last year.