by this beautiful river I'm gonna take you guys through the next
couple of minutes of happy hour it's been a fantastic week Rachit's talked you through all the awards that we've won this week. Fantastic week for Happy Marketer. But I'm going to talk to you about social media, Facebook in particular.
Especially in Australia. Australia has a population of about 22-23 million and we have about 15 million Facebook users in Australia. Pretty strong Facebook penetration. And if you look at last week's Facebook views, a few things have
been very very critical number one - there has been a lot of controversy about what gets into your feed especially with the US elections going on There's been complaints from the Conservatives that what you're seeing on the feed has been manually tampered with by editors now its election week in Australia as well.
The campaigning is going on pretty heavy There are many similar concerns in the Australian segment as well what's very interesting is there's been
a lot of positive engagement on Facebook about election topics the most engaged audience are women 25-34 and
what they're really interested about it the economy, social issues, immigration Facebook is not only playing a big part
in the U.S.
Elections but also in Australia and and what's really
interesting is what the different parties and the different constituents are doing
about that from what I understand New South Wales is getting the bulk of the comments and the engagement on the Facebook conversations about the Australian elections. So check that out. Something else that I want to talk to you
guys about is my personal experience over the last one week and how social has played a pretty big role. So, on one day we went to a beautiful park where we could feed kangaroos and koalas and what was really interesting is we took a lot of photos and videos on my Facebook app and I took a pano photograph and when I went to upload the pano photograph Facebook automatically transferred that
into a 360 degree video so anything that's pano, Facebook automatically turns that into a 360 degree video.
Pretty interesting because
if you've been catching us live on Happy Hour Live, we've talked a lot about 360 degree videos, Facebook LIVE, a lot of multimedia rich formats that Facebook is playing around with it was fascinating to see that even
during my holiday period, I could really enjoy one of these new developments. The next was we went for this particular whale hunting - Sea World - cruise. So that was a fantastic journey where we were on a beautiful cruise for 2.5 Hours. And what was fascinating was the crew, which literally they go into the ocean every day of the week they use a GoPro camera and a live
camcorder to record the journey every single day so beautiful images of whales and
dolphins jumping and hopping around and by the time the journey was over we saw
that the video was posted live on their Facebook page.
So it's pretty incredible
right, that Facebook is impacting all our lives right from elections to fun
moments at sea world, even to kangaroo feeding, where photos turn into 360 degree videos. But the fascinating news that I found about Facebook
in Australia was this teacher in Queensland. The very state that I'm in for the last one week. She did this beautiful experiment to see how far does a message reach from a simple personal
account so what did she do? She was to present a cybersecurity note to her classroom in the coming week, so she hand
wrote a note - a letter - requesting people for ideas and thoughts and then
she posted that on Facebook and what was fascinating was that within a week, her post - the handwritten post - got about 73,000 shares.
So it's amazing how viral a simple post can be, right? So a few quick summary thoughts -Facebook's pretty big is this part of the world. You have about 15 million out of 22 million
people in Australia actively using Facebook it's impacting elections, it's impacting the tourism industry here so Facebook's a pretty critical component.
And one thing before I sign off that you guys should take a look at is virtual
reality. In the last week or so, Facebook has made some major hires in Europe - in the European office - to really invest a lot of time and energy and resources into oculus rift , their virtual reality product. So look out for
what Facebook is going to do in the virtual reality segment because that's no more a virtual element.
It's reality! So guys, I'm going to sign off and head to the beach at Surfer's Paradise. That's the beautiful river by where I'm staying. So have a great weekend ahead. Thanks! Cheers! .