Prior to its event at the South By Southwest (SXSW) Festival in Austin Texas, Facebook shared some new numbers on Sunday, showing the growing popularity of its platform following some expanded capabilities earlier this month.
Facebook revealed that it has now seen over 400 billion Open Graph actions shared to it from Facebook-connected apps, VentureBeat reported Sunday.
An Open Graph action is defined as "the high-level 'interactions' users can perform in your app," which users can then choose to share back to Facebook. Open Graph actions can include following a post, liking a post, listening to music, reading articles, watching videos, reading books and performing a fitness routine, among others.
Users are given the ability to decide for themselves whether or not they want to share their information with Facebook by choosing from to share with "Everyone," "Friends," or no one at all. According to the stats released by Facebook, it seems like the majority of users are choosing to share their information.
Facebook users are sharing their app activity with each other over one billion times daily, adding up to the 400 billion Open Graph actions that have been shared, the social network revealed. This has included 110 million songs, albums and radio stations have been played 40 billion times through Facebook-integrated apps, while another 1.47 million books have been shared, as of March of this year.
Recent platform updates
Facebook recently updated its platform to include actions for lifestyle apps, including:
- Fitness, which may involve running, walking or biking. Some of the apps that included the ability to share these actions were Nike, Cyclemeter, Endomondo, Jawbone UP, Log Your Run, MapMyRun, Runkeeper, Runmeter, Runtastic,SPLIT Multisport GPS and Walkmeter.
- Books, which allows users to read, rate, quote and flag books that they want to read. Bookshout!, GoodReads, Kobo and BookScout added this capability to their apps.
- Movies and tv, allowing users to rate and flag those that they want to watch. This function was added to apps such as Rotten Tomatoes, Hulu, Flixster, Fandango and Crackle.
For example, when a user complete their workout on their fitness app, or finishes reading a book, it can automatically send the update to Facebook. The social network says that early data has shown that the average likes per story have increased by more than two times following these actions.
"We built Facebook Platform to enable people to capture memories and share experiences through the apps they use. Books, movies, TV and fitness comprise an important part of who people are, so today we're announcing new actions to give people better ways to express those things," Facebook wrote.
(Image source: https://developers.facebook.com)
