Facebook Finally Files for IPO
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In case you missed it earlier this week, Facebook has finally filed for their initial public offering. The company filed to raise $5B (as in billion-with-a-B) but optimistically hopes to raise as much as $10B when it IPOs in the next few months. This would dwarf the largest Internet-IPO of all time, which was the $1.9B Google raised in 2004. And, it would give the 7-year old company a value of as much as $100B. (Not bad for the 27-year old son of a dentist!)
In order to file for their IPO, Facebook had to disclose quite a bit of information about their business. The rumors were finally laid to rest about how much money Facebook really makes – over $3.7B in revenue last year, giving them a nice $1B in profit. They also disclosed that they now have over 845M active users. A quick look at their site shows over 155M of these users are in the U.S., meaning that around half of the U.S. population is using Facebook. And they’re not just using it to play games. They’re using it to share.
Along with the 250M photos uploaded daily, patients are making 2.7B comments every day. A chunk of these comments are in the form of recommendations to their friends & family. Facebook, being the bright people they are, realized the potential for this and recently took steps to increase these word-of-mouth referrals being made online. They’ve changed how practices display referrals on their own pages and they’ve launched social apps to drive more patient-to-patient referrals. And, they’re just getting started; because raising as much as $10B from their upcoming IPO will rapidly move them along to becoming the place for online referrals.
Want to be part of the largest patient referral network on Facebook? Claim your free DoctorBase profile and have the Panda automate your word-of-mouth referrals to new patients on Facebook at:
http://doctor.DoctorBase.com/claim
Facebook Timeline Imminent
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Facebook announced plans to impose a mandatory upgrade to their new timeline theme to all users within the “next few weeks.” So, by the end of February, your profile will be updated to timeline whether you want it or not. The timeline theme has been available to users since late last year, but it has been an optional upgrade – until now.
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Social Applications for Your Practice
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Facebook just launched new social apps from 60+ companies that will allow users to share their activities with friends via the timeline on their personal Facebook profiles. Facebook had already given us a glimpse of this with the apps they released last year, but now they’ve gone full stream by integrating with sites like the Wall Street Journal, Living Social, and Ticketmaster. Now, by simply logging into to these sites with their Facebook ID, patients are able to automatically post their activities as they occur on other websites. For example, when you managed to score tickets to the NFC Championship game here in San Francisco earlier this week via Ticketmaster, Ticketmaster’s social app would have made it possible to post that achievement directly to your Facebook profile without the need for you to manually submit this update via your profile at facebook.com. (As a bonus, it would also automatically create both widespread jealousy and a sudden influx of ‘friends’ trying to reconnect with you!)
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2012 Resolutions for Your Practice
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The new year is officially here and with it come plenty of predictions & resolutions. We’ve become a big fan over the years of Dr. Larry Emmott and his blog on technology and we love his delightfully witty post on what (not) to predict for 2012. Having spent the past few years as change-agents in the healthcare space, we recognize these anti-predictions are all too often true. Still, our tireless optimism and careful insight recognizes that more doctors do see the light every year when it comes to using the web to grow their practices. So, here are 5 simple resolutions to get your practice on track for a great 2012…
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Facebook Timeline Deadlines
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Facebook let developers take a look at their new ‘Timeline‘ layout earlier this year. Timeline presents your pictures and activities on Facebook as chronological story in order to present a more complete picture than simple, immediate updates. Now that over a million users have declared themselves “developers” in order to check it out early, Facebook has finally launched Timeline to the public this month. Right now it’s still opt-in, meaning your profile will remain unchanged until you select the option to update your profile to Timeline. That will, however, not always be the case as Facebook will begin automatically updating users’ profiles in 2012.
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Catching Facebook in a Private Moment?
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Facebook is reportedly close to an agreement in an ongoing FTC investigation into their privacy policies. Along with basic safeguards on how Facebook uses your data and giving the FTC the right to audit Facebook’s privacy practices for the next 20 years, the agreement may also put an end to the “retroactive changes” that continue to strike controversy with Facebook users.
Facebook Removes Reviews on Fan Pages
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Facebook recently announced that they would be removing the patient reviews from your Facebook fan pages this month. The removal of these reviews will be done by removing the entire ‘Reviews’ tab on your fan page and will result in you being unable to access any of these reviews in the future.
New Facebook Features and Your Fan Page
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Facebook held their annual f8 conference in San Francisco last week, and unveiled some major upcoming changes to their site. Along with a visual redesign and new Timeline feature, they also announced deeper levels of integration to engage users within the Facebook site. Instead of your patients passively declaring what they “like,” the new Facebook will encourage active participation by promoting the more engaging posts to the top of your patients’ news feeds. We’ve already started seeing this on our own profiles, as the application from Spotify (which keeps our San Francisco office rocking until 9pm on most nights) is constantly sharing with us what music our friends are listening to. But, aside from providing a new soundtrack for your waiting room, what does this mean to your practice?
200k Patient Referrals and Counting
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Patients made their 200,000th referral to a doctor on DoctorBase this week. Thanks to all who’ve used DoctorBase to recommend a doctor to their friends on Facebook!
What’s a Facebook Referral Really Worth?
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An interesting study from web metrics company Hitwise recently put some numbers behind all the talk about the importance of being on Facebook. As a bunch of self-confessed number-lovers here at DoctorBase, we felt it our duty to share these statistics with our doctors. Here’s how it breaks down…
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How Much Are Your Friends Worth?
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When the professional social networking site Linkedin went public last month, they validated the value of social networking on the web. Linkedin’s stock was initially offered at $45 per share, but is currently trading at around $75 a share – giving the company a market value of over $7B.
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100,000.
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Thank you to all of the patients & doctors trusting DoctorBase with their health.
The even better news is that we’re just getting started…
