(hubze) Social media is a dynamic field that encompasses a lot of sites and activities.  For some, social media is largely about blogging, Facebook and Twitter.  But there are more.

For instance, you have the daily deals sites and the social gaming sites.  These two are part of the social media sphere and may be worth looking into if you are looking to boost your marketing efforts.  But as these two reports show, it helps to choose your social media sites right from the start.  It also seems that there are more bad news in these two areas than we would like to hear.

The World Now Has 800 Fewer Daily Deals Sites

A new study being peddled by Daily Deal Media has some surprising statistics about various daily deals sites around the world. You would need to pay a lot of money for the whole report, but the site gave us some interesting key findings, such as:

1. Only 16.5% of businesses who used daily deal services last year were dissatisfied with their campaigns, while around 1 out of every 3 business owners found them profitable.

2. Groupon observers may think otherwise, but 62% of business owners think that the company’s move to go public was good for the deals industry as a whole.

3. In a survey of 60,000 people who availed of daily deals, close to 4 out of 10 people never really bothered subscribing to a specific deals program.

4. Out of those who subscribed to at least one deals platform, 28% only glanced at the offer to see if they are interested in it, while close to 20% reads the entire e-mail. 1 out of 10 subscribers get fed up with the emails and marks them as spam.

5. Close to 800 daily deals sites shut down in June to December 2011. This is due to the rampant consolidation of deals sites or just simply going out of business.

6. More than 1,300 deals sites in Asia either consolidated or folded up.

You can purchase the entire report from the Daily Deal Media website.

Zynga: Too Good to Be True?

When Zynga went public last year, it was touted as both fast-growing and profitable. However, it became apparent during its IPO and days after it that the company was in trouble. For one, investors were not buying and the company ended up with about half of their intended $7 billion valuation.

But now Benzinga.com, a financial advice site for investors, have revealed that Zynga loses $150 for every paying customer it signs up. Louis Bedigian, a staff writer at the site, even predicts that the company is destined to die.

Citing calcuations from Arvind Bhatia, a Sterne Agee analyst, the report shows that the company spends $300 per new customer. If the average customer spends $150 on Zynga products, the company still loses $150.

Bhatia also explained that unlike its more popular games such as Cityville and Farmville, Zynga’s newer games are peaking quicky and then falling rapidly. This means that they do not have really strong follow-up games for those that they have right now.

Zynga is also being saddled by Facebook’s flattening user growth. Unlike before when a lot of people were still new to Facebook, Zynga’s games are now reaching saturation point with Facebook users without a new batch of users coming in.

If the social gaming company cannot solve these problems, even after employing a lot of new talents last year, and generating more growth while also keeping people interested in their games, then it is going to bid a sad goodbye.