Posts filed under ‘MySpace’
Facebook and Twitter Post Large Year over Year Gains in Unique Users
Compared to user activity on social networking sites last year, Facebook and Twitter posted gains of 69% and 45% respectively in the U.S.
Via Nielsen Wire
Globally, the total minutes spent on social networks monthly saw a more than 100% gain over the same time last year, driving the average time per person spent on social networks to over six hours per month.
| Global Traffic To Social Networking Sites (Home & Work) | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Metric | Mar-08 | Mar-09 | Mar-10 |
| Unique Audience (000) | 214,218 | 261,740 | 313,690 |
| Total Minutes (000) | 28,577,539 | 55,703,031 | 113,061,590 |
| Time per Person (hh:mm:ss) | 2:13:24 | 3:32:49 | 6:00:25 |
| Source: The Nielsen Company | |||
Malcolm Gladwell On Social Media
Celebrated writer and thought leader Malcolm Gladwell is relatively – and deliberately – absent from the social media landscape. His blog posts are biannual, his Facebook page is void of content and his Tweets are few and far between. The Globe and Mail spoke with Gladwell during his recent trip to Vancouver to gauge his perspective on social media, and to understand why he hasn’t capitalized on it to promote his work.
While Gladwell’s overall assessment is that the balance of social media’s innovation is a net good, he also believes it bears some deficiencies;
The ease with which you can organize people means you no longer have to go to the trouble of things like building strong grassroots organizations, developing a coherent message, forming strong and lasting ties with individuals.
Gladwell also doesn’t believe that social media equates with emotional connection or engagement, instead relying on other platforms to communicate his thinking and work over the long-term;
If you follow me on Twitter, I do not own your heart. I may own your pocketbook momentarily. And I may own your attention for five seconds, but that’s it.
Arguably, his most interesting perspective is around the ubiquitous question of identifying social media’s tipping point, and long-term viability;
The problem is, we’re still in the experimental phase. The thing about Facebook is, it’s insanely new. This world of the Internet, if we know anything from its brief history, it likes nothing more than to build someone up only to topple them. Who has an AOL account these days? Not that long ago, AOL was the single most powerful player on the Internet. Who has a MySpace account these days? MySpace sold for billions of dollars not that long ago. I’m very reluctant to crown Facebook king of the future. They certainly are flavour of the month. This is not a world that respects loyalties and longevity.
While most of us may take a less accusatory perspective on social media and its benevolent or malevolent desires, Gladwell doesn’t prognosticate on social media’s future, or on the longevity of today’s key players. The rapid pace of change and relative unpredictability of when consumers’ rapt attention will become boredom is an ongoing challenge for social media players to continually understand their users, lifestyles and consumption habits – and to adapt to keep them engaged.
Brands Vie for Credibility on Social Networks
Brand presence almost as trusted as peer advice
Source: eMarketer
Social networks reach an estimated 940 million people around the world, according to January 2010 research from InSites Consulting. Most are there for personal reasons, such as sending messages, looking at pictures, and posting and responding to status updates. But interactions involving information about products and services have proliferated as brands encourage online word-of-mouth.
Asked what source was most believable when it came to information found about brands on social networking sites, Internet users were most likely to favor their peers. But “the brand itself” came in a close second, far ahead of journalists, considered traditionally to be an objective source. Notably, users were much less trusting of marketers—a separate response from brands—and didn’t put much faith in a brand’s competitors either.
Opinions varied by geography, with respondents in Southern and Eastern Europe most trusting of consumer-based word-of-mouth and those in Asia and South America favoring the brand.
The research supports earlier data on trust in word-of-mouth from fellow consumers as well as the ability of brands to foster earned media through their own social network presences, which are also highly trusted.
InSites also found that, while brands were not the top presence that users became fans of, they made a respectable showing. Among those users that had become a fan of anything, 35% showed their support for brands.
Overall, 58% of respondents worldwide had become a fan of something, and 79% had become a member of social networking group.
Facebook – The Most Searched On Brand in the U.S.
By Bill Tancer
As I’ve discussed before, examining search term data across all engines, while providing excellent tactical insight for search programs, also can provide invaluable insight for brand marketers. We’re now able to provide a new search metric beyond volume (search volume for a specific term over all term volume) and breadth (# of search term variations over all search term variations), our new metric which I’ll call breadth volume, sums the volume for all variations on a root term.
Here’s a table for the top brand searches (U.S. for week ending 3/27/2010) by breadth volume:
So in this example we see that when we combine the volume of searches for all queries that contained the root “Facebook” over the last week (there were 10,673 unique terms), those searches accounted for 2.8% of all U.S. searches.
Exporting our data into Excel, we can chart the changes in a brands “breadth volume” over time, and in this case compared to a competitive brand.
Stay tuned for some other exciting ways we can leverage our new breadth volume metric.
