Archive for the ‘Facts’ Category
Stats and Info in Bullets: SCG’s Weekly Social Media Digest Volume 2
Monday, July 12th, 2010It’s time for more! Lots of numbers in this one. Hooray for numbers! Any other cool stats or campaigns people saw this week?
Numbers and Stats:
- Facebook accounted for 75.73% of all social networking visits in the US in May.
- About 16B minutes are spent on Facebook a day.
- Facebook has about 60K servers.
- More than 3 billion photos are uploaded each month.
- 6B pieces of content are shared weekly.
- 1M photos are viewed every second.
Changes and Additions to Facebook:
- Facebook asking some people to set it as their default homepage.
Brand News
- Facebook “Like” buttons coming to email marketing. A report by Mashable.
- Ads work on Facebook according to Mulley Communications.
- Facebook only picked up 320,800 new monthly active users in June, compared to the 7.8 million it gathered in May. Info from InsideFacebook.
- Lady Gaga (the Page) became the first person on Facebook with 10M fans.
- Kraft Foods focuses messaging on Facebook by heavily promoting campaigns associated with Wheat Thins, Oreo, and Crystal Light. To note, they made their Oreo Facebook Page “more global.” Something other brands might consider.
- Windows Messenger leads this week’s list of fastest-gaining Facebook apps by daily active users (DAU). They gained 334K new DAUs.
- Facebook gifts die.
- Twitter search volume is up 33% since April reports Mashable.
- April = 600M search queries per day.
- June = 800M search queries per day.
- @earlybird – A new Twitter handle started by Twitter itself that tweets special offers to its followers. Link to Pete Cashmore’s CNN special column.
- Twitter’s official BlackBerry App exits beta thanks to beta testers.
- Rumor – Twitter may let users pay for self-promotion says Mashable.
- LeBron James gets 150K followers in 7 Hours and now has over 400K.
Thanks to InsideFacebook, Mashable, and CNN for providing being our resource for most of the content here.
Nielsen’s State of Mobile Apps: Shock and Blah
Friday, June 11th, 2010While Nielsen isn’t exactly known for releasing studies that blow minds, the work they’re doing in the mobile space is quickly becoming a favorite read of mine.
While the mobile space is an ever-expanding space with more options than ever before, a majority of the players are making their bets on the iPhone market, but with the expansion of HTML5, you might see a move from apps to Web-based applications (remember when you used to have to create Web apps on your first-gen iPhone?).
Here are a few head turners (and duhs) from the Nielsen report:
- The Smartphones are Coming. U.S. wireless users continue to gobble up smart phones as 21% of those polled have a smartphone, which is up from 19% the previous quarter and 14% during the study before that.
- iPhone Users are App Collectors. The average number of apps on an iPhone: 37. That’s a full 15 more apps than the next largest OS; Android with 22.
- Who’s Where? Facebook continues to be the most-popular social networking app, with MySpace still trending high with teens.
For all the info, head over to Nielsen.
Facebook Infographics FTW
Monday, May 17th, 2010Here’s a great infographic we just saw. Some great facts and figures about everyone’s favorite F-word: Facebook
[Source: Online PhD Programs]
The World According to Wentz: #OldFailLady
Thursday, April 8th, 2010
Dear Mr. Nick Bilton,
This letter is in response to your New York Times article entitled “Twitter Needs More Filters.” Typically I appreciate when the mainstream media prints geeky rants generally reserved for tech-bloggers, but in this case, your article appears a little off-base. What Twitter users are missing is not a lack of filters but a lack of knowledge of the tools available to use in concert with Twitter and the native tools within it.
Let’s start with the search tool within Twitter. As you mentioned, the service can become overrun with trending topics like “SXSW”, “iPad” and the omnipresent “Justin Bieber” (my heart skipped a beat when I was typing his name!). The answer to your troubles here is as simple as a minus sign (-). Let’s say this past weekend you were searching Twitter for the “Big Apple” to find something fun to do on Saturday night in NYC but all you were getting were users’ tweets about how long they’ve been waiting in line to buy a plus-size iPhone. Simply use the (-) limiter like this: “Big Apple – iPad” and you will get the results you wanted sans the Apple fanboys. Mess around with Advanced Search at http://www.search.twitter.com and learn other cool search limiters like date range and retweet exclusion.
So how do you manage your friends’ updates? Adding more features to Twitter will only spawn more Failwhales. The beauty of the service is its lack of bloat; they leave that to the app developers. Use clients to create groups, alerts and more with tools like TweetDeck and CoTweet. Who goes to http://www.twitter.com anymore anyway? Clients are a light-weight and (usually) free way to manage your feeds. I know that you were looking for a way to filter your friends’ feeds down within Twitter but unfortunately, that’s not part of the service. Take TweetDeck for a spin and I promise you that you’ll find a Twitter user experience unlike any you’ve had before.
Cordially yours,
@Frenchtron300
Social Media by the Numbers
Friday, February 19th, 2010 
Blogs, the long-suffering workhorses of the Internet, are often thought of as an excellent way to communicate with others online. However, a “blog post,” when used to convey one’s opinion, comes with one inherent flaw: it requires the use of words, and words alone can simply not be trusted.
Fortunately, in the entire history of the world, numbers have never been used to lie or deceive any one in any way. That is why, periodically, we like to take a look at “Social Media by the Numbers” in order to cut through the empty rhetoric often present in the busy world of social media and get down to some serious and objective truth.
- Percentage of journalists in a recent study who say social media is an important tool for producing and reporting the stories they write: 56%
- Number of unique visits to Twitter.com in January: 73.5 million
- Minimum number of Olympic athletes who dislike NBC’s Olympic coverage, according to NBC.com’s own “Olympic Pulse” Twitter feed: 1
- Dollar amount of voucher offered to filmmaker Kevin Smith following his removal from a Southwest Airlines plane for being “too fat” to travel, which prompted a backlash via Twitter: $100
- Percentage of people, according to a CNN.com poll, who agree with Southwest Airlines’ decision: 58%
- Minimum number of photos of 9/11 hijackers that have been appropriated for Facebook advertisements regarding changes in Michigan’s auto insurance policy: 1
- Number of incarcerated individuals’ Facebook profiles that British Justice Secretary Jack Straw has requested be shut down, due to the fact that these profiles are being used to harass the individuals’ former victims: More than 30
- Altitude, in feet, which Toshiba UK launched an “ordinary living room chair” for an ad campaign: 98,268
- Number of class action lawsuits filed against Google due to privacy concerns over their new Google Buzz application: 1
- Percentage of social sharing on the web driven by Facebook: 44%
- Number of Facebook’s new environmentally-friendly “green data centers” that will be partially powered by coal: 1
- Breakdown of our emotional reaction to the “new social statement site” pleaserobme.com: 70% amused, 30% terrified
