Stats & Info in Bullets: SCG’s Weekly Social Media Digest Volume 1

This is the first of a weekly series we’re starting here at Spring Creek Group where we’ll repurpose stats and changes in Facebook and Twitter that happened throughout the week. For this week, we’ve gone a little further back to make sure everyone is caught up.

Many of the facts and stats may affect you or your client’s business, so get ready. They’re simple stats and info in bullets.

Hope you enjoy, and always feel free to add any additional news, input or suggestions in the comments!

Numbers and Stats:

• Facebook announces they now have around 500MM users.
• Grew by 2.1M users in May despite privacy controversies.
• In the US, there are slightly more female users than males.
• Large percentage of users are middle aged.
• 70% of Facebook users are outside of the US.
• 53.3% of Facebook users like, or feel neutral towards ads on Facebook.
• According to Reuters, Facebook was profitable in 2009, with revenue up to $800M.
• Video uploads and views show growth. Now, according to ComScore, Facebook grew to be the 10th largest US video site in May 2010.
• 20MM videos uploaded every month (12MM in 2009).
• 2B video views every month (not sure about last year).



• The English version of Facebook is used in many non-english speaking countries: Philippines (98.7%), Singapore (94.6%), Malaysia (78.8%), and Hong Kong (35.8%).
• In Indonesia, 43.7% of people using the English version of Facebook are between the ages of 18 and 25.
• Order of top 5 countries by largest % of users: US, UK, Indonesia, Turkey, France.
• Indonesia and India led Facebook growth in June 2010.
• Indonesia added 1,190,600 users in June, bringing their total users to 25.9 million.

Changes and Additions to Facebook:

• Improved analytics for Pages officially launched on Monday. Here’s a look at what changed.
• You are now able to remove ALL Facebook Page administrators. Before, this was a headache for agencies and companies as they couldn’t remove the original creator of the Page if needed.
• When new users sign up for Facebook now, the second step is choosing Pages to Like. This will increase the exposure of Pages in general, and boost the premium placed Pages many new Likes.
• Bringing Likes to Comments – Users are now not only able to like wall posts and status updates, but comments as well.



• Post a voicemail to Facebook walls – could be something fun to look into for posting to a client’s Page.
• Facebook begins testing automated Face-tagging photo feature. Basically, you can tag your friend once and then it will automatically tag the rest of the photos of that friend.
• Facebook location features to be coming soon.

Brand News

• Facebook integration is live on Bing. Bing’s site for this is bing.com/social.
• Ford to launch new 2011 Explorer on their Facebook Page.
• AT&T takes on customer service through Facebook. With more than 10,000 mentions online each day of dissatisfaction, AT&T has finally decided to take action. They’ve created a Customer Service tab on their Facebook Page, which takes advantage of many social media best practices (like putting faces to names).
• Mobile: Android has more than 7M Facebook users.

Changes and Additions to Twitter:

• Promoted Tweets – This is one of the first signs that Twitter is working towards a business model.



• Library of Congress – The Library of Congress receives copies of every book, pamphlet, map, print, and piece of music registered in the US. Now it has tweets.
• @Anywhere – Twitter has made it really easy for people to more deeply integrate Twitter into their website.
• Switching to OAuth – Affective in a couple months, all third-party Twitter applications will be required to use OAuth to authenticate Twitter profiles.
• Twitter Places – Starting soon, you’ll be able to choose the exact location that you’re tweeting from. For example, Safeco Field, Seattle, WA. You’ll also be able to see tweets at exact locations nearby with Foursquare and Gowalla integration.



• Twitter Stability Issues – with spikes in traffic from World Cup and the growth of Twitter in general, Twitter has been experiencing small outages and missing tweets. They’re hard on the case to fix it and should be close to normal in a few weeks.
• Ads in Trending Topics – As a part of Twitter’s new promoted tweets initiative, they’re rolling out promoted trending topics.



• Find friends easier – Twitter has improved their Facebook and LinkedIn apps to include the ability to search your friends and colleagues that are on Twitter. This function is currently available for LinkedIn, but has been delayed slightly in Facebook.

Brand News

• Twitter for Android.
• Twitter for iPhone – The app from Twitter.
• Coca-Cola was the 2nd company (after Disney/Pixar) to buy advertising in Twitter’s trending topics. Their promoted tweet garnered 86M impressions, an engagement rate of 6%, and a Vice President of Global Interactive Marketing that was “pretty pleased.”
• Twitpic adds Twitter Places – This means that on Twitpic, you’ll now be able to search public pictures by geotagged location, as well as see a history of places you’ve been.
• Virgin America offers free flights to Twitter influencers – Virgin America partnered with Klout to find Twitter influencers in Toronto and give them a free round-trip ticket to San Francisco or LA. The influencer aren’t required to do anything. Virgin America just assumes they’ll tweet about it.
• Sports and Tweets – Records were broken for a new Tweets-per-second (TPS) this week. Keep in mind that the average TPS is 750.



• 2,940 TPS when Japan scored against Cameroon
• 2,928 TPS when Brazil scored their first goal against North Korea
• 2,704 TPS when Mexico tied South Africa
• But the winner was when the LA Lakers beat the Boston Celtics. That victory generated an all-time record of 3,085 tweets