Posts Tagged ‘twitter’
Twitter stats don’t tell the whole story
March 11th, 2010
As you might have seen, an interesting Twitter stat has been doing the rounds recently: ‘21% of Twitter users are active users’ ,a stat that you’re likely to see regularly from now on.
This originated from the Barracuda Labs 2009 Annual Report, which was released earlier this week, revealing data from Twitter trends and tracking, as well as Web threats and trends, and email spam and viruses. The report is also available at the company’s portal.
The study looked at around 19 million Twitter accounts, and started with one assumption: an active or “True” Twitter user has at least 10 followers, follows at least 10 people, and had tweeted at least 10 times.
Looking back, the data shows interesting usage trends and reveals that 26% of Twitter users had 10 followers or more by December 2009, while only 40% were following 10 people or more, in fact 51% of users were following less than five people.
The report also confirms that 34% of Twitter users hadn’t tweeted once, while 73% had tweeted less than 10 times. That means nearly all of the tweets on the social network were coming from about 1/4 of the user base, and it is these users that the report refers to as ‘power users’.
So, are these revealing stats going to spell the end of the myth that Twitter is going to be the new communications platform for all? Hopefully, because i doubt even the quarter of Twitter users that are using it consistently thought it was going ever to be that.
If you’re not trying to make money out of Twitter, the importance attached to the amount or frequency of Twitter’s usage should not be as important as one might first assume.
The most important element of Twitter is the conversation, not the brand, not the technology and not the potential, but the conversation. That conversation doesn’t just happen on Twitter, it happens across many social networks, messaging platforms, via SMS, even in email and person-to-person, and Twitter allows part of that conversation, bringing communities together that choose to share information with each other.
If Twitter stopped tomorrow, the conversation would still continue, and my bet is the majority of Twitter’s ‘power user’ base, that Tweet the majority of the conversation, use other platforms to continue the conversation in other ways.
So is this the end of Twitter and the Twitter success story? No, Twitter is a massive success story, but it has been blown out of proportion in some ways. It is, as the research says, a valuable tool for ‘power users’, but in the world of social media we all have freedom of choice, we all communicate in different ways and some of us will find our preferred community on Twitter while others will look elsewhere for a better fit in terms of relevance. However, the one common theme is the conversation, and the ability to share; knowledge, content, news, excitement, sorrow, whatever.
We’ve seen the ‘no-one reads blogs’ headlines before, which again i don’t believe to be the case. Of the millions of blogs only a small percentage are useful and interesting, and those blogs are well utilised, the others quite simply are not. Does that make blogs any less useful though?
What we are seeing is Twitter maturing, as the study says, Twitter recently reported it had reached approximately 50 million tweets per day.
In the beginning of 2008, Twitter was growing approximately 0.31% per month. By November 2008, that growth increased to 1.95% per month.
After December 2008, Twitter’s growth exploded from nearly 2% per month, rising to approximately 4% per month, before finally peaking at nearly 20% per month in April 2009. Growth appears to have normalised, dropping back to 0.34% in December 2009.
We can also see more evidence of Twitter users finding their feet. A full 79% of users had less than ten tweets in June 2009, but that number dropped to 73% by December. 80% of users had less than 10 followers in June 2009, but that percentage dropped to 74% by December.
So, little by little, Twitter is finding its place in the role of conversation. It’s not going to change the way we communicate radically, but it is helping us to communicate more effectively, with those in our chosen community.
What will Facebook do with its News Feed patent?
February 26th, 2010
This week Facebook was awarded the patent for the News Feed - a feature common to Facebook as well as other social networks such as Twitter and MySpace, and a number of social media apps and startups.
The patent refers to the method of displaying stories/news items relating to online activities to a predetermined set of viewers, and “assigning an order to the news items”. According to reports, the patent also covers the auto-generation of a user’s activity and the display of that to friends. That means the news updates you get when your friends upload videos and accept friend requests is covered by Facebook’s new patent.
It’s true that Facebook pioneered the News Feed technology back in 2006, and so on the face of it deserves to own the patent…but what does this mean for the rest of the social media industry? Facebook is currently the world’s largest social network, and so if it’s going down the road of seeking patents for its technology, this could really hamper innovation and progress within social media, and render networks such as Twitter useless.
It’s currently unclear what Facebook plans to do with this patent. It could take the hard line and pressure Twitter, MySpace, Google etc into taking down their News Feed features, or at the opposite end of the scale it could choose not to exercise its patent.
The reason why social media has evolved so quickly is all down to collaboration, the mashup of content and technology and the sharing of creativity. Patents are arguably not a good thing in this space, but what can we do to stop them?
At the moment this is primarily an industry story, but should Facebook choose to make use of the patent, it’s likely to reach the attention of a wider audience. Ultimately the power rests with individuals to stop Facebook from agressively patenting its technology - if the business becomes too commercial in its focus, it will lose popularity, and could suffer massively in terms of online PR.
Is journalist experiment to write news through Facebook and Twitter irresponsible?
January 22nd, 2010
A journalist-style Big Brother has today been announced, whereby five journalists will lock themselves away in a French farmhouse for five days, with access to only Facebook and Twitter as their news sources. The experiment will test the quality of news from the social networking and micro-blogging sites as access to all other areas of the Internet will be banned, along with smartphones, TV, radio and newspapers.
The journalists from Canadian, French, Belgian and Swiss radio stations will be expected to go on the air on their channels to comment on news they have found. But without being able to corroborate their news through usual sources and channels, it remains to be seen whether they will have any news to report!
The RFP French-language public broadcasters association has organised the event, and claims: “Our aim is to show that there are different sources of information and to look at the legitimacy of each of these sources.”
The stakes are high - the experiment is likely to attract a lot of media attention and so the journalists will be under pressure to deliver ‘news’…but at what cost? Will they take the risk of reporting news that has not been properly corroborated by multiple sources? Surely that would be highly irresponsible behaviour for a news organisation.
As I previously documented in a post last year entitled: “Mzinga backlash: Is Twitter a reliable journalist/blogger source?“, Twitter can be an unreliable and liabellous source of news, and hoaxes are commonplace. While it will be interesting to follow the journalists’ findings and experience, I’m not sure I even agree with the point of the experiment as it completely contradicts with the principles of quality journalism.
I imagine it will be very time consuming for the journalists to try and validate stories, and so in particular I will be watching to see whether they are able to deliver ‘breaking news’, or whether it will just be commentary after the event. It will be interesting if the journalists share the criteria they used for corroborating stories i.e. volume of Tweets on the subject.
I’m sure there will be a follow-up post from me when the experiment concludes!
Weekly Social Media sites, tools and posts round up (27-11-2009)
November 27th, 2009
Welcome to another installment of the ‘Weekly Social Media sites, tools and posts round up’
1. First off today is Facebook Grader by Hubspot, it’s been around a while, but basically the idea is for you to Grade Facebook users or business pages, there is also a nice search tool that allows you to search Facebook members via keywords.
2. Graph Edge is a Twitter tool that drills down into your twitter feed looking at:
- How many of your followers you’re really reaching
- How quickly your network is growing (or shrinking!)
- Who’s dumping you
- Who your most influential followers are, and how to reach them
- Who else your followers are following
3. Twinked.in - Microblogging meets professional networking. Twinked.in is a resource for professionals that want more information on social networking. The site consists of a categorised blog, forum, jobs board and even a section to buy official Twinked.in merchandise!
4. Convoflow is an easy on the eye search bar that you add your keyword term to. You are then lead to the results page where all the results are laid out by a good number of blog, microblog, news, picture and video services.
5. Tweet Level is PR company Edelman’s Twitter reputation tool that measures an individual’s standing on Twitter. The tool offers you a score using the following metrics:
- Influence - How many people listen to your tweets and how influential are you. This is the primary ranking metric
- Popularity - how many people follow you
- Engagement - do you actively participate in your community
- Trust - do people believe what you say
Social Media post of the week: 300 Case Studies of Social Media Marketing
SEO post of the week: Ultimate Guide To Web Optimization (Tips & Best Practices)
More of the same next week.
Twitter live event tools review
November 24th, 2009
My colleagues and I at Liberate Media have been to a few events recently where there have been live twitter feeds shown on screen and of course broadcast out to the Twitter community via hash tags.
Here are two free alternatives based on the Adobe Air platform:
This tool allows you to give presentations with your chosen Twitter keyword floating on your screen in a number of pre-set positions. The tweets can be set on a 100% white background or a transparent % of white.
The Pros
- Very quick, easy to use and simple set up
- Can be used over any program on your computer
- Can be used for many other tools
The Cons
- Very limited functionality
- You can only use one keyword
The Twitter Bubble control panel
At first glance Twitter Camp looks like a very robust and highly customisable live events option.
After the instalment and upon opening the platform for the first time you are presented with a number of customisable options, including the ability to change the background colour, logo, image, the footer logo, image and the ability to create a custom message at the bottom of your screen.
The Pros
- Highly customisable
- You can use more than one keyword to display
The Cons
- Takes a little time to set up, according to your branding needs.
Summary
If you’re looking for something to wow your audience at an event, then Twitter Camp is your best bet, because of all the customisable features you can brand it in your own way, giving your event more of a bespoke feel. If you’re looking your a quick way to showcase Twitter via a presentation then go for Twitter Bubbles, a no frill system that gets the job done.