Posts Tagged ‘ social media marketing ’

December and October busiest months for social media

Social media continues to be one of the fastest growing industries online. Between September 2010 and September 2011 visits to Social Networks and Forums have increased by nearly 11% and, if you saw my Internet clock blog last month, social media accounts for nearly a quarter of all time spent online. But when are people engaging with social media the most?[ READ MORE ]

Facebook: where we reach out when life happens

For members of the “Facebook Generation”, Facebook has become the de facto conduit for communication when something important occurs in our lives. Yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg revealed further design upgrades at the annual f8 Conference, including “Timeline”, which will be a form of digital biography of our lives and encourages users to see Facebook as a digital home. In the past, we’d run to a specific person when something big happened in our lives and the world around us – now we have networks of hundreds of people we rush to with news big and small. In March of 2010, Facebook became the largest website by market share of visits and, combined with the Pew Internet & American Life Project’s research that the average adult Facebook user has 229 Facebook friends. Typically, Facebook’s market share of visits peaks on Saturdays and Sundays according to our data. But that pattern varies with the occurrence of major news events. Indeed, peaks in traffic to Facebook tend to correlate with major news events and, concurrently, peaks in the News and Media category’s upstream traffic from Facebook. The chart below illustrates the dates over the past nine months when Facebook’s market share of visits had the greatest positive difference in comparison to the average for each weekday. Peaks in positive variance correlate to major events like “Snowmageddon 2011” (2/2/11) and tornado outbreaks in the US (late April). There are less newsworthy peaks, like New Year’s Day, Memorial Day weekend, the 4th of July and Labor Day weekend; evidently web-users were less inclined to visit news sites after their New Year’s Eve festivities. Though some jumps in the News and Media category’s upstream from Facebook are merely a natural increase resulting from an increase in Facebook’s market share of visits (e.g. holidays), other peaks in upstream from Facebook further illustrate the site’s success as a major communication channel for web-users during important events. When examining the peaks in variance for News and Media’s upstream traffic from Facebook alone, the nexus between Facebook and key incidents becomes evident. Weekends may be when Facebook’s share of traffic generally peaks, but when major events happen, web-users turn to Facebook to share information with their communities. As a result, news organizations need to be prepared to capitalize on the influx of new traffic to their sites when major events occur and marketing organizations as a whole could benefit from recognizing that their Facebook ad campaigns may have a wider reach during said time frames. Thanks to Margot Bonner, Analyst on the Custom Data & Insights team for helping with today's analysis.[ READ MORE ]

Google+ opens the floodgates to all, market share rockets

Google+ emerged as the third largest site in the Social Network and Forums category last Wednesday, a day after the site went from “invitation-only” to "open access" available to everyone. Opening access created a massive spike in market share of visits for the site, with a 1269% growth from the week ending September 17th to the week of September 24th. The site also received nearly 15 million total US visits last week. In just one week, Google+ went from ranking as 54th most visited site in our Social Networking and Forums category to 8th place. The evolution of Google+’s audience composition from its launch in early July to last week illustrates how quickly the cycle from “Innovator” and “Early Adopter” phase, to the “Early Majority” and “Late Majority” can occur. In comparison to the online population, Google + continued to over-index for and win a high share of its visits from Mosaic USA 2011 Types which contain “Influencers”, “Early Adopters” and the internet-savvy, like “Bohemian Groove”, “Gotham Blend” and “Progressive Potpourri” ; this indicates that “Early Adopters” still account for a large share of Google+’s traffic. Yet the week of September 24th also saw a sharp increase in visit share from “Hispanic Harmony”, “Platinum Prosperity” and “Striving Single Scene”, amongst others, shifting the audience profile of Google+. Besides the outlier “Platinum Prosperity”, the unifying factor between these varied groups is their lower to middle income profile. This evolution in audience profile indicates that Google+ may be shifting into the “Early Majority” stage. Note – the data does not include mobile traffic or traffic from the Google Notification Bar Thanks to Margot Bonner, Analyst on the Custom Data & Insights team for helping with today's analysis.[ READ MORE ]

Becoming part of the conversation – getting started in social media

The best way to educate yourself to the state of marketing is to get out there and start engaging and experimenting with all the different tools – Facebook, Twitter, Tweetdeck, LinkedIn, WordPress, YouTube etc. [ READ MORE ]

Facebook.com generates nearly 1 in 4 page views in the US

In March, we reported an important milestone when the market share of visits to Facebook.com* surpassed Google.com*. Since then, we have continued to watch the growth of Facebook.com, which increased 60% from the same week last year and represented 1 in 10 US Internet visits last week. The amount of content consumption taking place on [...][ READ MORE ]

Facebook ‘Messages’ Requires Marketers To Integrate Social

Perhaps I’ve now seen all of the Toy Story movies too many times with my kids, because the line from the theme song really sticks out with Facebook Messages; “Some other folks might be a little bit smarter than I am, bigger and stronger too, maybe. But none of them will ever love you the [...][ READ MORE ]

Craigslist Top Search Term Last Week

For the first time in three years, searches for ‘craigslist’ surpassed ‘myspace,’ highlighting the increasing popularity of online classifieds during the economic downturn.U.S. searches on the term “craigslist” have increased 105 percent for the week ending March 14, 2009, compared with the same week last year. This is the first time that the query has [...][ READ MORE ]

MySpace Moves Into #1 Position for all Internet Sites

Today Hitwise issued a press release reporting that for the first time, www.myspace.com has surpassed Yahoo! Mail as the most visited domain on the Internet for US Internet users. To put MySpace’s growth in perspective, if we look back to July 2004 myspace.com represented only .1% of all Internet visits. This time last year myspace.com [...][ READ MORE ]

PhotoBucket Leads Photo Sharing Sites; Flickr at #6

In the SF tech bubble that I live in, most of the talk about photo sites has been centered on Flickr. In fact, you could get the impression from most people I meet that Flickr is the ONLY site at which you can share and store photos. Examination of the category however, shows that Flickr [...][ READ MORE ]