Who Is Using What In Social Media?

Some interesting findings from a recent Pew Research survey.  Five key revelations:

1. Facebook remains that most preferred site although its growth has slowed quite dramtically.
2.  Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and LinkedIn saw significant increases over the past year in the proportion of online adults who now use their sites
3. Men now use Twitter more than women.  The reverse was true in 2013.
4. More women (77%) than Men (66%) use Facebook
5. While LinkedIn is showing strong growth more than 60% use it infrequently

Related articles

• Pew: Facebook User Growth Slowed As Others Gained, But Still Has Most Engaged Users
• Pinterest Passes Twitter in Popularity

11 Ideals That Will Change Your Communications

What is the optimum length of time for a presentation to clients? How long should we make make our company video?

These are just two of the questions that are answered in recent collated statistics from a variety of reputable online sources.

Here are eleven statistical findings that should guide your online and offline communications:

1. The ideal length of a tweet is 100 characters
2. The ideal length of a Facebook post is less than 40 characters
3. The ideal length of a Google+ headline is less than 60 characters
4. The ideal length of a headline is 6 words
5. The ideal length of a blog post is 7 minutes, 1,600 words
6. The ideal width of a paragraph is 40-55 characters
7. The ideal length of an email subject line 28-39 characters
8. The ideal length of a presentation is 18 minutes
9. The ideal length of a web page title tag is 55 characters
10. The ideal length of a domain name is 8 characters
11. The ideal length of a YouTube is 3 to 3 1/2 minutes

And yes, I am aware that the headline for this post is seven words rather than six and that the content is less than  1,600 words; both of which are less than 'ideal'.  But we need to remind ourselves that 'ideals' are not absolutes.

I Know What I 'Like', Or Do I?

Somewhere in the steamy streets of Dhaka an earnest posse of veiled women and young men are busily becoming admirers of a bevvy of stars and businesses around the world.

They are employees of what are euphemistically termed 'click farms'; a sort of agricultural production line of fake 'Likes' that pepper Twitter, Facebook and other social media.

In the good old days we had automated bots that did this job and social media companies such as Google waged a war to counter the automated trend.  To a certain extent they won the battle, but the fake brigade still smelt money and re-focused  their operations on human keyboard-tappers instead.

While the capital of Bangladesh, Dhaka, is a recognised hub for click farms so are other places such as Cairo and Indonesia.  It is no coincidence that these centres are located in countries where workers get paid a pittance.

The Guardian reports:
"For the workers, though, it is miserable work, sitting at screens in dingy rooms facing a blank wall, with windows covered by bars, and sometimes working through the night. For that, they could have to generate 1,000 likes or follow 1,000 people on Twitter to earn a single US dollar."

Another dubious example is Shareyt, whose owner Sharaf al-Nomani, told the same newspaper that: "around 30% or 40% of the clicks will come from Bangladesh". The Guardian equated this statistic to 25,000 people in Dhaka repetitively punching their computer keyboards, hour after hour, to enhance the visibility of a client's product or service.

But these sweatshop conditions doesn't seem to deter well known clients; some of which may surprise you.

For example, the USA State Department recently had its knuckles rapped for spending US$630,000  to boost its Facebook fan following.  Most of these new fans came from Cairo, which given the current political sensitivities has an aura of the absurd.

There is nothing covert about click farm companies and the 'Likes' they generate are quite genuine, in the sense that a human being created the action.  Take a company such as WeSellLikes.com. Its domain name choice is clearly not attempting to mask its activities.  If I was so inclined I could buy 10,000 'real worldwide likes' for less than $US100.

Practical yes, ethical...barely. So why do businesses indulge in such activities?.  

The greatest motivation is fear. Fear that their enterprise will look pathetic with its 200 genuine Facebook Likes compared to Competitor X down the road who has 10,000. A common belief is that customer perception of their brand might be adversely affected by such a discrepancy in numbers.

While there may be an element of truth in this assumption (according to  research 31% will check out reviews, ratings, likes and followers before buying), buying 1 million twitter followers from an Indonesian web entrepreneur for $US600 for your farmhouse cheese brand, isn't necessarily going to solve your online marketing woes.  

Customers are becoming increasingly aware of the ruse and the more savvy they become, the less effective these click farms buy-ins will be.

But one business often begets another. Click Auditors are the new breed, with London's Status People being one such service provider. They assist companies to block out the fakes for as little as $US5.50 per month.

The real trouble for a business begins when you start to believe your own marketing hype and strategically plan based on false social media analysis. I would like to say that such folly does not exist but regrettably it does.

Of course this being a genuine blog post I would welcome genuine 'Likes' and 'Followers' - although it is highly doubtful that Mr Sharaf al-Nomani, will do so personally.

Reference:

• How low-paid workers at 'click farms' create appearance of online popularity - The Guardian
• 4 Ways Click Farms Screw Your Business  - Inc
• Click farms are the new sweatshops - The Washington Post
• Selling social media clicks becomes big business - San Jose Mercury News
• 1000 fake followers for US$10 - NZ Herald
• State Department bureau spent $630,000 on Facebook 'likes' - Washington Examiner

Bieber or the 'Beeb'?

Ever despaired at emulating the follower feats of Justin Bieber and his ilk?  Perhaps you should not worry too much that your Twitter follower count is considerably lower than his.

As the chart above demonstrates, even the US President isn't immune from the curse of  fake follower.  A quick review of these most popular twitter accounts shows that only a small percentage of followers could be termed 'real' and actively engaged.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons that Bieber's recent vocal offering  to his besotted fans is titled "All Bad"?.  His real twitter followers number 9.36 million instead of the often promoted 46.8m.

It doesn't get much better for the current leader on the twitter charts, Katy Perry.  Her real and engaged twitter fan base is only 3.33 million.  Poor old Barack Obama suffers a similar percentage fate which may or may not be a reflection on the incumbent.  He has a mere 2.6 million followers hanging on his every tweeted word.

But what of a major corporations, instead of the usual raft of personalities and politicians?  

The  BBC is one media organisation that has truly embraced social media in all its forms.  While the following of their various account varies, some like BBC Sport are doing rather well.  At time of writing they have 3378, 428 engaged followers.  The most preferred hour for their followers to visit is between 4 and 5 pm in the late afternoon, UK time and 60% of them are male with only 6% definitely identified as female.

So when it comes to veracity of your followers all that glitters is not necessarily gold.  Why not check your own following using this tool?

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Getting Your Smart Phone Fix

It comes as no surprise to learn that smartphone addiction is a very real thing, albeit a pleasant one for most in the 18-24 year old demographic.

According a new survey conducted by IDC in conjunction with Facebook, our interaction with each other through our smart phones starts almost as soon as our eyes open in the morning. Within the first 15 minutes of waking up 4 out of 5 smartphone owners are checking their phones.

The focus of the study was to understand how smartphone owners use their phones over the course of a day and the week, with an emphasis on social and communication applications and services.

Smartphones have become woven into the fabric of everyday life.  In the USA where the study of 7,400 people was conducted, half of the country's total population use a smartphone and this figure is projected to rise to 67.8% of the population by 2017.  That's 222.4 million interconnected people.

A sense of being 'connected' was the primary motivation and sentiment experienced by respondents. Talking on the phone (43%), texting/messaging (49%) and direct messaging via Facebook(40%) were the services that drove the highest levels of connectedness across the largest number of people.

Friday to Sunday had the highest levels of engagement and the ease of being able to slip a smartphone into one's pocket was also a major factor.

The average daily time spent communicating on smartphone was 132 minutes and only 16% of that time was actually spent on phone calls. 84% spent their time texting, sending and receiving email and engaging through social media.

Facebook who co-sponsored the survey will no doubt be heartened to learn that 70% of respondents use Facebook on their phone and of this group, 61% use it each day.

82% read their Facebook news feed while 49% responded or posted comments on friends’ updates.  Interestingly, playing games on Facebook was not a dominant activity with only 16% showing this preference, while 7% used Facebook to find apps that interest them.

The survey found that Facebook dominates the total time spent on social and communications activities (on a smartphone),  making up 1 out of every 4 minutes.

One final word on Smartphone addiction; 63% of smartphone owners keep their phone with them for all but an hour of their waking day. And of course, many also use their phone as their alarm clock the next morning!

The full report can be viewed here.

Related articles

• 5 Steps for Kicking Your Smartphone Addiction (at Work) | CareerBliss
• Australia becoming smartphone addicted: report

Twittering On In A Flash (Of Light)

We are a chatty lot! Social media demonstrates a basic human need; the desire to communicate with others.

TweetPing

And if you ever doubted have active Twitter is a global communication tool, have a look at TweetPing (above), the brainchild of Franck Ernewein, a French web designer.

Every time a tweet is made somewhere in the world Tweetping gives of a light flash, superimposed on a map of the Earth.

But the site provides more details than a simple visual reference.  Activity by continent is detailed in the bottom section of the design -  the total number of tweets, total number of words, characters and the last #hashtags and @mentions.

Here is one hour of the Twitterverse in action presented in just five minutes


There are other excellent alternatives to the above. Frog Design's "A World Of Tweets" also presents data on a map showing where people are tweeting at from the past hour. A region's heatmap gets "hotter" depending on the activity.

A World Of Tweets

Tweereal's animation on the map features only those tweets containing geo-tags (coordinates)

Tweereal

So is Twitter the collective consciousness of the 'Net as some pundits suppose? It must be coming close to be reaching this status as one in eight people in the world tweet, albeit that the range of content followed is often confined to relatives, celebrities and a few chosen brands.

Patrick Meier of National Geographic quotes Hillary Clinton as saying in 2010, that social media is the new nervous system of our plant.  Certainly if you throw in other social media maps such as these for Flickr, FourSquare and Facebook you get a better overview of global activity, but is activity enough to gauge the prevailing mood.

For this you really need to add a layer of sentiment analysis. The Global Twitter Heartbeat Project is heading in this direction. Here is their Hurricane Sandy Tweetbeat.

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• Will researchers ever be able to wrap their arms around Twitter?
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What's Hanging On The Vine?

Well not very much really.  As most people know Twitter recently launched its video clip service - Vine. To quote their blog "a new mobile service that lets you create and share beautiful, short looping videos. With Vine, capturing life in motion is fun and easy"

So  what are people posting? If you have a look at Vinepeek you can see the clips on their unmoderated service.

Source: VinePeek

Lot's of 'foodie' clips, warm cuddly pets, a guy who got 'in the money' and the occasional flash of the unsavoury.  it didn't take long for pornographers to realise the potential of Vine as Mashable  reports. So what's hanging on the vine might be not what you expect.

At least with Vine you now have the choice of sharing your communication on Twitter using 140 characters or with a six-second GIF-like looping video.  Available in Apples App store but no Android version that I could find?

Related articles

• Warning: Graphic Porn Invades Vine
• Twitter Buys Vine
• Vinepeek Is The Most Addictive New Site On The Internet

A World Of Tweets

Frog Design have come up with a nifty, real-time visualization of geolocated tweets around the world.

A World of Tweets is all about playing with geography and bits of information. Simply put, A World of Tweets shows you where people are tweeting at from the past hour. The more tweets there are from a specific region, the "hotter" or redder it becomes.

A World Of Tweets

This continuous collection of Twitter statuses also allows for the presentation of other interesting visuals as well as statistical and historical data about the tweeting world we live in.

Through the activity of Twitter users it is possible to tailor a new map of the world that evolves during the day according to the time zones and the spreading of mobile technologies.

Going Down The 'Googla' - Bottom of the List For Sharing Stories

Google claims 170m Google+ users but other reports have said it is a ghost town, so what is the truth?

Findings released appear to confirm the latter – despite its large number of accounts the platform is bottom of the list of social network users’ favoured channels.

Social media agency Umpf analysed 100 random online entertainment, health, business, technology and general news stories and looked at how many times each story was shared by Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Twitter users.

The findings show Twitter as the most active social network for sharing stories, followed by Facebook in second, LinkedIn third and Google+ last:

1. For every 100million users of Twitter, 197.3 people were likely to share an online story
2. For every 100million users of Facebook, 41.8 people were likely to share an online story
3. For every 100million users of LinkedIn, 15.2 people were likely to share an online story
4. For every 100million users of Google+, 6.0 people were likely to share an online story

Whilst Google+ is the second largest of the four in terms of official users*, and despite it arguably being the best placed of all four to succeed – it was created by Google post-Twitter, post-Facebook and post-LinkedIn, and designed to be the most socially-integrated network (“Online sharing is awkward. Even broken. And we aim to fix it.”) – it performs the worst.

Jon Priestley, of PR and Social Media agency Umpf, said: “Our findings clearly show a gulf between Google+ user numbers and their willingness to share online content, particularly when compared to rival platforms such as Facebook and Twitter".

Visualising with Vizify

We live in a visual world as the recent and rapid success of Pinterest has demonstrated. Now three Geeks (their term, not mine) have come up with something after a coffee-fueled frenzy that has all the juice of a good interactive infographic.

Zuckerberg's Law states that the amount of online data about an individual doubles each year so they gathered their own data and tried to make sense of it all. They found the data disjointed and overwhelming: career history here, tweets there, check-in data everywhere.  Boring and incoherent is not a good look!

Enter Vizify, a network  acknowledging the fact  that you are more than the sum of your parts. Vizify creates one definitive, multidimensional, graphical biography.

Overview Screen

Twitter visualisation with sliding time scale

While it is early days and the network is by invitation only, getting an invite proved really easy.  The result of my 'dabbling' can be see here.

The other thing that impressed me about Vizify was its simplicity.  It is a simple matter to change the privacy settings, drag and drop content, colour your world or add new services

Easy to use editing panel

So if like me you like the idea of an interactive infographic for prospective employers and clients that presents your online biography in an exciting way, then Vizify is for you.

And while we are talking about new social media tools try out Skylines, which organises the world’s real-time photos. The platform indexes over 5 million photos a day sent through services Twitter, Instagram, Twitpic, Yfrog and Lockerz.

Skyline - real-time images as they happen

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• Put your business card online with Vizify
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'Like' Chocolate? So Does Facebook

If your Facebook content strategy is to pepper your text with words such as 'Like' then you may have to think again.
According to a recent report from Sotrender, “like”, and similar call-to-action words such as “look” and “click” no longer encourage engagement as they once did.

After analysing 111 UK Facebook pages that contained 2800 different posts, across four different industries they came to the realisation that while pictures and graphics work best, there were some some words that draw a better response than others.

Among those ranked highly by Sotrender are chocolate, cream, daily, most, shop, winter, wardrobe, and today.

Other key findings include:

• Using catchy words in posts doesn't seem to increase engagement as Facebook users become 'immune' to constantly repeated phrases
• For food brands words that express emotions draw a higher response rate
• While providing links in Twitter posts works well this survey found that doing the same in Facebook drops fans’ engagement to below average

Source: Sotrender

• A picture is worth a thousand (or so) words when it comes to engaging with people on Facebook. Asking questions in posts works but an image or graphic is far more effective as the chart below shows.

Source: Sotrender

The recently introduced Timeline in Facebook has also had two beneficial effects:

• Posts now have have a longer shelf-life
• Engagement has increased for individual posts 

"80% of all comments are made in circa 8 hours and 30 minutes (2 hours more than before Timeline)" - Sotrender.

But don't fall into the trap of posting too often. Less is more, and too many posts over a short time period could well result in a loss of interest and, by extension, fans.

Related articles

• Facebook Users Like Food Pages

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• Study shows Facebook Timeline extends post lifetime, increases engagement by 13%

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Why LinkedIn And Pinterest Should Be Part Of Your Mix

While Pinterest's rise has been meteoric, LinkedIn has been the 'slow burner'. Both have their place in the marketing mix. I have noted that Pinterest has become increasingly effective in driving referral traffic to a corporate site and LinkedIn has a similar effect, especially when the posts have been made to targeted interest groups that content directly relates to.

In the first month of this year there were147 million users on LinkedIn and Pinterest reached the 10 million unique active users mark. LinkedIn has the highest penetration rates in the USA, the Gulf States and the Netherlands. Pinterest currently has 13. 6 million users according to AppData.

Higher referral traffic, better quality leads and ultimately increased sales result from using both of these platforms. (Awareness).

Interest in Pinterest has slackened slightly in the past year as this chart from Google Trends search results demonstrates.

By comparison, LinkedIn's search trends have remained fairly constant expect for a huge spike in June, no doubt related to the security breach that network experienced.

For the past couple of months LinkedIn  has been running a beta test for new targeting options and fifty brands have been taking part.

Companies will now be able to direct  posts to target  groups of followers with status updates based on company size, industry, function, seniority, employee tenure and geography. So for example, if your product or service is related to farming you can now segment by agriculture, the country profile and level of corporate seniority to get to the right decision maker.

Mike Grishaver of LinkedIn says that in a recent study they discovered that 67% of their members follow a company to gain industry insights, 61% for company news, while 49% are attracted by the peer community. LinkedIn's aim is to enable more relevant conversations between companies and followers.




Awareness recently produced a white paper 'Beyond The Big Three - 5 Killer Strategies to Dominate LinkedIn and Pinterest".  Here are their seven tips for increasing social reach using Pinterest:

1. Create pinboards and populate the boards with your own pins and by repinning from other users.•  Create topic-specific boards that resonate with your target audience to encourage following ofyour brand’s profile. Focus board topics on the lifestyle, history, causes, and interests relatedto your customers.•  When creating boards, use keywords developed for SEO to refine your boards and integrateyour Pinterest brand profile with your marketing initiatives.
2. Publicize your Pinterest account on all other social platforms.
3. Embed Pinterest buttons or widgets on your company website.
4. Register your profile in Pinterest directories to grow your followership:• WePin.org is a directory based on specific interests.• Repinly lists stats about Pinterest users and the most popular pinners / boards based on topic.
5. Consider connecting your Pinterest account with your brand’s Twitter profile to effectively use hashtags.Note: Carefully consider connecting with Facebook - the hashtags on Pinterest are only appropriate for Twitter and may clutter your Facebook timeline.
6. Once you've built a following, encourage users to create their own pins and repin items from your boards and your website. This will ensure that your boards are shared with your followers’ followers, increasing your brand reach on the platform.
7. Post consistently to retain and grow your social reach.

Related articles

• Everybody needs both Pinterest and LinkedIn

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• Buying Power Of Pinterest Users 2nd Only To LinkedIn, Says ComScore [CHARTS]

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