Archive for June, 2010

The World Cup 2010, a combined TV and social media blockbuster.

Published on June 28, 2010 in Facebook, Twitter and social media. Comments

England vs Germany

There’s no doubt that traffic on Twitter and Facebook has been very heavy during the FIFA World Cup. Twitter even set a new record of 3,283 Tweets per second during the recent Japan vs Denmark game. That beat the previous record at the close of the LA Lakers’ win over the Boston Celtics in June. That’s some feat, considering that football (or soccer) isn’t the most popular sport in the U.S., and Twitter has a large U.S. user base.

I wonder if that record was surpassed again last night (Australian time) when England quite obviously scored a goal against traditional rivals Germany, but the referee didn’t pick it up? Everybody around the world watching on TV and those tweeting with each other certainly noticed. I know I tweeted about it. I’m sure there was also quite a bit of social media debate going on as to whether football should finally install video refereeing within the goal area!

Peter Blackshaw, an executive from TV and web monitoring firm Nielsen, has recently noted that social media activity during the World Cup is outpacing that seen during the Olympic Games, Super Bowl and Academy Awards, which is causing advertisers to want to get more involved. Indeed, according to Coca-Cola’s Carol Krus, Coca-Cola’s Promoted Trend on Twitter, which ran during World Cup matches and was only the second such trend, achieved 86 million impressions and an engagement rate of 6%, for whatever that’s worth.

The World Cup’s massive global TV audience in certainly a big factor in the success of the World Cup in social media. Not many people would be tweeting about it if they weren’t watching it on TV or via web video streams at the same time. Football is a spectator sport, perhaps the biggest in the world, and that’s being reflected in social media.

For the first time during a World Cup, fans have been able to swap views on favourite teams and games in real-time and in a big way, thanks to social media. During the last world Cup final in 2006 in France, the worldwide TV audience for the final game was estimated to be 715 million viewers, but Twitter was only just beginning and Facebook only had around 12 million users.

With this sort of probable TV number on the table, it’s no wonder Twitter decided to get involved with its own official World Cup pages and hashtags. Smart move, if only they could keep the service running during the peak traffic periods. Depending on which teams are in the final game of the World Cup, it’s shaping up to be a combined TV and social media blockbuster.

Twitter World Cup 2010

Twitter’s official World Cup 2010 pages

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Facebook blocks Twitter follower finder. Let’s hope it’s unintentional.

Published on June 24, 2010 in Facebook, Twitter, business, social media and technology. Comments

Facebook Twitter appSo it appears that Facebook is now blocking a new feature of Twitter’s Facebook app. The particular feature lets you find who out of your Facebook friends also has a Twitter account.

As you can see above, I got the message, “It appears that the connection between Facebook and Twitter isn’t working, we are working with Facebook to resolve this problem.”

TechCrunch is now reporting that the move may be unintentional, and that Twitter said “Facebook has notified us that they have blocked the update to our application, and we are working on a resolution with them.”

Well I certainly hope this block is unintentional. After all the criticism over Facebook’s lack of openness and constant erosion of trust, blocking a feature like this from one of its major competitors would be a really bad move, don’t you think?

As has been suggested, it might have been blocked automatically because it was getting too much traffic all at once and they had to pull the plug. That would make sense, considering the very impressive ongoing growth of Twitter.

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10 new stats showing why you should take Twitter seriously (if you don’t already).

Published on June 22, 2010 in Facebook, Twitter, business, mobile and social media. Comments

Following on from my last post, 10 new stats showing the fast growing popularity of social media, I thought I’d give a quick update on where Twitter is at in terms of recent growth.

These new stats have been revealed over the past few weeks. They show that Twitter is quickly becoming a real(time) media force to be reckoned with. Even though the younger Twitter is nowhere near the size of Facebook, these stats show that Twitter is certainly growing up fast.

  1. Twitter now has close to 106 million users.
  2. Twitter is attracting 190 million visitors per month.
  3. Twitter is generating 65 million Tweets a day, or 2 billion tweets per month.
  4. Twitter sees around 135,000 new registrations every day.
  5. There are 600 million search queries on Twitter per day (real-time search revenue anyone?).
  6. In April 2010 Twitter announced that there were 100,000 applications for Twitter. In Dec. 2009 the company reported 50,000 Twitter applications.
  7. Applications account for 75% of all tweets.
  8. 37% of active Twitter users connect to the service via mobile applications.
  9. Tweetmeme recently had over 500 million retweet buttons served in one day, 15 billion a month.
  10. Tweetmeme’s retweet button is now on almost 200,000 websites.

It makes me wonder: where will Twitter be at a year from now? It’ll also be interesting to see how their new revenue generating activities go over the first 12 months or so.

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10 new stats showing the fast growing popularity of social media.

Published on June 16, 2010 in Facebook, Google, blogging, business and social media. Comments

According to new data from Nielson and Hitwise, social media is becoming incredibly popular worldwide. Let’s get straight to it, the stats speak for themselves.

  1. Three quarters of web users worldwide visit a social network or blog when they go online.
  2. The numbers of people visiting social networks and blogs has increased by 24% from last year.
  3. The average visitor spends 66 percent more time on these sites than a year ago.
  4. The average visitor spent almost 6 hours on networks and blogs in April 2010 as opposed to 3 hours, 31 minutes last year.
  5. According to Hitwise, Facebook’s overall web traffic pulled ahead of Google’s for the first time in the U.S. in March 2010.
  6. People in the U.K. are now visiting social networks more than they’re visiting search engines.
  7. YouTube recently surpassed two billion views per day.
  8. Twitter has now reached 65 million tweets a day and 2 billion tweets per month.
  9. At 86 percent, Brazil has the highest percentage of web users visiting social networks.
  10. Australian web users spend the most time on social networking sites, averaging 7 hours 19 minutes in April. The U.S. and Italy came in second and third with six and a half hours each.

What seems clear from these stats and others before them, is that the internet is becoming a much more human and social place than it used to be. Do these stats reflect the amount of time and frequency you use social network and blogs?  My own usage is certainly way above the averages stated here!

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Twitter Failwhale ahoy. Laying down track in front of a fast moving train.

Published on June 9, 2010 in Twitter, social media and technology. Comments

Twitter Failwhale

I’ve been seeing Twitter’s Failwhale quite a bit lately, including just now. Today Twitter is also reporting that timelines have been significantly delayed at times.

I’m thinking it’s because, according to Twitter CTO Dick Costolo, 65 million Tweets are now being sent on Twitter every day; that’s nearly 2 billion tweets a month!

Costolo has been quoted as saying, “We’re laying down track as fast as we can in front of the train”.

Apart from these tech issues, which Twitter had a lot of earlier in its startup phase (back in 2007), Twitter must be pretty happy with progress. These sort of numbers must certainly be good for its fledgling revenue gathering attempts.

If all goes well, any guesses as to when a Twitter IPO will be? I can’t see them selling to a bigger company any time soon, can you?

UPDATE: Oh wait, perhaps this better explains the issues Twitter has been having recently. It’s all clogged up! :)

bpfailwhale

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