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Posts Tagged ‘FaceBook’

Twitter’s active flock reaches 100 million

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Business models, FaceBook, internet, Market research, Social Networks, Strategy, Twitter, Web 2.0, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 12, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Article from SFGate.

“Twitter use is growing, with more than 100 million monthly active users around the world and 50 million who log on every day, the San Francisco microblogging service said Thursday.

Chief executive officer Dick Costolo said the number of active users increased 82 percent since the beginning of this year, putting the company on pace to add as many active users by the end of 2011 as the combined 26 million that Twitter added from 2006 to 2009.

The increasing audience size is key to the company’s future because Twitter is now convinced advertising is “the horse they are going to ride” to generate revenue, said analyst Debra Aho Williamson, principal social media analyst for the research firm

“These are all positive trends,” Williamson said. “2011 has been a good year for Twitter in terms of getting more usage, not just awareness.”

Costolo revealed the new data during an informal “state of the union” briefing with reporters Thursday. Williamson was also prebriefed by Costolo on Wednesday.

Twitter has previously said it had more than 200 million registered accounts worldwide. But Twitter watchers had long questioned how many were multiple accounts registered by the same person and how many accounts were actually active.

So Twitter is now focusing attention on its active users, not just the overall base. Facebook uses the same strategy, touting its 750 million users who log on at least once a month.

The number of active users “can be a successful measure of the exchange of information that’s going on there,” Williamson said.

Many press releases

Still, Williamson said many of Twitter accounts are used by “corporations pumping out press releases, using it as a distribution service.” And she notes that media companies like CNN and The Chronicle have multiple Twitter accounts to distribute news headlines and story links.

“While it sounds relatively good that half of active users log in every day, I wonder what percentage of those active users are just entities putting stuff out and not people actively engaging,” she said.

According to Twitter, the data shows:

— An average 230 million tweets per day, up 110 percent from January.

— More than 5 billion tweets per month

— A 105 percent increase in the number of users who log on each day.

— More than 400 million monthly unique visitors to Twitter.com, up 70 percent from January.

— 55 percent are mobile users.

Twitter now has more than 50 percent of National Football League players, 75 percent of National Basketball Association players, 82 percent of members of Congress, 85 percent of U.S. senators, 87 percent of Billboard Top 100 musicians, 93 percent of Food Network chefs and all of the Nielsen top 50 TV shows.

But there’s one potentially negative statistic that sticks out – a huge portion of active users, 40 percent, have not tweeted in the past month.

“If you think of it as a social network, then 40 out of every 100 aren’t even being very social,” Williamson said.

Still, the overall numbers should be large enough to entice advertisers.

Maybe it’s not as big as Facebook, but “if you look at it from an advertising perspective, an audience is an audience,” Williamson said. “Twitter is really proving itself in terms of getting people engaged with the advertising.”

Ad revenue projections

Twitter hasn’t been successful generating revenue by licensing access to its extensive stream of tweets. Microsoft on Wednesday renewed a deal to license Twitter’s data “fire hose,” but Google has not.

Williamson said the company is continuing to learn from its Promoted Tweets advertising platform and has other programs in the pipeline, including a self-service advertising system.

Twitter is still a privately held company, but eMarketer has projected the firm will have $150 million in advertising revenue this year and $250 million next year. Williamson said she is examining how the newest data may change those projections.

“Twitter had a good year and they clearly have a lot of things planned throughout the rest of the year and in 2012,” Williamson said. “They’re hoping the growth trends will continue.””

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Pew: More Than A Quarter Of U.S. Adults Use Mobile And Social Location-Based Services

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 6, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Article from Techcrunch.

“There’s no doubt that as smartphone usage increases, geo-location is becoming an increasingly important technology in consumers’ day to day lives. The Pew Internet Research Project has come out with a new report showing the growing number of U.S. adults that are leveraging location-based technologies in social and mobile apps. According to Pew, 28% of adults use at least one of location-based service that exist in mobile and social media spaces. The report shows the most popular use case of location-based technology is using mobile phones for maps, directions, or recommendations.

Pew reports that 28% of cell owners use phones to get directions or recommendations based on their current location (that works out to 23% of all U.S. adults). Only 5 percent of cell phone owners user their phone to check-in to locations using apps like Foursquare or Gowalla.

And 9% of internet users incorporate their location into Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn (7% of all adults). And 28% of U.S. adults do at least one of these activities either on a computer or using their mobile phones.

Unsurprisingly, smartphone owners are more likely to use location-based social networks on their phones. One in ten smartphone owners (12%) have used Foursquare, Gowalla, or a similar application and 55% of smartphone owners have used a location-based information service. Almost six in ten smartphone owners (58%) use at least one of these services.

Pew says that younger smartphone owners are more likely to use location-based services in their phone. And Pew says that geosocial services and automatic location-tagging are most popular with minorities. A quarter (25%) of Latino smartphone owners using geosocial services and almost a third (31%) of Latino social media users enabling automatic location-tagging. Pew says that only 7% of white smartphone owners use geosocial services, byt 59% get location-based information on their phones, compared with 53% of blacks and only 44% of Hispanics.

Pew reported nearly a year ago that only 4% of online American adults use location-based services. My guess is that number has increased since last Novemeber.”

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Facebook music rumors revived as BandPage startup gets cash

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Economy, FaceBook, Gerbsman Partners, internet, Investments, Market research, Social Networks, Strategy, Technology, Web 2.0, web 3.0, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 1, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Article from SFGate.

“RootMusic, a San Francisco startup that helps artists such as Rihanna, Katy Perry and Arcade Fire connect with their Facebook fans, received additional venture funding Wednesday amid reports that the social-networking giant is close to offering its own music service.

RootMusic, which says it has about 32 million monthly active users for its BandPage platform on Facebook, announced a $16 million round of financing led by GCV Capital.

The platform adds a page for fans to hear and share songs, watch video and view concert dates. The company was started in March 2010, but already more than 250,000 bands around the world use BandPage, and usage has increased tenfold since January, said RootMusic CEO J Sider.

There have been various reports that Facebook is ready to release its own music service. On Tuesday, CNBC, Mashable and other outlets reported that Facebook plans to announce a music platform at its f8 developer conference in San Francisco on Sept. 22, with Spotify, MOG and Rdio as partners.

Facebook spokesman Larry Yu would not comment directly on those reports or what’s coming for f8, but said in a statement that “many of the most popular music services around the world are integrated with Facebook and we’re constantly talking to our partners about ways to improve these integrations.”

Sider said he views a potential Facebook music platform as complementary to BandPage.

“If something like this would happen, it would raise awareness that as a fan, (Facebook’s) where I should go first to find information.”

The Facebook music drumbeat might prove to be sour notes for former social-networking rival Myspace, which has been trying to reposition itself as a destination for music. Indeed, RootMusic’s slogan entices musicians to “Make the Move to BandPage on Facebook.”

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Social network use passes 50 percent mark in U.S.

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, boic, Business models, internet, Market research, Social Networks, Technology, tagged , , , , , , on August 27, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Article from SFGate.

Half of all adults in the United States are now using social networking sites, another indication of the rising influence of companies like Facebook, according to a study released Friday.

Overall, 65 percent of all adult Internet users are on sites like Facebook or LinkedIn, more than double the 29 percent who used social networks in 2008, according to the Pew Research Center report.

But Pew said that for the first time since it has conducted the survey, 50 percent of all adults – including those who aren’t Web connected – had used social networking.

“The pace with which new users have flocked to social networking sites has been staggering,” the report said. “When we first asked about social networking sites in February of 2005, just 8 percent of Internet users, or 5 percent of all adults, said they used them.”

The center’s Internet & American Life Project report, based on interviews with 2,277 adults from April 26 to May 22, found social networking was most popular with women and young adults. However, adults older than 30 accounted for most of the overall growth in the past year.

Of adults 65 and older, 33 percent used social networking, compared with 26 percent a year ago. While the percentage of young adults who were daily social networking users stayed about the same, the percentage of Baby Boomers who did so daily rose 60 percent in the past year.

“The graying of social networking sites continues, but the oldest users are still far less likely to be making regular use of these tools,” Pew senior research specialist Mary Madden said. “While seniors are testing the waters, many Baby Boomers are beginning to make a trip to the social media pool part of their daily routine.”

In an e-mail, Madden said the pace of social networking adoption has been “even more dramatic” than with “now-mainstream online activities like online video and online banking.”

“Any time an activity reaches the 50 percent mark, it’s a big deal in our world,” she said. “And the other part of the story is the intensity of social networking use, which is almost unparalleled. Out of all the ‘daily’ online activities that we ask about, only e-mail and search engines are used more frequently.”

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New Google+ social network starts off strong

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, FaceBook, google, Market research, Social Networks, Strategy, Technology, tagged , , , , , , on July 25, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Article from SFGate.

“Just three weeks after its launch, Google+ is off to a strong start.

Google Inc.’s latest attempt to break into social networking circles attracted more than 20 million visitors in its first 21 days, according to the Internet measurement service comScore Inc. And there is a report that Google+ now has 25 million members.

To be sure, those numbers still don’t place Google+ in the same league as the more established social media stars, especially the current king, Facebook Inc., which has 750 million active users.

But Facebook has made enough mistakes in the past to leave the window wide open for Google+, which is still in its experimental stages, to barge through and become a serious contender for the crown, said Sam Hamadeh, CEO and founder of a Privco, a New York firm that monitors private companies like Facebook.

Facebook may have a big lead now, but the two has-been kings of social networking – Friendster and Myspace – are reminders that there’s no such thing as invincibility in the world of technology.

“People used to be on Myspace chatting all day, updating their pages,” said Hamadeh. “And before that, people were on Friendster nonstop. Before you knew it, the winds had shifted and once the winds shift, they shift very quickly.”

Officially, Mountain View’s Google hasn’t issued any updated Google+ numbers beyond those that CEO Larry Page revealed during a July 14 earnings call – 10 million members, more than 1 billion items shared and received in one day and 2.3 billion clicks of the “+1 button,” Google’s answer to Facebook’s “Like” button.

‘Just the beginning’

“We’ve learned a tremendous amount having just gone to field trial three weeks ago,” Vic Gundotra, Google’s senior vice president for social, said in a statement. “The team has been listening to users and moving really quickly to launch dozens of new features and updates to the product. We realize this is just the beginning. And while we’re thrilled with the reaction so far, we have a long, exciting road ahead of us.”

Hamadeh, citing sources inside Google, said the fledgling social network hit the milestone 25 million user mark Thursday night.

And Andrew Lipsman, a comScore vice president, said the 20 million visitors to Google+ in the first 21 days was “an extraordinary number.”

Of that total, 5.3 million were in the United States and 2.8 million in India. And people from the Bay Area and Austin, Texas, two of the most tech-savvy markets, were three times as likely to be on Google+, Lipsman said.

Right now, the main users are the tech-savvy crowd that is always at the forefront of new and emerging technology.

Of the total Google+ audience, 63 percent were men and 58 percent were between the ages of 18 and 34, comScore said.

“It has clearly captured the attention of the technorati and as usage incubates among this crowd it will likely continue to proliferate to a more general audience,” Lipsman wrote in a blog post.

High marks

That technorati has generally given Google+ high marks for its design and privacy protections, especially compared to Facebook. Analysts say Google+ can be compelling.

“My usage has subtly changed as more and more of my personal network joins, and I’m commenting as much privately as publicly,” said Charlene Li, founder of the Altimeter Group, a San Mateo technology research and consulting firm.

One major feature in Google+ is the ability to create specific, private groups, called “circles,” of friends or people being followed.

“Google+ has the advantage of not requiring that people be a member of the network in order to share with them. They just get updates via e-mail,” Li said in an e-mail. But whether Google+ becomes a hit with more mainstream audiences is still a question.”

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