Archive for the ‘twitter’ Category

80% of visitors to company blogs are coming for the first time, a survey from Compendium has revealed.

The findings suggest that a company blog is more important as a new business tool than was previously thought.

First time visitors come from two major sources, referring sites and search engines, confirming that good quality content that is keyword optimised, will pull traffic to company sales funnels.

Research amongst Furlong PR customers suggests that 75% of blog traffic comes from social networking sites and 25% from SEO.

Compendium’s survey also looked at use of Twitter. Approximately 43 percent of companies surveyed had established a Twitter account.

Twitter usage was highest among B-to-B companies with 87 percent maintaining an account.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone has conceded that 140 characters are not always enough to get your message across, especially when it comes to summarising the amazing growth of your micro-blogging site in the last year.

Stone used 1552 characters in his email newsletter to account holders yesterday, offering some insight to the highlights of Twitter’s ‘annus miraculous’

Accounts opened were up 1,500%, Twitter employees rose 500% to 146 - the latest being Aaron, “an engineer focused on building internal tools to help promote productivity, communication, and support within our company. We celebrated with a little dance party.”

Stone mentions the new features introduced - Twitter lists, retweets and mobile apps, plus the humanitarian and charitable uses Twitter has been put to, “Twitter is more than a triumph of technology — it is a triumph of humanity. Projects like Fledgling and Hope140 were inspired by you.”

In a veiled reference to the huge proportion of unused accounts, estimated to be 83% of the 50 million plus opened, Stone says in the opening paragraph “If you haven’t visited in a while, we’d like to invite you to come have a look at http://twitter.com — we’ve been busy!”

Twitter has announced its number of daily status updates or tweets has now passed 50 million, closing in on Facebook’s claimed 60 million.

Announced on its blog, Twitter describes the exponential growth of the service since it began:

“Folks were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007. By 2008, that number was 300,000, and by 2009 it had grown to 2.5 million per day. Tweets grew 1,400% last year to 35 million per day. Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day—that’s an average of 600 tweets per second.”

According to a report by RJ Metrics last month, while Twitter is adding accounts at the rate of 6.2 million per month, only 17 percent of these are active each month.

For some reason the Winter Olympics has left me cold this time, practically frost bitten in fact but as a sports fan, I worry I’m missing something so the Twitter Tracker from US news channel NBC looked a good bet - you click on a photo of an Olympic star and it shows everything being said about them.

Not knowing who any of them are though, is a drawback and in terms of holding interest, Twitter Tracker goes downhill rapidly from there - like whoever won the skiing.

The main Twitter feed is a better bet. NBC’s has 65K followers - a gold medal winning ski jump ahead of the official Vancover 2010 one which has 13K followers - worldwide, slightly embarrassing, Richard Madeley has more than that.

There’s a volte-face when you compare their Facebook pages though, Vancover 2010 has almost one million fans, while NBC’s Facebook icon directs to my personal Facebook page, at least on my computer - and I have no fans at all.

Furlong PR has a mighty 7 fans though, a very select bunch, I urge you to join and unlike private members club, One Alfred Place, I promise I won’t try and throw you out for overuse.

By the way, does that Evan Lysacek have a look of Robin Cousins about him?

While the twenty year old USA today focus group ‘ad meter’ judged Snickers to be the favourite Super Bowl ad this year, Doritos has emerged as the favourite ad measured online, according to several different buzz monitors.

Colle & McVoy’s Squawq registered 35,000 tweets about the brand sent during the game, two thirds after its ‘house rules‘ ad (below).

Doritos also generated the most talk and highest sentiment according to BrandBowl2010 plus the most positive tone online, according to Zeta Interactive - 96 percent positive, 13 percent up from before the game.

YouTube’s Ad Blitz verdict is still to come in but on rival video sharing site Hulu, Doritos was once again the most liked ad though Motorola’s ‘Megan Fox Photo’ was the most viewed.

Measured over a longer period, from December, Alterion SM2 found that Focus on the family, with its controversial pro-life content, generated the highest volume of activity.

Although 75 million people had signed up for a Twitter account by the end of 2009, only 17 percent sent even a single Tweet in December ‘09, an all-time low for the micro-blogging service, research from RJMetrics has found.

Overall, in the three years since it began, 40% of Twitter account holders have never sent one Tweet and 80% have sent less than ten.

Despite the high percentage of inactive users, Robert Moore of RJMetrics observed that 17 percent of 75 million people still translates to a large number and the study found “tremendous loyalty and engagement from those Twitter users who stay on the system after their first week.”

Among the study’s other findings: Twitter is currently signing up about 6.2 million new members a month, down from a July 2009 peak of 7.8 million a month and the average Twitter user has 27 followers, down from 42 followers in August 2009.

With all this X Factor/Rage against the machine rivalry, some Christmas mood is being lost I feel, so here’s the best Christmas song ever, dedicated to our clients, thank you and happy holidays.

To join the festive poll, tweet your favourite to #BestXmasSongEver

A new survey from Weber Shandwick reveals that while 73% of Fortune 100 companies have registered an average of 5.5 Twitter accounts, three quarters are not used very often, which in Twitter terms is as good as saying, they’re not being used at all.

The Twitter accounts had a variety of purposes, newsfeed 26%, brand awareness 24%, sales 16%, thought leadership 11% and customer service 9%.

More than half are described as having ‘no personality’ meaning they are faceless corporate accounts rather than ones with human advocates and 11% were placeholder accounts designed to prevent brand jacking.

If, as WS suggest,  Twitter should be viewed as ‘an uber corporate cocktail party’ it would seem these businesses are all dressed up with literally no idea where to go. Even if they found the party, possessed of  ’no personality’ they wouldn’t be very popular anyway. Read the rest of this entry »

Three diverging news stories this morning bring the position of social media in business into focus - for a moment at least.  From California, Palo Alto Networks report that use of Twitter and Facebook in enterprise level businesses is up 250% and 192% respectively (which from Palo Alto’s firewall perspective means new security issues to be addressed.)

From social media rock star Pete Cashmore’s bedroom in Aberdeen, AKA Mashable, comes the news that Twitter and LinkedIn have struck a deal to share status updates, confirmation of the business potential of both sites, with the promise of further integration to come, not least because Twitter co-founder Biz Stone and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman are best buddies.

Thirdly, from San Diego and the Public Relations Society of America, via SDNN, Arianna Read the rest of this entry »

Embedded this at the bottom of a post on Wednesday but it really deserves separate billing, especially on a Friday. Indebted to @gsterling at Local Social Summit #lss09 for showing it to us.