Monday, 25 January 2010

Social media and Web 2.0 statistics: a round-up

In order to truly understand a business sector and develop an expertise, an avid reading habit is required. thebluedoor is a digital PR agency so consequently our reading material is quite varied to cover both the PR sector and those of our clients. Our PR focused reading list is quite broad (both online and in dead-tree format), and includes Wired, New Media Age, .Net, PR Week, Marketing Week, B2B Marketing and The Economist.

I thought it might be useful to post some of the recent digital media and online PR statistics that we have read about.

Facebook:
  • 300 million global active users
  • 22 million UK active users
  • 50% log in and spend 25 minutes daily
  • Average 'heavy' users spent 125 hours over the last 12 months
  • 59% year on year growth
  • 75% of all time spent on social networks
  • 8,325 billion minutes spent in the UK in September 2009
(Sources - B2B Marketing; NMA/Nielsen)


LinkedIn:
  • 52 million users globally
  • 3 million in the UK
  • Growing at 1 million every 12 days
(Source - B2B Marketing)


Twitter:
  • 1,959% year on year growth
  • US leads by Twitter countries, followed by UK
  • 6th largest social media site
  • There have been over 8,000,000,000 Tweets to date, and counting
(Source - NMA: Nielsen; GigaTweet)


Wikipedia:
  • 3,1720,120 articles in English
  • 19,245,419 pages in English
  • 684,000,000 visitors in 2008
(Source - Wikipedia)


iPhone App Store:
  • 30 million iPhone users
  • 20 million iPhone Touch owners
  • Over 2 billion apps have been downloaded from 100,000 apps
  • AdMob estimates that $200 million worth of apps are downloaded per month ($2.4 billion per year)
  • By June 2009, the app software-development kit had been downloaded 1,000,000 times
(Source - Wired: AdMob)


3G Phones:
  • 3G mobile penetration in western Europe has risen from 17% in 2007, to 29% in 2009
  • It is forecast to reach to 67% in western Europe by 2011
  • In Japan penetration rate is 67%
  • $43 billion was made from mobile Internet in Japan in 2008
  • 610 million of the first two billion App Store downloads were for paid applications
(Sources - Wired: Morgan Stanley, Pinch Media)


Blogs:
  • 133,000,000 blogs indexed by Technorati
  • 3,561,000 RSS subscribers to TechCrunch
  • 346,000,000 people read blogs
  • 900,000 new blog posts every 24 hours
(Source - Technorati)

I tend to bookmark interesting articles on Delicious. Do have a look at what I've been reading recently, and I would be grateful of any recommendations. Thanks!

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posted by thebluedoor at 16:50 0 Comments

Sunday, 15 November 2009

Social media, journalism and politics: a fatal embrace?

Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and now SlashKey are all continuing to grow with stunning speed according to exclusive research by Nielsen Online published in new media age (05/11/09). Key to their growth is the fight for their online audience's time. UK online population spent 11.1 billion minutes using social media sites during September 2009, an increase of 83% on the previous year.

Twitter - public enemy number one or popular darling, depending on whether you are a 'typical' BBC Moral Maze listener or enthusiastic Reuters news pundit - continues to grow. Currently standing at sixth most popular social media sites by unique users (4.43 million to be exactly), it is the fastest growing online real estate (1,959%), with 5,734,350,000 Tweets to date and counting.

Earlier this week, I attended a debate at Reuters to discuss with other Twitter users from the worlds of journalism, politics and PR, to discuss Twitter and social media's role in shaping the world. Top of mind were recent debates including BBC Radio 4's Moral Maze programme where people on Twitter were described as a "baying mob", as well as the recent Jan Moir/PCC event, plus Trafigura.

Of course at a self-selecting event such as this, there will always be an element of the digital gold-fish bowl preaching to its-self. However, I came away feeling that the reason why these tools are important are for the same reason that a complaints line, or marching against the poll-tax have always been important. Whilst I doubt that Government ever will take such tools to the heart of their communications strategies, social media certainly has a place, a powerful one too, at the table for those with ambition, aspiration, ideas and desire to make a difference. However, these same tools become less permissible as people progress up the food chain - the voice of the one has to bend to the voice of the party (a touch of the Stalins creeping in here), particularly in our current 'democratic' process of party line and party whip.

In today's anguished world of publishing where the debate on free vs. paid seems to rumble on towards its doomed end, social media has added a layer of complexity to the mix. Does a publication compromise the truth for the need to be the first to break a story? Speed puts the industry under immense pressure, however many of the journalists attending, particularly the younger ones, kept on reminding the audience - nothing has changed. The tools have evolved but the reasons haven't.


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posted by thebluedoor at 13:22 0 Comments

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