‘Study shows that only 27% of Twitter users tweeted during a three month period‘ says a story in The Next Web.

My reading of the same piece is very different.   Once you put that stat into its proper context, it is not a case of *only* 1/4 using their accounts.  Rather, this shows that Twitter user engagement is on the increase.

For example, in 2010 RJ Metrics worked out that Twitter’s churn was actually in the region of 83%.   And in April I estimated that, based on Business Insider stats, of the 175 million accounts, there were perhaps 20 million truly active human beings on Twitter.

My guess is that 1/4+ engagement is something neither Google+ or Foursquare would be able to demonstrate.

Semiocast, the company behind the study cited in The Next Web says that of the 383 million Twitter accounts 28.1% were in the US.   This confirms previous research showing that Twitter has become less US focused.   Semiocast previously showed that the fastest growing language on Twitter is Arabic, with 60% of tweets not being in English.

Semiocast also confirms an earlier Comscore study which held up the Netherlands as the top Twitter country when measured as the % of the overall Internet population using it.   Semiocast says that the Netherlands had the Twitter users (33% of all Internet users), followed by Japan (30%)

Image – Laughing Squid

Related articles

• 60%+ of tweets not in English as Arabic increases 22x (liesdamnedliesstatistics.com)
• Study shows that only 27% of Twitter users tweeted during a 3 month period (thenextweb.com)
• Twitter gets $300M investment from Saudi prince (cbc.ca)

One of the first resources we created when starting Rabbit in early 2010 was a list of 20 free social media evaluation tools.   Not measurement, evaluation.  Tools that will give you some form of meaningful data that you can use in reports.  And ones that don’t cost anything.

Fast forward almost two years and a lot of that list is out of date, with many of the originals no longer being around or having ‘upgraded’ to full paid for services.  As a result, it’s time for a refresh.

This is by no means an extensive list, there are other tools around in addition to these, but even a few of them together will provide you with meaningful intelligence.   The 20 are as follows:

1 – Alexa.com
Gives you stats on websites, including global rank, country rank, number of sites linking in, and good basic audience data including demographics.

2 – Amplicate
Like a lot of services, Amplicate operates a fremium model.   A quick search, which will give you a ‘hate’ vs ‘love’ snapshot for a brand is free.   Pay $19 and you get a year’s worth of data.   And for $199 you can download various industry reports.

Amplicate also has a blog with various useful bits of information (for example, apparently half of online chatter about Foursquare in 2011 was negative ).

3 – Board Reader
Board Reader will search for mentions across forums (including sites like Quora) and will also churn out a chart based on mentions over time.

4 – Blogscope
One of the giants in professional sentiment analysis alongside the likes of Radian6 and Lithium is Canadian research firm Sysomos.   Sysomos originated from University of Toronto research and in fact, some of that is still live on Blogscope.

We’ve had periodic problems connecting to the site, but when its live, it is good for a free service.  The charts it produces aren’t pretty, but they are useful.

5 – Facebook Insights
This should be standard for anyone who works in social media.   Free to access for any Page admin, this provides an in-depth picture of fans’ interactions with your page.

This allows you to post content at the most optimum time, to identify the type of content your fans engage with the most and gives a pretty accurate demographic breakdown. Knowing where your fans come from and what they do on your page when they get there allows you to tailor your strategy more effectively.

6 – Follower Wonk
Follower Wonk makes sense of yours, or someone else’s Twitter feed.  You start with 150 credits, with every search costing 30-40 credits (the idea being that after that you pay).

Follower Wonk is useful in giving you the equivalent of the Facebook ‘friends of friends’ metric, you can dissect a Twitter feed to see what type of users they reach in terms of followers and influence.

7 – Feed Compare
A lot of blogs run their RSS feeds through the Google-owned Feedburner.  If they do, you can run them through Feed Compare to look at subscriber numbers – arguably a more useful metric than visitors as this measures engaged users who subscribe to a blog via a feed.

8 – Google Insights
One that is easily overlooked is Google’s Insights tool.  This is not only useful in tracking brands, but also sector specific areas and how they work across different regions.

For example, Google News – cheese vs milk vs butter in the UK

9 – How Sociable
Though as with many of these services, the idea is to get you to subscribe (starting at $19 a month), a free search will give you a range of influence metrics across different social networks.   Useful if you track over time, or are doing a quick competitive search.

10 – Ice rocket trends

In addition to running a blog and news search engine, Ice Rocket has a trends tool.   This allows you to compare a number of search terms, giving you a basic graph of how they compare in share of voice.

11 – Klout / Peerindex / Kred

The three main sentiment scoring systems, Klout is trying to establish itself as the de facto industry standard, while Kred is the newest entrant and one that shows a lot of promise.

Services like Klout do have flaws (we’ve explored these more in our Rabbit Feed on influence), but both Klout and Peerindex are useful for the ability to create lists which can be public or private.   Essentially you can set up a league table of brands across a certain industry sector and track their scores over time.

12 – Mention Map
A great visual tool, Mention Map tells you who an Twitter user speaks to the most.   Good for tracking the influencers of influencers.

13 – Social Mention
An excellent free social search engine with basic analytics including sentiment and top keywords.   Recommended.

14 – Statbrain
Very often you will want to estimate the traffic of a site where you’ve been featured.  Statbrain will give you an approximation of how many weekly visitors any site gets.

15 – Statigram

With Instagram breaking into the ranks of top tier social networks, there will be more of a need to analyse Instagram activity.   Statigram is a free service with a number of different elements.   You can view Instagram images via your browser, and set up a custom URL to direct people to (e.g. http://statigr.am/bmibaby).

You can manage your followers, and you can also get useful data about the type of engagement your posts are getting, your most committed followers and the times of day to post.

16- Timely
When is the best time to tweet to hit the optimum number of followers?  Timely gives you the answer.  A more sophisticated service also looking at Facebook and giving you data on influencers is Crowd Booster http://crowdbooster.com/, which comes in at $20 a month for 10 accounts.

17 – Twitter Counter
Another free service with premium (paid for) features, this tracks your Twitter follower count over time.   To get data on retweets and mentions, prices start at $15 a month.

18 – Tweetreach
As the name says, Tweetreach will tell you how far a tweet has gone in terms of reach (no of people who in theory saw it) and who the most influential tweeters of a certain term are.   The first 50 results are free, making it useful to get a real-time snapshot of activity.   If you want a more in-depth report, that will cost you $20

19 – Trendistic
Trendistic tracks Twitter trends over time.   Input a search term to see how it’s performed.   You can also embed a code to have a chart change dynamically on your site.

20 – Visual.ly 
Visual.ly is a kind of DIY info graphics service.  In Visual.ly labs there is a tool meant to be fun in which you compare your Twitter profile against someone else’s, but this can just as easily be used for brands.

Finally a word on consistency and tracking these tools over time.   You will only get the best out of them if you use them regularly.

For example, whatever the benefits or otherwise of Klout, it does give you the ability to benchmark yourself against your peers and also track progress on a week by by week basis to see if you are improving or if things are getting worse.  As a result, our advice would be to choose a handful of the above tools and stick with them.

We’ve saved this list as a Delicious Stack, you can access it here

(Top image – Tiny Apartment Crafts)

Related articles

• A guide to social media influence (liesdamnedliesstatistics.com)
• Would You Rather Have Klout… or Kred? (socialtimes.com)
• You Might Have Klout, But What’s Your Kred? (techcrunch.com)
• Social Media Digest:Kred launch, Heinz Facebook and Hacking (umpf.co.uk)

Comscore and Telefonica (the European telecoms giant that owns 02) have come out with a study about the use of smartphones and the Internet in Europe.

The research tells us that in the UK (48%) and Spain (48%) almost half of us are now smartphone (as opposed to ‘feature phone’) owners.   Across the five biggest EU states, the average is 42%.

Other key findings are as follows:

Android leads in phone sales, Apple dominates in mobile web traffic

Who is bigger, Android or Apple?  That depends how you look at it.

In terms of smartphone ownership, there are certainly more Android (28%) phones and iPhones (21% of the smartphone market).   Indeed phones running Google’s mobile operating system are on the verge of overtaking Symbian (i.e. current and previous generation Nokia).

However in terms of actual mobile operating systems, Apple iOS is in front, 30% to 27%.  This is because Apple’s mobile operating system is also on later generation iPod Touches and of course iPads.

Crucially Apple devices account for 62% of mobile digital traffic in the big EU states compared to 22% for Android.   Personally I think that is because someone walking into a shop wanting to buy “a phone” is now likely to be steered towards one of the cheaper Android devices.   However someone buying an iPhone is doing so consciously and at least in part because of the array of apps on offer.

That’s a stat worth bearing in mind when skewing mobile campaigns towards different devices.   It is also worth noting recent US stats showing that the iPhone 4S helped Apple overtake Android in the American market in Q4.

Finally, while the Internet in Europe is now female dominated, Comscore says that most smartphone (56.3%) owners are men.   There is evidence from other research that Android is very male biased, while iPhones have a more even male / female spread.

21% of UK web traffic to family sites from mobiles

The share of web traffic from mobile devices is still relatively small, 5% (7.7% in the UK).   However, remember that % is skewed by the amount of web traffic coming from office based PCs.

Also the picture is very different when you look at different categories.   In the UK, a quarter of traffic to automotive sites came from smartphones, while tablets and phones together accounted for 21%of visits to family and parenting websites (this includes kids sites like Disney).

Target smartphone and tablet owners in the evening 

As the above table shows, PC traffic is highest during the day, while smartphone and (especially) tablet traffic peaks in the evening, as well as during peak commuter hours (8am and 6pm).   Something to bear in mind if running a campaign targeted at users of mobile only networks such as Instagram.

Shoppers use their phones while in store

Research in the summer showed that 1/4 of online shopping conversations actually happen in-store l.  In fact, over a fifth of European smartphone owners have taken a product photo in-store, while 1/10 sent it to their family and friends.

Surprisingly, given the mixed evidence about the adoption rate of QR codes, 10.9% scanned a barcode in store.   Meanwhile 14.9% of German and 13.2% of UK smartphone owners claim to have actually scanned a QR or barcode of any description – it doesn’t actually say whether these scans were successful or not.

Finally, over one in twenty  (6.4%) smartphone owners have compared produce prices while in a store, a stat that is only going to increase given apps such as the Amazon price comparison one, where you scan a product in store and get the equivalent Amazon price

Related articles

• The iPhone Strikes Back! Android’s Share Of New Smartphone Purchases Has Collapsed (huguesrey.wordpress.com)
• Apple Back On Top As Bestselling Smartphone In The U.S. (paidcontent.org)
• Apple Surpasses Android To Become Reigning Champion In The U.S. [Report] (cultofmac.com)
• Q4 data shows that iPhone beat out all Android phones (electronista.com)

According to Comscore  at least 10% of visits to the top European newspaper websites are preceded by a visit to Facebook.

Previous stats have shown that Turkey in particular is a core Facebook territory, and so it’s no surprise that Facebook accounted for almost a fifth of visits to Milliyet.

However, in the UK both the Guardian and Mail, the UK’s (and two of the world’s) biggest online newspapers, had around 13% of traffic coming from the social media giant.  Significantly the Guardian saw the traffic it was getting from Facebook more than double from 4.6% in November 2010 to 12.8% in November 2011.

Overall, Comscore says that 50% of European Internet users visit online newspapers.

At the end of last year, the UK’s telecoms and media regulator Ofcom found that 51% of 18-24 year olds and 37% of 25-34 year olds use social channels for breaking news.

Related articles

• Almost 1 in 2 Europeans Visit Newspaper Sites (stateofsearch.com)
• Women, younger users now use social media for ‘breaking news’ (liesdamnedliesstatistics.com)
• Show me the sales. How does social media impact the bottom line? (liesdamnedliesstatistics.com)
• It’s a Facebook World (wir-sprechen-online.com)
• The UK’s Guardian newspaper notches 4m Facebook app installations in 2 months (thenextweb.com)
• Guardian’s Facebook app installed by more than 4 million users (guardian.co.uk)

There is a wealth of research showing that social media users in emerging markets are proportionally more active  than their Western counterparts.    For example, Indonesia, Russia and Egypt all have 80%+ of their internet populations on social media.   Meanwhile, Israeli and Russian social media users spend twice as much time on those channels than people in the UK and US.

A latest stat released by Instagramers, a global Instagram community with 240 local chapters celebrating its 1st birthday today, shows the same holds true on the photo-sharing network.     The three most active Instagramer communities measured in photos tagged and uploaded are the Philippines, Brazil and Turkey.

No, this doesn’t look at actual user numbers but it certainly measures engagement.   Others groups in the top ten are actually sub-sets of the main country groups, such as Igersistanbul (57k photos) and Igersaopaolo (36k tagged images).   A dynamic list can be found on Statigram (one of several web based services for viewing Instagram posts).

Related articles

• The success story of 2011, Instagram growing 2x as fast as Foursquare (liesdamnedliesstatistics.com)
• Why Join Instagram? (socialmediatoday.com)
• If Your Are Levi’s, Say So On Instagram and Twitter #IAmLevis (adpulp.com)

Almost every agency in this space, ourselves included, is often asked to prove a direct link between social media and sales / conversions.

Indeed though awareness for the need for social media marketing campaigns is without a doubt higher than 3-4 years ago, questions about measurement and tangible benefits remain the same.

I’ll come back to whether the ‘show me the sales’ question is useful to ask on its own.   But the fact is there is research out that shows social media does impact the bottom line.   I’ve distilled some of these into ten key points, included in the presentation below.

They are as follows:

1 – 83% of consumers globally are likely to visit a website are likely to visit a website recommended by a friend on Facebook, and more than half say comments posted on retailers’ Facebook and Twitter pages, whether positive or negative, also influence their opinions (2011 Global Consumer Shopping Habits Survey – Channel Advisor)

2 – Consumer opinions posted online (70%) are more trusted than information on TV (62%), newspapers (61%) and online banner ads (33%) (Nielsen)

3 – In Europe over 50 percent of respondents aged 16 – 64 with access to the Internet, use social networks to assist with shopping decisions and of those that would be likely to follow a retailer on a social network, 35 percent stated they use social media platforms to read reviews or rank products and services (IBM)

4 – “Customers who engage with companies over social media spend 20 percent to 40 percent more money with those companies than other customers.” (Bain & Co)

5 – A study in South Korea (a mature social media market) found that social impacts sales among moderate and heavy users.  Recommendations shared among moderate social media users increased brand sales by 5%.

However, heavy social media users also listen to negative chatter.  Brands talked about negatively experienced a 14% sales drop among this grow (Harvard Business School)

6 – The heaviest Facebook users are also the biggest spenders online - the top 20% of users spend $67 per quarter, compared to $27 for non Facebook users (Comscore)

7 – According to a Kantar Media study in the US, 35% of social media users say Twitter has influenced their purchasing decisions (Twitter links also result in more clicks than Facebook)

8 – Even concentrating on smaller social networks can be commercially beneficial.  Radio Shack in the US found that customers checking into their stores on Foursquare spend 3.5x more than those that don’t

9 – Super fans and advocates on your social channels are 50% more likely to create content that influences a purchase (ComBlu)

10 -  The picture is the same if you look at individual industries.   In the ‘quick serve industry’, consumers exposed to social media have a 7x greater likelihood of ‘higher spend’ (WPP / Ogilvy)

Meanwhile, 60% of consumers say they factor other travellers’ online reviews into their plans when booking a vacation / holiday (eyefortravel / Simpliflying)

Is that the right question to ask?

That’s a selection of evidence that provides a direct link between the tweet or Facebook post and the cash register or online check-out.   But, as I said earlier, that may not be the right question to ask in isolation.

Yes, social media needs to provide a return on investment just like any marketing spend.   But the danger is seeing social media as the brand marketing equivalent of a slot machine – put the coin in and get an instant return.

By and large social campaigns don’t (and shouldn’t) work like that for a number of reasons:

1 – Social works best in tandem with other marketing disciplines.   The WPP study mentioned above shows that social campaigns are particularly effective when integrated in the overall marketing mix.   Similarly there is evidence that combining search and social marketing campaigns are particularly effective

2 – Social media has a key role to play in protecting a brand’s reputation.   There is plenty of evidence of what can happen if you don’t see and respond to negative comments.   Indeed, one bad tweet or post can cost you 30 customers (Convergys)

49% of people would be much less likely to buy from a brand which had a page where customer questions went unanswered (Conversocial)

Related to that, a large % of consumers now feel empowered to blast out about companies online (EURO RSCG)

3 – Rather than look at how social media directly drives sales, it is more fruitful to look at how social media can support the whole sales and conversion cycle.

This infographic from Get Satisfaction is a favourite.   This illustrates how social media comes into play all the way from the information gathering stage to converting new customers into fans who will talk up your products and services online

4 – Finally rather than ‘how does social media impact sales’, I actually prefer the question ‘how does social media impact behaviour’, which is much more powerful.

To take one high profile example, there has been a direct link between men taking part in the annual ‘Movember’ campaign and social media activity

(Above image, Martin Deutsch / Featured post image – 401k)

Related articles

• [Infographic] How travel marketers calculate ROI on social media and why the future is mobile (simpliflying.com)
• Is social media marketing central to managing online reputation? (marketing.yell.com)
• Social media is a research tool, not a crystal ball (agbeat.com)
• Publishing Insiders Wrap-Up: Facebook Facts from Social Media Expert Mari Smith (amarketingexpert.com)
• To Stick with your Social Media Program or to Abandon It, That is the Question (worob.com)

The other day econsultancy released the findings of a SITEL-commissioned  (UK) study showing that 15% of 16-24 year olds prefer to use social media for customer services above any other channel.   Overall, across all age groups, 6% prefer to use social media, and 4% have actually complained on Twitter.

Not that impressive, right?

Actually that headline stat from the study  needs to be read in terms of both the wider context, and in tandem with other findings from the survey.  These show that the Internet as a whole is now the preferred route to finding solutions to problems with products, services or brands.

1/3 of consumers have used forums to find solutions

In particular:

• 57% of consumers across all age groups will search for a solution to a problem online first
• 33% have used forum or chat-based websites to find answers – in the UK, moneysavingexpert is one that tends to come up fairly frequently
• 19% use a ‘question based’ site like Quora or Yahoo! Answers, a number I found surprisingly high

So what should the conclusions be?  I would highlight a number of things:

1 – Only 4% may have complained on Twitter, but remember that is across all industry sectors.   If you take certain sectors such as financial services, electronics and travel the % is almost much, much higher.

Indeed, in June Jaan Albrecht of Star Alliance said that 30% of customer feedback received by the 27 member airlines comes via social media

2 – The stats about forums and question sites does show that any customer response programme online needs to embrace a lot more than Twitter and Facebook.  Monitoring needs to encompass all online touch-points where consumers can feed back, interact and ask questions

3 – The % of those that complain via social media is bound to increase.   In training sessions I do, I often talk of an (un) virtuous cycle – as consumers watch their peers circumventing the call centre or (worse) the written complaints procedure on Twitter, they will do the same.

At least anecdotally, one travel brand I trained earlier in the year told me that the tone of comments they had received on Twitter were much more insistent than previously – as far as consumer expectations are concerned, the bar is now higher

Image – Life is Art 

Related articles

• 15% of those aged 16-24 turn to social media first for customer service (econsultancy.com)
• Social media replacing customer service channels at banks: report (zdnet.com)
• 15% Of Young People Use Social Media For Customer Service (thebluedoor.com)

As we head into 2012, a number of social networks are being touted as the next big thing – this includes Path, Pinterest…and SoundCloud.    With SoundCloud having just raised $50 million, we’ve produced a Rabbit (where I work) guide to sound based communities.

I’ve included an embed above, we’ve got other guide and resources up on the Rabbit site available for download.

Related articles

• Why I Will Continue To Use SoundCloud (thedigitalminstrel.wordpress.com)
• SoundCloud Raises $50 Million (socialtimes.com)
• Kleiner Perkins backs SoundCloud funding (news.cnet.com)
• SoundCloud gets US$50m for sonic growth (go.theregister.com)
• SoundCloud Raises $50 Million Round Led By Kleiner Perkins (eu.techcrunch.com)

Recently various figures have come out about the growth of Google+.  Just today The Guardian  reports on the network seeing 67 million visitors in November, with 2.7 million of those coming from the UK (the US is the biggest market with close to 15 million visitors).

Meanwhile, Hitwise is shouting about 49 million US visits (as opposed to visitors) in December . And when it comes to actual accounts, Ancestry.com’s founder Paul Allen has been keeping track of the service and estimated that there were 60+ million live as of Christmas.

Yet at the same time, for many of us with Google+ accounts these figures don’t seem to make a great deal of sense.  I suspect I am not untypical in that I’ve created a profile, but after an initial burst of enthusiasm don’t use it very much.  There seems to be a disconnect between raw visitor numbers and engagement and I wanted to see if I could dig into this a little bit more.

• First of all the numbers.  Remember that these figures are monthly and includes someone who might only access the site once.   They don’t measure actual activity.

• 14.7 million US visitors sounds impressive, but a post by Sysomos says that this is actually only a 10% growth since late Sept

• Similarly in November, the LA Times reported on the fact that, despite there being some impressive growth spurts, traffic actually dropped in 11 out of 21 weeks, with fluctuations of 10-20% from one week to the next

• Finally, the Hitwise number for December mentioned above sounds huge.   However, Digital Trends highlights a figure that I think is key.   For the week of 17 December, Hitwise tracked nine million visits.   By comparison, in September, Google+ was managing 15 million visits a week with a much lower user base

Why do articles such as the one in today’s Guardian keep on presenting the big numbers without digging deeper into what those numbers actually mean? I think the article on the Sysomos website has got it right – “people really, really want Google+ to succeed.”

There’s been a lot of talk about the next Facebook, and Google+ has been held up as the most likely candidate.

Google+ isn’t the next Facebook.  It could be the next Twitter

My own view is that Google+ is not a failure in the waiting.   It also isn’t the next Facebook.   Facebook is more dominant in social media than Google is in search.  With Facebook having a 95% share of social media time in the US it just won’t happen – for now.

In fact a better parallel isn’t between Google+ and Facebook, but between Google+ and Twitter.  Sure, the networks are very different but there are a lot of similarities in the growing pains and user profiles of both. There was a time, around 2008/2009 when people also ‘really, really’ wanted Twitter to succeed. Then in 2009 / 2010 the first questions about engagement on Twitter started to appear.

At the time some people compared it to the virtual world Second Life (which attracted an enormous amount of hype in 2007, without the user numbers ever justifying it) .   I predict that in 2012 we’ll see similar stats rolled out about Google+, showing that most accounts are barely active or dormant.

Fast forward to today, and Twitter’s user base is impressive, yet even back in March, the evidence was that a relatively small number of ‘elite’ users – 20k people – were responsible for 50% of activity  Behind a large number of casual users there is a very committed, small but influential ‘core’.

I suspect the same holds true for Google+ And so despite only having 1/3 of Twitter’s numbers (and a much smaller proportion of time), Twitter has consistently punched above its weight in terms of influence.

Case in point – in 2011 it was Twitter and not Facebook that dominated the mainstream news agenda.

Image – Sean MacEntee

Related articles

• Google+ Tops Facebook’s Growth Rate (socialmayonnaise.com)
• How Google+ Is Changing the Web, Even Though No One Wants It To (hubspot.com)
• Hitwise: U.S. Google+ traffic leaps 55 percent in December (news.cnet.com)
• Google+ Posts Strong December Growth Numbers (coated.com)

Stats of the month – January

To kick off the New Year, here’s the second in my series of presentations about ten stats of the (previous) month.     Each slide has an embedded link for further information, and I’ve also included the text and link for each slide below:

 1 – Social networking has become the world’s most popular online activity

It accounts for 20% of Internet time and social networking sites now reach 82% of the world’s online population (Comscore)

In fact, there are now more Facebook users than Buddhists! (Rune Leth Andersen)

2 – At the same time, social media may be reaching saturation point in many markets

“Social is running out of hours.  Social is also running out of people” - George Colony, Forrester

Forrester says social media only slightly less popular than shopping and childcare

3 – As a result, the growth area for social remains emerging markets

According to Pew Research, out of 20 countries surveyed, the top three for the % of the total population on social media were Israel (53%), USA (50%) and the UK (50%)

However, if you look at the % of the Internet population on social media, the top three are Indonesia (86%), Russia (84%) and Egypt (82%)

4 – Facebook may have the numbers, but Twitter shapes the news agenda

Twitter was the most cited social network in the media in 2011, beating Facebook in 10/12 months – including Sept when Facebook’s new features were launched (Highbeam Research)

5 – The Internet is now Britain’s 2nd biggest news source

According to Oliver & Ohlbaum, 75% use the TV for news, 68% the Internet, 54% newspapers and 33% mobile

6 – Social media continues to chip away at traditional media use

In the UK, 18% read a printed national newspaper less due to social media use.  In Australia the figure is 21% and in the US it is 15% (Ofcom)

7 – Younger and female users of social media use it as a prime news source

51% of 18-24 year olds in the UK, 53% in the US, 61% in France and 61% in Italy use social channels for breaking news (Ofcom)

8- Social TV continues to rise in importance

More proof that social media and TV can effectively work hand in hand:

38% of Internet consumers have used a social network to recommend a TV programme and 29% often discuss what they are watching on TV in real-time online (Motorola)

9 – Apple dominates the mobile web

61% of European non PC Internet traffic comes from Apple ‘iDevices’, while in the US 92% of mobile purchases were made via iPhones and iPads (Comscore / RichRelevance)

10 – Instagram on track to becoming the world’s biggest mobile social network

Overtaking Foursquare (SocialFresh)

The December stats of the month can be found here

Related articles

• Vivek Wadhwa, WaPo: Social media will become a feature rather than the “big thing” (nextlevelofnews.com)
• Prediction #1: Social media slides down the pedestal (swordandthescript.com)
• Top 10 Social Networking Resolutions for Business in 2012 (ipwatchdog.com)
• The State of Social Media and Social Media Marketing in 2012 (slideshare.net)
• Surprise hit Pinterest a top 10 most-trafficked social network | Logicamp (logicamp.wordpress.com)