‘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

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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.

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• Almost 1 in 2 Europeans Visit Newspaper Sites (stateofsearch.com)
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The other month we produced an infographic at Rabbit about the growth of in-store mobile browsing – in particular the finding that 25% of online conversations about shopping happen in shops.

Comscore has now come out with another – possibly even more impactful – statistic, showing that (in the US) 1/3 of smartphone purchases were made inside a retailer.   In other words, people walk into a store, see an item and rather than taking it to the till, they buy it there and then online.

What does that mean for retailers?   Obviously if you are, say, a book seller such as Waterstones in the UK or Barnes and Noble in the US, you don’t really want people looking at books on the shelf and then ordering via their amazon smartphone app.

It could however be turned into an opportunity as well.

In the UK, £25 billion+ a year is spent on in-store point of sale material.  Rather than that money going on ‘buy one, get one free’ type offers, some of it could be used in building interactive displays.

Want to find out what other people are saying about this product?  Go online to our mobile site, or scan this QR code.   Is the queue at the till too long?   Order it here and we’ll deliver it to your house the next day.

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More than half of UK mobile users that access social networks from their phones do so almost every day.   This is according to Comscore, which says that overall around 35% of the UK mobile phone population uses social networks from their phones.

Note that around 44% of UK mobile users have a smartphone, with iPhone users most likely to go online.   The overlap between smartphone and mobile social network users won’t be exact, but it will be pretty strong.

As a result, the conclusion is that smartphone ownership is increasing mobile social network use.   And that use is by and large heavy, rather than infrequent.

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While the IBM study in my previous post refers to the US, Comscore’s latest smartphone figures are about the EU5 – UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy.

Comscore shows that the iOS platform – and Comscore includes iPod Touches as well as iPhones and iPads – accounts for 30.5% of mobile devices in the major European markets.    This compares to 29% for Symbian (Nokia) and 24% for Android.

IBM’s research in the US shows that Apple iOS users are more active online in both relative and absolute terms.   In Europe, Comscore shows that this is even more the case.

61.1% of non-PC browser based page views – so the vast majority - are made from Apple mobile devices, compared to 20.9% from Android devices.   Meanwhile, despite clinging onto the no.2 spot in smartphone popularity, Symbian phones account for only 2.7% of European mobile Internet traffic.

Again, Comscore’s European stats mirror IBM’s American ones in showing the disproportionate influence iPad users have on the mobile Internet.

iPads currently account for 43% of all iOS traffic.   To put that in perspective, in April, Apple revealed that 10% of iOS devices were iPads.

The European Comscore and US IBM figures, raise the question of whether we are looking at smartphone market share in the right way.  Currently there seems to be a train of thought among marketers that Android is where it is at, because more are being shipped.

Yes, brands need to factor in both the Android and Apple iOS universes, but as the Symbian figures show, having lots of handsets on the market and having those users go online with their devices is not the same thing.

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According to Comscore, in March 2011 the Mail and Guardian online were level pegging at 40-41 million odd visitors.      However by August, the Guardian was in distant second place with the Mail attracting an amazing 85 million visitors / month compared to the Guardian’s 53 million.

It is worth mentioning that the major UK newspaper brands now get a large share of their web traffic from outside the country.    As far back as 2009, Comscore showed that between 48%-73% of  UK newspaper site visitors were from outside the UK and I’d imagine that % will have increased by now.

A point to bear in mind if you are a UK PR getting coverage in the online edition of a UK newspaper – most of those X million eyeballs you quote your client in the coverage report are from outside the country.   Of course, that could be a positive depending who the client is.

Back in March, The Guardian said that the Mail was the second most popular English language news site after the New York Times.   It will be interesting to see if the Mail now has the no.1 spot, especially post the NYT’s (partial) pay wall.

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Comscore’s latest look at the European smartphone market is out.   It shows that Symbian lost the same % of users that Android gained (16%).  Android is now second to Symbian in the European smartphone market with Apple iPhones 3rd (37.8% vs 22.3% vs 20.3%).

Android ahead of Apple?  Depends how you measure it

However, though ‘Android beats iPhone’ makes for a good headline, the truth is less black and white.  As Comscore shows, in pure smartphone ownership, there are now more Android users.    But the Apple iOS ‘universe’ also includes the iPad, dominant in the tablet space, and iPod touch.

Indeed over a third of Apple iOS devices are apparently iPods, with iPod Touch owners being more active users of the app store than iPhone users – something worth bearing in mind when thinking about the popularity and reach of services like the photo-sharing network Instagram.

Back in April, the Apple’s European user base was double that of Android’s.   That gap will have shrunk, but I would still bet that there are more Apple than Android devices in the EU5.

A final point to note is the % of smartphone users as a % of the total in the UK (44.5%).   Indeed, in the last quarter for the first time more smartphones than feature phones were shipped in Europe.    Out of the five major EU states surveyed, the UK also leads in mobile social network use, with a third of UK mobile users having accessed social media from their phones.

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• Android Beats iOS In European Smartphone Market Share, Still Behind Symbian (techcrunch.com)
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• Comscore: Android’s UK market share explodes as Apple overtakes Symbian (engadget.com)
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Both those reports were US focused.   Now comes confirmation from Comscore that the same holds true in the major European countries (the EU5 – UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy).

Across all age groups, European women spend more time on social networking sites than men.   Not surprisingly, young women aged 15-24 spend the most time on social media at 8.4 hours a month.   What is a surprise, is that among women it isn’t 25-34 year olds that come next, but 45-54 year olds.

In fact, women aged 45-54 spend more than twice as much time on social networks as their male counterparts (5.5 vs 2.7 hours a month), pointing to a digital divide opening up – not between the young and old in general, but with men aged 45+ increasingly being left behind.

Or, to put it another way, someone in Israel will spend 21 minutes a day using social media, compared to 10 minutes a day for someone in the US.

Overall, Comscore’s stats confirm the trend of consumers in emerging markets to be more engaged when it comes to social media.     Argentina, The Philippines, Turkey, Venezuela and Colombia are all near the top of the Comscore table.

These figures also support earlier stats, looking at the top countries for Facebook and Twitter penetration.   

Over one in five Internet users in Brazil, Indonesia, Venezuela, The Philippines, Turkey and Argentina are active on Twitter.   In the US, according to Pew, the figure is 13% Meanwhile the no1 Facebook country is the Philippines, with 92.9% penetration of the Internet population, followed by Israel (89.9%), Turkey (89.6%) and Chile (88.8%).

Indeed, even when looking at ‘new’ social networks, emerging markets seem to be scoring highly.    On my feed I’ve noticed a very active Turkish Instagram community, for example 4116 photos are currently tagged #istanbul.

Turns out this wasn’t a rogue stat and is confirmed in a recent round of research.   Data released by Comscore last week shows that the Netherlands maintains its position as the no.1 Twitter country….and can claim the same accolade for the careers network LinkedIn.

Both Twitter and LinkedIn reach over 1/4 of the Dutch Internet population.  By comparison the figures for Twitter in the UK and US range from between 1/10 and 1/12 of Web users.   At the same time, it is worth noting that Japan was very close in terms of Twitter penetration (26.6% vs 26.8%) and that the emerging markets of Brazil (23.7%), Indonesia (22%) and Venezuela (21%) similarly have a significant % of Internet users on Twitter.

Separately, Comscore tells us that the Dutch spend the most amount of time online in Europe, ahead of the UK, Turkey and France.   In fact, people in the Netherlands spend 1/3 more of their time online as their German neighbours – would be quite interested to see how TV viewing fares in each of those markets.

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• The Netherlands Ranks #1 Worldwide in Penetration for Twitter and LinkedIn – comScore, Inc (huguesrey.wordpress.com)
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