Research out by Pew shows that when it comes to the major US hard news story of 2012, the Presidential election, voters prefer tried and tested news sources.

Only one in twenty (6%) Americans hears about the campaign from Facebook, and while 20% get election news from online news apps or websites, 36% get it from cable TV.Similarly, 41% of Twitter users ‘regularly’ or ‘sometimes’ get election news on Twitter, compared to 40% who never do.

Two observations about this study:

Pew headlines it by saying “Twitter, Facebook play very modest roles.”

I would add the words “so far.”   Pew’s research also shows that younger age groups who are most likely to get news from social media, have so far been turned off by the campaign

Secondly, we’ve yet to have the set piece events of the election, the live Presidential debates.   The recent US Superbowl showed how social media and live TV now goes hand in hand with 10,000 tweets a second being sent in the closing minutes.

Related articles

• Which Superbowl Ad Got The Most Social Media Love? [INFOGRAPHIC] (ubervu.com)
• Election 2012: Voters Expect Candidates to Be on Social Media [INFOGRAPHIC] (mashable.com)
• Poll: People Don’t Rely On Facebook, YouTube, Twitter For Election Information (readwriteweb.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)

Despite commanding 95% of social networking time in the US it is Twitter which shaped the news agenda in 2011.

According to Highbeam Research (via Inside Facebook), Twitter received around 50% of mentions about social media in the (traditional) media, compared to 45% odd for Facebook

Except for February and April, Twitter was ahead every month, including September when Facebook launched Timeline and other features.

Why does this matter? Despite dwarfing every other social network and having a (now) celebrity founder in Mark Zuckerberg, the news media was more interested in the role Twitter had to play in society.   Which brings to mind the old arguments that many like myself used to make about the need to look beyond Twitter’s numbers to influence.

At 100 million regular (according to Twitter) users , Twitter’s user base is of course now substantial.   Twitter’s lead in the news agenda would have been down to everything from the Arab Spring, which has resulted in Arabic becoming the fastest growing language on Twitter , to here in the UK celebrity led scandals, which resulted in Twitter appearing on the front page of the nation’s tabloid newspapers

Photo – L.e.e  

Related articles

• Study: Twitter Beats Facebook for Media Attention in 2011 (insidefacebook.com)
• Facebook Sues Mark Zuckerberg (No, Not That Mark Zuckerberg) – Reuters (reuters.com)
• Facebook Subscriber # > Twitter Follower # ? (techcrunch.com)

UK communications and media regulator OFCOM has come out with another mammoth piece of research, this time the international communications market report, covering the UK, US, Australia, France, Italy and Germany.

Some (mainly about Britain being a national of online shopaholics ) of it has already been covered in the mainstream press, so I’ve tried to dig out ten findings that didn’t get so much of an airing.   These include ones that look at how social media has replaced traditional media as a news source

1 – Ofcom’s research confirms Forrester’s earlier claims that social media is reaching saturation point.  78% of American, 75% of Australian and 70% of UK Internet users have set up social media profiles.

2 – Not surprisingly, Facebook is the social site most are familiar with.   In the US, 89% of social media users are on Facebook, with Twitter a distant 2nd on 24%.    In the UK, the figures are 83% and 22%.   Surprisingly in the UK Friends Reunited (remember them?)  still gets a strong showing

3 – As you would expect, younger social media users visit those sites more frequently than older users.    In the UK, 68%, in the US 69% and in Australia 61% of 18-24 year old social media users go online 2+ times a day.   This compares to 26% of 45-64 year olds in the UK, 28% in the US and 29% in Australia who access social media.

4 – Does social media use reduce traditional media use?   For a minority it does.   In the UK 14% and in the US 10% claim to now watch less TV because of online social use.  However, 18% of British social media users and 21% of Australian social media users say they read print newspapers less.

Those stats can be read in a number of different ways.  There is no doubt that print circulations are in terminal decline, the UK nationals losing the equivalent of Glasgow in sales over the past year.

At the same time, there is evidence that integrating social media into TV programming and promotions has a small boost for overall ratings.

5 – In the various markets surveyed by Ofcom, between 1/5 and 1/3 of social media users don’t change their privacy settings.   In the UK, the % that leave them be is 30%, in Australia it is 28% and in the US 26%

6 – Ofcom’s research again proves that social media is more female than male dominated.      In the UK 49% of female and 32% of male social media users regularly update their profiles.   In the US, the figures are 51% and 37% and in Australia 42% and 31%

7 – Male and female behaviour is also different on social channels.   Across all markets, women are more likely to use social media “to see what other people are saying and doing.”    In the UK, 63% of women and 51% of men use social media in this way, while in the US the figures are 71% women and 57% men.

8 – Just as social media may have caused some users to leave traditional media, more and more now use it as a primary news source.

In the UK, 51% of 18-24 year olds and 37% of 25-34 year olds use social channels for breaking news.    Again, women are different than men.   While 43% of British women on social media find out about breaking news on these sites, for UK men the % is 37%.

9 – OFCOM’s research debunks the myth that social media use cuts you off from the real world.     A third of British (34%) and Australian (32%) 18-24 year olds now engage more in their community.   In Italy and Germany, over 4/10 younger social media users are more active.

10 – Most social media users distrustful of what they see:   Finally a finding that is slightly at odds with an earlier OFCOM stat about trust in social media, more users are distrustful as opposed to trustful about what they see on social sites.

However, there is not surprisingly a lot of variation by age here, with the under 45s being twice as likely to trust what they see on social channels compared to the over 55s.

Related articles

• 19 Huge Social Media Moments of 2011 (mashable.com)
• Infographic – Social Media Interactions Drive Holiday Purchases (adverbox.com)
• Expats ‘love social media as point of contact’ (newsmessenger.co.uk)

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.

Related articles

• Apple iOS leads in mobile Internet traffic; iPads deliver 97 percent of tablet traffic (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• ComScore: Android continues dominate in U.S. smartphones (intomobile.com)
• comScore: iOS still ahead of Android in total user base thanks to iPads (slashgear.com)

This time from Nielsen, which shows that among consumers using social media, consumer ratings and reviews come top as the preferred source of product information.

The Nielsen blog post doesn’t specify where the study took place, but assuming it was carried out in the US, social media users = just over half of the population (allowing for 3/4 Internet penetration and 3/4 Facebook use among the Internet population)

Less well received?   A company’s Twitter ID at 7%.  I interpret that in two ways.   First of all, corporate social media accounts aren’t trusted to deliver unbiased product information, but ones run by ordinary consumers are.

Secondly, you may not look to a social media feed for product information, but you will turn to it for news and / or complaints.

Finally, the Nielsen study again confirms female dominance in the social media realm with women on social networks more likely to talk to their friends about brands than men (81% vs 72%)

Related articles

• The State Of Social Media 2011: Social Is The New Normal (fastcompany.com)
• The Nielsen Social Media Report and What It Means to Customer Service (customerthink.com)

The good news if you are someone like me earning their living in this industry?  They “are as excited about social media today as ever before.”   The bad news:   A quarter intend to spend less than 35,000 euros this year (US 48k, GBP 30k)

Forrester’s Nate Elliott says it comes down to a mixture of resourcing and the inability to prove ROI.

Measuring social media is actually pretty easy.  However, as I’ve heard said many times before, it is tracking the right things that is difficult.   On that note check out this SEOMOZ article on social media KPIs, one of the best I’ve read

There is a third problem though, one that revolves around the perception that social media campaigns are free.   They are not.   Some investment, at the very least in monitoring what people are saying about you, needs to be made.

So how much does a social media campaign cost?   It depends on a whole range of factors, but this piece where various (US) social media practitioners took hypothetical ad budgets and scoped out what they would do with it is useful (thanks @shannonpaul for reminding me about the link!).

It shows you how can indeed build a year long programme for the price of a few magazine ads…but not for 35,000 euros.

(photo from loop oh via creative commons)

Related articles

• Social Media Consultant or Copywriter? (renwrite.wordpress.com)
• Is Your Social Media Strategy Flash, Fluff or Functional? (concepthubinc.com)
• Make Your Marketing Social by Design (greatfinds.icrossing.com)

Essentially Pew found the following:

23% of adults and 28% of mobile / cell phone owners use the GPS on their phones to get directions somewhere

9% of Internet users – so essentialy one in ten – set up their Twitter, FB etc accounts to disclose their location when they post via automatic tagging

5% of all mobile / cell phone owners – but 12% of smartphone owners – check in via services such as Foursquare and Gowalla

In addition to smartphone owners, Pew also shows that younger users and non Whites are more likely to check in online.

The smartphone stat shows that services such as Foursquare do have some future, as smartphone ownership in the US (and UK) is around 35%, while most mobile phones sold now are apparently smartphones.

Indeed, Fast Company recently published a piece questioning whether Foursquare has the ‘juice’ to hit the big time.   Foursquare has somewhere North of ten million users, but to put that into perspective Instagram has over eight million, has been going for less than a year and still only runs on Apple iOS.

As a previous Foursquare sceptic, I’ve revised my opinion about them.  Because I’m a heavy Instagram user, I now check in on Foursquare every day.

The redesigned app looks good, but Fastcompany points out that the route to mass adoption is more fun, better apps connected to Foursquare, and quite simply more significant discounts and deals of the type that American Express has been running with the network.

However – it is not just about the big number.  A stat I’m fond of quoting as it shows that you need to look at who is using a network, and how they are using it as well as how many are using it – there is evidence that people who check into retail locations spend significantly more money than those that don’t.

Related articles

• 28 percent of U.S. consume mobile and location-based services (intomobile.com)
• Pew: More Than A Quarter Of U.S. Adults Use Mobile And Social Location-Based Services (techcrunch.com)

A few things about this chart:

The response times were to say the least very patchy.   AirTran didn’t respond at all.   Others, which have in the past been lauded for their social media expertise also didn’t do so well.

For example, SouthWest appeared in Time Magazine’s top 140 Twitter accounts, yet took over six hours on average to get back to passengers. Perhaps the volume of tweets sent to the @southwestair account was just too much for the team to handle – at one point on Sunday night 2+% of all tweets (worldwide) were about Hurricane Irene.

However, SouthWest actually tweeted less in August than in June (source tweetstats), which implies that Twitter was not used as a ‘real time’ crisis comms plan – a number of brand tweets found their way into the account on Friday 26th (the day before the shutdown), including an invitation to hang out with the SouthWest DJ’s on Turntable FM.

At the same time two US airlines – Delta and JetBlue – notched up an impressive Twitter record.   Delta responded to every single Hurricane Irene tweet sent to them by STELLAService, with an average response time of 14 minutes.  JetBlue responded to most, but the ones that it did respond to, were answered in 11 minutes.

Delta and JetBlue have huge follower numbers – 232k and 1.6 million respectively.  As a result if you are an airline the chances are you will encounter someone who has flown with one of these two carriers, Delta obviously also having extensive international route map – and it raises the bar for what passenger expectations are when using social media.

Both Delta and JetBlue also responded 2-3x faster on Twitter than on the phone (for other airlines the reverse was true with US Airways answering the phone in two minutes – compared to American, which took an hour and a half).

Last year the American Red Cross published a study which said that an hour was an acceptable response time if people had an emergency and were asking for help on social media.   The new standard – ten minutes?

Related articles

• Bucks Blog: How Airlines Fared in the Hurricane Irene Test (bucks.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Airlines that garner the most complaints (msnbc.msn.com)
• Here come the Twitter ads…from accounts you don’t follow (thenextweb.com)
• Airlines on Twitter Monthly Report for July 2011 reveals that more airlines have Twitter accounts than loyalty programs (simpliflying.com)

Having come back after two weeks away, the main social media story in the UK involves Twitter knocking down so called ‘super injunctions.’

These are double gagging orders that the rich and famous employ to stop the media reporting about some scandal.  The double bit refers to the fact that they are not allowed to say that the injunction exists in the first place.

The use of Twitter to get around the UK’s antiquated defamation laws has resulted in the social network breaking its UK traffic record – Time Magazine has a good explanation of the back-story for non UK readers.

The latest twist involves a footballer referred to in court as “CTB” allegedly involved in an affair with a reality TV star.

CTB is taking legal action against Twitter to force the social network to reveal the identities of people behind the accounts who have been talking about the alleged affair.   Symbolic of the inability of the old order to keep up with the new, the footballer in question was according to the Daily Mail being named 16x per minute on Twitter this afternoon (a 5 sec search is enough to tell you who CTB is supposed to be).

The reaction from the parts of the legal establishment has been predictable.  According to the appropriately named lord chief justice, Lord Judge, “modern technology was totally out of control.”

According to Lord Judge, readers place greater trust in the content of traditional media than those who ‘peddle lies’ on websites (via The Guardian).

Actually they don’t.  This is what OFCOM, an official body a bit like the US FCC, has to say on the matter:

1 – 34% of UK consumers trust and 43% don’t trust what they read in newspapers, or a difference of minus nine
2 – 36% of UK consumers trust and 33% don’t trust what they see on social networks, or a difference of plus three (news websites are actually the media commanding the highest trust ratio)

It’s a fundamental point and one which large parts of the establishment hasn’t really grasped yet.   Until they do, expect social networks to continue to blow holes in any attempts by the law to control what can and can’t be read, heard or seen.

(Above – the rise of CTB mentions on Twitter over Fri and Saturday)

Related articles

• “Footballer seeks Twitter answers” and related posts (rocketnews.com)
• Footballer sparks Twitter storm (bbc.co.uk)
• VIDEO: UK court demand causes Twitter trouble (bbc.co.uk)
• Footballer sues Twitter and its users for threatening to reveal his name for having an affair (ubergizmo.com)