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Posts Tagged ‘geolocation’

What’s Ahead for Social Media in ’10

If 2009 was the year that social media really burst on to the scene, the theme in 2010 will be how social media is embraced and leveraged by a growing number of companies. With this in mind, here are some fearless predictions about what’s on the horizon.

1. Social media monitoring and measurement will gain even more traction as companies recognize the importance of being able to listen and understand what’s happening so they can engage with key influencers and opinion leaders. The adoption of these services will also be bolstered by the growing focus on return on investment (aka ROI) as companies look at what they are getting for the money being spent on social media.

2. Geo-location will become a major trend as more social media users broadcasts their locations, not only to friends, family and colleagues but to retailers as well. This will give businesses the ability to send the right advertising offers to people at the right time and the right place. Look for services such as FourSquare and Twitter to drive the geo-location market.

3. Facebook’s impressive growth will continue but users will have to live with the reality that Facebook wants to make more of its information public so that more of its content will be monetized. Twitter’s user base will expand as well but not as wildly as 2009.

4. Blogs will come back into style again as individuals and companies realize they are powerful and effective tools to really communicate with customers, potential customers, partners, investors and employees. In 2009, the pendulum swung hard to micro-messaging but expect macro-messaging (aka blogs) to stage a rebound.

5. Video will continue to grow aggressively as more companies realize it’s an effective way to communicate amid a sea of text. For more on the world of video, check out our video engagement report.

By Mark Evans - December 22nd, 2009 - 3 Comments »
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Posted in Social Media

You’re Tweeting from Where?

One of the challenges in assessing Twitter-Land is getting an accurate picture of where users are located.

Right now, location is mostly determined by the information that people provide within their profiles. There are a few issues:

1. Not everyone provides their location information

2. Some people provide wrong information. For example, many users change their location to Tehran to support the political activists in Iran.

3. It can be difficult to assess location information if it’s written in non-English languages such as Arabic, Chinese and Japanese.

So, it’s exciting – if you’re into geography and geoloation – that Twitter is going to be introduce a new API that will lets developers add latitude and longitude to any update. In a blog post, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said:

“Folks will need to activate this new feature by choice because it will be off by default and the exact location data won’t be stored for an extended period of time. However, if people do opt-in to sharing location on a tweet-by-tweet basis, compelling context will be added to each burst of information.”

If and when the new API gains traction – and users opt-in to having their locations made available – it will provide a much more accurate and interesting view of how and where Twitter is being used around the world.

For more thoughts, check out Fast Company’s blog on what Twitter could do with your location information, and Mashable’s list of five geolocation features it wants.

Here’s a chart from our Inside Twitter report that shows the countries where Twitter is being used the most. In future reports, we plan on providing more details about countries and cities.

sysomos-twitter-newusersbycountry

By Mark Evans - August 21st, 2009 - No Comments »
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Posted in Social Media, Technology

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