Social Media « Sysomos Blog

Posts Tagged ‘Social Media’

Tebow Takes on Twitter

Tim Tebow may be the most popular man in sports right now. He was a first round draft pick the NFL’s 2010 draft. He became the Denver Broncos’ starting quarterback part way through the 2011 season and has lead them on a wild charge ever since. His celebration ritual has spawned an internet and photo meme known as “taking a Tebow.” And as of Sunday, he can say that he is also a Twitter record holder.

This past Sunday during a Broncos’ game against the Steelers, Tim Tebow threw an 80-yard touchdown pass in overtime to win the game for Denver. The crowd in Denver went wild, but even more so, Twitter exploded with tweets about Tebow. Right after the touchdown pass Twitter recorded 9,420 tweets per second, making it the second most tweets per second for a single event. It was however the record for a sporting event.

I took to MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics software, to look a little bit deeper into the event. I found that it wasn’t just Twitter that was talking about Tebow. On Sunday, January 8th, I found Tebow mentioned in 2,549 blog posts, 1,495 online news articles, 22,950 forum posts and 484,946 tweets.

While 484,946 tweets doesn’t sound like a giant amount, it’s much larger when most of the tweets happen at almost the same time. Also, I pulled up a popularity chart of mentions of Tebow on Twitter over the past six months and found that this one day was almost the amount of tweets on his last most popular day.

I also found something interesting when I looked at where all the tweets were coming from. Surprisingly, Colorado didn’t even come close to being the state that produced the most tweets about Tebow. Neither did Pennsylvania. The top three states that were talking about Tebow were California, New York and Florida. Colorado actually tied for the state with 9th most Tebow tweets with Virginia and New Jersey.

Lastly, I took a look at the talk surrounding Tebow in a buzzgraph. Not surprisingly the Broncos are right in the center of the conversation. We can also see strong ties to the Steelers and the score of the game, 29-23. We can also see that Tebow’s winning touchdown pass was also a main part of the conversation as we can see from strong connection to the term “80-yard.”

With every NFL fan now with their eyes on Tebow, I wonder if he could set another record next week? Or maybe at the Superbowl?

By Sheldon Levine - January 12th, 2012 - No Comments »
Tags: analytics, Denver Broncos, MAP, nfl, Social Media, sysomos, Tebow, Tim Tebow, twitter
Posted in Events, Samples, Social Media

What’s Next for Tumblr?

Tumblr is a strange beast.

It’s one of the fastest-growing and increasingly popular social media services but arguably it hasn’t been seen as terribly sexy.

Look at the fawning coverage of Pinterest or Path, and then compare it to Tumblr, which had an astounding 14 billion pageviews in December versus three billion in December 2011.

It is difficult to get a handle on the measured embrace of Tumblr but it have to do with how many people are waiting for Tumblr’s next move. Despite Tumblr’s strong growth, it is struggling to find a business model. But with a ton of venture capital, Tumblr has the luxury of time to figure it out.

In the meantime, it seems people have given Tumblr the benefit of the doubt without getting overly excited about its prospects.

Another thesis may be that people don’t see Tumblr as a business with strong revenue potential because it’s a free service used by many people for personal reasons to publish short posts, particularly photos. This contrasts with how many blogs are used to do personal branding or support a business.

It could mean there is a wait-and-see approach to Tumblr. While it’s popular with users, there may be some pragmatism from a financial standpoint. Having raised $85-million venture capital in a deal that valued it at $800-million last September, 2012 is the year in which Tumblr will demonstrate it’s a business with lots of potential or a really interesting project.

There are some indications of what may lie head.

Last week, Tumblr CEO David Karp told Business Insider that the company has been playing around with the idea of non-intrusive ads, which sounds a lot like Twitter’s embrace of advertising.

Meanwhile, Gawker reported last week Tumblr is building an editorial team, which could be used to curate Tumblr’s best content.

As Twitter followers have discovered, it is difficult to predict how Tumblr could turn the corner business-wise even as it becomes more popular. Until then, Tumblr will remain interesting but maybe not the belle of the ball.

By Mark Evans - January 9th, 2012 - No Comments »
Tags: david karp, pinterest, Social Media, tumblr
Posted in Social Media

Happy (Social) New Year!

New Years is a friendly time of year. Everyone likes to wish others a happy New Years, regardless of if you know them or not. You say it to the clerk at the grocery store, your neighbor that you only see once in a blue moon, even the random group of strangers you pass on your way home from your new years party. If we do this in real life, it’s not hard to imagine that we also take to social media to spread New Years cheer to the entire world. And we do. In fact, in Japan when midnight struck, the Japanese sent 16,000 tweets a second and actually crashed Twitter. So just how much New Years well wishing was being passed through social media? I took to MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics software to find out.

Looking for mentions of “new year” and “new years” on December 31 and January 1 I put together some numbers of people mentioning it through social media channels. From those two days alone I found 299,583 blog posts, 44,376 online news articles, 342,361 forum posts and 9.2 million tweets mentioning New Years.

Looking at where all the talk was coming from I found that the US had created 53.9% of all the mentions. The UK had the second most mentions with 11.5% and then Canada with 5%.

However, because such a large amount of media comes from the US I thought that this even seemed a little weighted. Because of this I decided to look at the geographical distribution on Twitter. Here, the top three countries remained the same and in the same order, but the US had been taken down to 43%. As well, the other category above (across all social channels) accounted for 19.7%, while just on Twitter the category accounts for 27.8%. And although Japan was able to crash Twitter with so many New Years tweets at their midnight, they didn’t seem to produce as much as some other countries over the span of two days.

A heat map of Twitter New Years mentions shows us that tweets were in fact being produced by people around the globe.

Pulling up a buzzgraph of the overall conversation I found nothing but good wishes coming from the social media world. Words like “happy,” “happiness,” “wishes,” “celebrate” and family.

Another word that I found in the buzzgraph that was popping up a lot was “resolution.” The new year is a time when a lot of people make resolutions and I found that a lot of them made them publicly through social media this year. I added “resolution” and “resolutions” to my original query and found 41,972 blog posts, 4,518 online news articles 18,431 forum posts and 321,265 tweets about New Years resolutions. Think they’ll be kept?

Happy New Year to you and yours from all of us at Sysomos! Hope 2012 is great for you!

By Sheldon Levine - January 5th, 2012 - No Comments »
Tags: analytics, MAP, New Years, Social Media, sysomos
Posted in Events, Samples, Social Media

The Mysterious Growth of Google+

Ever since Google+ launched last June, one of the most fascinating elements has been trying to get a sense of its growth, potential for adoption, and how people are actually using it within a world dominated by Facebook and Twitter.

What makes this social spectator sport difficult to understand is how different metrics are being applied.

In some respects, it makes Google+, the cricket of social media because you can see activity but you’re not quite sure what the rules are.

A good example is the buzz (pun, completely intended) about an Experian Hitwise report that suggests Google+ attracted 49 million U.S. visitors in December – a development glowingly described by Mashable as “massive”.

Meanwhile, Paul Allen, an analyst and the founder of Ancestry.com, told the Daily Mail recently that Google+ now has more than 62 million members. Allen also bullishly expects Google+ to have 400 million users by year-end.

It certainly sounds impressive until you head over to Compete.com, which reports Google+ had 14.3 million unique U.S. visitors as of late-November – a number that had grown less than 10% since late-September.

People Really, Really Want Google+ to Succeed

To be honest, it’s a bit of a head scratcher about who to believe. From the outside looking in, it seems like people really, really want Google+ to be mega-successful so it can become a viable and sizable rival to Facebook.

By trumpeting Google+’s growth, it could make individuals and brands think that maybe it’s time to climb on board given the train is beginning to gain momentum. After all, no one wants to be seen as being late to a social media party.

On the other hand, it’s challenging to grasp Google+’s apparent growing popularity given it doesn’t come up much in conversations with brands looking to establish or enhance their social media foothold.

From my personal experience, the digital and Web savvy are using Google+ or, at least, have signed up for the service. I’ve also heard anecdotally Google+ has become popular with photographers because it displays photos beautifully. Otherwise, Google+ doesn’t seem to have really resonated, at least not enough to think it will rival Facebook any time soon.

At this point, it is difficult to know what to believe. Is Google+ really becoming the greatest social thing since sliced bread, or is the excitement about Google+’s growth exaggerated or over-hyped?

Any insight into Google+ – good, bad or indifferent would be great. For those of you who have embraced Google+, what makes it so compelling, and how has it affected how your use of other social media services?

By Mark Evans - January 4th, 2012 - 4 Comments »
Tags: facebook, google, Social Media
Posted in Social Media

A Myth of Social Media

In a recent article by Thomas Rogers, he discusses whether we’re experiencing information overload, and to a greater extent, if the Internet has transformed knowledge.

Rogers asserts the availability and access to knowledge has created a more informed and interconnected society, while wondering if this is dangerous.

The first part is likely true. A lot of the credit has to be given to the way people share and network, which has a lot to do with social media.

The second part of Rogers’ thesis reflects a great myth of social media: we have too much information at our fingertips.

In interviewing author David Weinberger, there was one thought that really stood out as truly defining for Rogers. According to Weinberger, there is no longer the “smartest guy in the room” because now it’s the room that is smart.

If ever there was an apt portrayal of social media, this might be it but to say knowledge can lead to overload is farfetched.

Social media has opened up information and data to every person who has even a modicum of curiousity. It would be a mistake to label this as dangerous when, if anything, it has the potential to be one of the great advents of modern times.

Rogers discusses information overload but the idea is dismissed and re-labelled as a failure of filters. I don’t see either.

I view the Web and social media as a tool; simultaneously a soapbox and a place of higher learning. This tool changes the way we learn and interact. It is an evolution in learning, not a detriment.

For some, social media is seen as way to overload our brains, as well as a way for some to learn at too mature of a pace. The bigger and more important point is it should be seen as a new frontier and an opportunity to learn and connect like we never have before.

By Mark Evans - January 3rd, 2012 - 1 Comment »
Tags: information overload, Social Media, sysomos
Posted in Social Media

What’s in Store for Social Media in ’12?

With 2011 now a distant memory (Well, it has been two days!), what’s ahead for social media in 2012? What are the key trends that are going to emerge? Who’s going to rise? Who’s going to fall?

While it is difficult to accurately forecast the future in the fast-moving social media world, here are a few suggestions:

1. Mobile will continue to emerge as the way more engage in social media. Instagram’s spectacular success, and the growing popularity of Path has demonstrated demand for a mobile-only service. Meanwhile, Facebook’s drive for social media dominance will likely see it move forward with its aggressive mobile strategy. As well, look for Google+ to leverage mobile to strengthen its social foothold.

2. Niche social networks. As much as Facebook is seen as the default social network, there are many social networks catering to specific niches that have large followings but don’t necessarily appear in the spotlight. One of the newest players is Pinterest, a scrapping network that has seen the number of U.S. users quadruple to four million in December from August.

3. Google+ will attract more users, although I’m not sure it will hit the 400-million mark suggested by Paul Allen recently. The key question for Google+ is whether it can carve out a unique identity from Facebook, or whether it becomes the alternative for people who don’t want to be on Facebook. As well, it will be interesting to see if brands embrace Google+, something that doesn’t seem to have happened so far in a major way.

4. IPOs: With a few social networks already doing IPOs, you can expect several others such as Yelp and, of course, Facebook, to excite investors by going public this year.

5. The role, importance and companies trying to tackle influence and influencers will stay in the spotlight as brands and companies look for ways to identify the key people within their sectors.

What do you think? What are some of the other key trends that will emerge?

By Mark Evans - January 2nd, 2012 - No Comments »
Tags: 2012, predictions, Social Media
Posted in Social Media

Artists Look to Kickstart Their Ideas

The global creative community has worked hard for a long time to be seen as viable business and worthy of funding.

Only until recently did the Web via social media really afford the community the ability to effectively connect with funding opportunities.

Kickstarter is a social media service that lets you post art projects, secure capital, or simply follow projects and people. It’s a fairly innovative take on niche social media that seems to be piquing the interest of many Web users.

YouTube was an enormous boon to anyone with a Webcam and some creative talent, but Kickstarter is a beast of a different nature.

A user posts a project, and then categorizes it as music, film, art, technology, design, food or publishing. An end date for pledging is also required. Kickstarter delivers the platform for connection, e-commerce and financing to take place.

Kickstarter is already attracting plenty of praise, traffic and users for its unique approach to social media and the world of investing. The beauty of Kickstarter is people can fund or pledge a small amount to a creative project, and the projects themselves don’t need huge capital investments.

Best of all, the creative team also doesn’t have to give up equity, which is a huge bonus for for anyone who has tried to get a creative project off the ground. You can also gauge the interest in a project by posting it and monitoring how much money has been raised.

Social media is so revolutionary not just for what it can do on the large scale, but also its importance to communities that require attention. Some projects on Kickstarter have received 10s or even hundreds of thousands of dollars – money that might not have been available otherwise.

Kickstarter is a great example of using social media for a greater good, and provide opportunities to the creative community that strives to get their ideas off the ground.

By Mark Evans - December 30th, 2011 - No Comments »
Tags: kickstarter, Social Media, sysomos
Posted in Social Media

Social Media in 2011

2011 has been a pretty big year in terms of social media.

We’ve seen new social networks appear and flourish like Quora, Google+ and Pinterest. We’ve seen big changes in some of the major social networks like Facebook’s Timeline, a running history of your online life, and Twitter taking a more strategic role as to how people are using the network and how they can start to generate revenue from it.

As well, we’ve seen a large uptake in the use of social media, both from the general public and from businesses with some pretty cool results. With all that said, I thought it would be fun to take a look back at how people talked about “social media” in 2011 using MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics software.

Going back to January 1st of this year and searching for the terms “social media,” “socialmedia” and “#sm” I pulled up some general stats around all the social media chatter this year. For 2011 I found social media mentioned in 2.2 million blog posts, 1.4 online news articles, 295,354 forum posts and 12.1 million tweets.

Trended out over time, talk of social media for the year looks like the chart below. Twitter of course dominates because of it’s quick and easy to use nature. It’s interesting to note that blogs and online news about social media seem to follow in a very similar pattern. I also did a little extra digging into the largest spike on the chart around, June 30th. It turns out that June 30th was Mashable’s Social Media Day, so there was even more chatter that day using the words “social media.”

Next I took a look at where all the talk was coming from. The following chart represents all social media talk across all the channels we cover combine. We can see that the USA controlled a large portion of the conversation at 56.8%. The UK was the second largest producer of social media talk about social media with 16.3% and Canada came in third 5.7%.

I then dug a little deeper into two main social media channels to look a little closer at the demographics. When I looked at just blogs, I found the USA still lead in conversation about social media, but this time they only accounted for 47%. Here again we also see the UK with the second most conversation (11.4%) and Canada rounding up third (6.0%). We can also see that the “other” category accounts for a lot more in blogs by making up 21.5%, which means that blogs everywhere seemed to be talking a lot about social media this year.

So, just who was doing all this blogging about social media? I first looked into the gender breakdown. It turns out males account for 60% and females for 40%. While not even, I think that those numbers are fairly close considering the amount of blogs about social media we saw this year.

Something I found interesting was when I looked into the age of the bloggers. While most people think that social media is for the younger generation, I found that the age group that blogged most about social media was those aged 36-50 years old with 37.5%. Bloggers aged 21-35 came in second with 33.3%. Those aged 51 and over made up 25%, while the youngest set, 20 and under only accounted for 4.1%.

Next I look at the industries that were blogging about social media throughout 2011. A little surprising, but education blogs actually held the greatest amount of conversation with 17.3%. The second most amount of social media conversation came from blogs in the communications and public relations field at 15.2%. The thrid place spot was tied between marketing blogs and those focused on the internet with 8.6% each.

I then headed over to Twitter. Here I found the same pattern in terms of who was talking about social media by geographical location. The US made up 49.7% of the conversation, while the UK followed8.3% and Canada coming in third with 5.5%.

The gender of Twitter users talking abut social media seemed to be a bit more split however. On Twitter males accounted for 64% of people talking about social media while the females made up the other 36%.

Lastly, I headed back to take a big picture look at what people were actually talking about when they were talking about social media. Pulling up a word cloud that spans all social channels it seems that business seemed to dominate the conversation about social media for 2011. We can see that words like “business” and “marketing” seem to be some of the largest words in the cloud meaning they came up the most. We can also see that “Facebook” and “Twitter” seemed to be the the two social networks that were talked about the most (which isn’t very surprising as they’re the two most adopted networks).

So how was your 2011 in terms of social media? What were your highlights? Let downs? Lessons learned? Let us know in the comments.

By Sheldon Levine - December 29th, 2011 - No Comments »
Tags: 2011, analytics, blogs, MAP, Social Media, sysomos, twitter
Posted in Samples, Social Media

Search for:
About Sysomos Blog

News and updates from Sysomos, provider of powerful suite of software for social media monitoring and analysis.
Our Products

Powerful analytics platform for social media

Social media monitoring and engagement dashboard
Follow us on twitter
Subscribe to posts
Browse by
- Announcements
- Customers
- Engineering
- Events
- Features
- Samples
- Social Media
- Technology
- Tips & Help
- Uncategorized
Archives

Posts Tagged ‘Social Media’

About Sysomos Blog

Our Products

Browse by

Archives