Social Networks

27% of Twitter users just read tweets and never write them

Jose A. del Moral — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 21:38:06 +0000

27% of Twitter accounts posted at least one public message between September 1st 2011 and November 30th, according to a study released by Semicast. This means that many Twitter users mostly use the service to read tweets from others.

The most active country on Twitter is the Netherlards, where 33% of accounts posted at least one public message. In second place comes Japan, while Spain is the third with 29%. This data comes from analyzing 383 million of Twitter user profiles created before January 1st 2012.

Drawing from its experience with previous studies, Semiocast used its proprietary platform, databases and tools to process user profiles in order to determine the location of each user using all available information (free-form location declared in user profile, time zone, language used to post tweets and GPS coordinates for the very few concerned tweets).

Facebook surpasses Orkut in Brazil

Jose A. del Moral — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 04:05:03 +0000

This is big news. Orkut is not any more the largest social network in Brazil, as Facebook has for the first time become the top one. According to ComScore, in December 2011, Facebook attracted 36.1 million visitors versus 34.4 million for Orkut.

Facebook increased 192% since December 2010, while Orkut only grew 5% in the same period of time. This change leaves China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Holland and Russia as the only markets in which Facebook is not the largest social network. India and Poland are already dominated by Facebook.

French local social networks lose ground to Facebook

Jose A. del Moral — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 17:42:17 +0000

In France local social networks, such as Copains d’Avant or Skyrock, are losing ground to the big three: Facebook, Youtube and Twitter. So says a recent study by Ifop based on interviews to 2,080 Internet users.

Facebook is the most reknown social network in France, where 95% of users seem to know it. Twitter is the one that has increased its notoriety the most, together with Badoo. Besides Copains d’Avant and Skyrock, Windows Live and MySpace have lost ground.

Google+ is in this list for the first time with a 64% notoriety rate. Not bad! Another interesting data is that Viadeo keeps being more reknown than Linkedin in France, even if Linkedin has gained 11 points since last year. In general terms, 77% of French Internet users do belong to at least one social network.

1. Facebook: 95%
2. Youtube: 92%
3. Twitter: 85% (+5)
4. Copains d’Avant: 82% (-2)
5. Dailymotion: 79%
6. Windows Live: 78% (-7)
7. Skyrock: 76% (-4)
8. Google+: 64%
9. MySpace: 63% (-9)
10. Trombi: 57%
11. Picasa: 56%
12. Badoo: 34% (+11)
13. Viadeo: 27%
14. Linkedin: 25% (+11)
15. Flickr: 23%
16. Netlog: 23%
17. Google Buzz: 20% (-10)
18. Habbo: 13%
19. Hi5: 11%
20. Ping: 11%
21. Planèt UMP: 9%
22. Wizbii: 4%
23. Louer un étudiant: 4%
24. Fotolog: 3%
25. FourSquare: 3%

Mobage overtakes Mixi as the main social network in Japan

Jose A. del Moral — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 11:52:11 +0000

Mixi might not be any more the main social network in Japan. Mobage, an only-mobile network based on gaming and launched just one year ago, has more users than Mixi. 75% of Japanese only access these sites from their smartphones. People in Japan don’t like Facebook as they are very privacy-conscious.

These are the top social networks in Japan right now, according to Asiajin:
1. Mobage (both Yahoo! Mobage for PC and Mobage Twon for mobile)
2. Gree (only mobile gaming, registration requires a Japanese cell phone number, makes money from virtual goods)
3. Mixi (very similar to Facebook, but uses nicknames instead of real names, makes money out of ads and registration requires a Japanese cell phone number)
4. Twitter
5. Facebook

Which parameters does Alianzo use for the new 2.0 Top Ranks?

noemi — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 17:50:24 +0000

With all this new trend of measuring the influence, success, popularity, notoriety (or as everyone likes to call it)it is very important to communicate users what are your results based on to tell someone his brand is more influential than his competitors or that he is better doing than his good blogger friend. So in an attempt to be as transparent as possible we will tell you the basis of our algorithms:

Alianzo Rank: it is the sum of points obtained in the 4-generated rankings: blogs, twitter, facebook and youtube. he score is always shown in an integer from 1 to 10, like the spanish marks. Before you were told how your you were doing at school, now this is the your social media mark. To generate this ranking, the four social medias have the same weight, so if you are not present in one of them, you are 25% less likely to increase your ranking position.

Top Blogs: The art of measuring the blogs and links has changed and we have adapted to it. Now our ranking includes the number of links from Google blogs, from all pages of Google, subscribers to Google Reader links on Yahoo!, the votes on Digg, Alexa position (only if ti has his own domain) and votes on Digg. We consider a web page as a blog when it contains news and comments in chronologial order (last goes first). Besides, it can include RSS, user comments and other usual (but not essential) features.

Top Twitter: This ranking calculates the notoriety of a twitter profile based on all data that offers us this social network: number of followers, number of tweets, number of retweets, number of mentions, number ofreplies , number of lists including a profile and finally the popularity (or the difference between followers and followings).

Top Facebook : our ranking of this massive network collects the number of fans + the activity.The activity is the number of comments, likes and shares of the last 10 posts. The total of the two parameters is added up and given a score based on a logarithmic mean.

Top Youtube: we take the number of views and subscribers to the channel, the number of videos uploaded and comments on the videos, favorite videos and the number of channels that are contacts.

The calculation is executed daily but much of the data only comes once a week, so the variation of positions in the ranking is updated weekly. We ask you for a little patience, the more profiles update, additional adjustments will be calculated by the algorithm

If you have any question or suggestion about our measurement procedure, leave a comment:

How many social networks can survive?

Jose A. del Moral — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 23:11:54 +0000

If Google+ becomes mainstream, does that mean that Facebook will not stand up? How many social networks can survive at the same time. Not many. People don’t want to belong to several networks at the same time, as that is not easy to manage. We all go out in the same place, once we get accustomed to it. That explains why once Facebook becomes the main network, second networks start dying.

At least, that’s what I think. Nevertheless, Tom Anderson, founder of MySpace, does not think the same. This is what he says: “I don’t think social networking is a zero sum game. I suspect that people believe that social networking is a winner take all endeavor, because they mistakenly assume people left MySpace for Facebook. Facebook didn’t kill Myspace; MySpace committed suicide through continual mismanagement. (For what it’s worth, I include myself in that group of mismanagers and I don’t mean to blame any single individual—the troubles were tremendous”.

He also expalins, Friendster’s death in the same terms: “Likewise, MySpace did not kill Friendster—Friendster had its own set of problems. If they’d been corrected, I believe both MySpace and Facebook would have thrived as different types of social networks. (In fact, Friendster basically would have been Facebook—a real name network, focused on real-world relationships for efficient communication.)”

Map of world social networks (2011 version)

Jose A. del Moral — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 15:44:55 +0000

We have updated the original version of our map of social networks, which was first made two years ago. Things have changed quite a lot since 2009: many networks have disappeared, Facebook and Twitter have become stronger, new categories have surged (as social commerce or Facebook games), new functionalities have to be considered (mainly, localisation) and Facebook pages have become very important as social networks by themselves. At the same time, Facebook has conquered most of the world.

Is Badoo the largest European social network?

Jose A. del Moral — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 23:54:49 +0000

At the end of last year Brussels held a workshop on EU social networks and EU R&I programmes in which 15 social networks were present. Among them were some local leaders (as Holland’s Hyves, Spain’s Tuenti, Hungary’s iWiw, Greece’s Zoo, Sweden’s LunarStorm, Germany’s Vznet or Poland’s Nasza Klasa), some sites which technically can not be considered social networks (Portugal’s Sapo or Spain’s Barrabes), some content sharing sites (as France’s Dailymotion) and a few global social networks (Netlog and Badoo, which are based in Belgium and the UK). Germany’s Xing, which is a competitor to Linkedin with a strong position in Germany and China, also attended this meeting.

These last ones are the most interesting and they are the only ones that can be really considered as Europe-wide networks and the largest one is Badoo. So is this the largest European social network? The answer is yes. A dating site which makes money out of spamming and selling fees to its users is nowadays the largest social network in Europe. Industrial fragmentation is not good for Europe. Different regulations and strong cultural differences are dividing Europeans (and their social networks).

Curiously, the European Commission did set up this meeting because it considers that social networks offer big business opportunities to all the sectors of the economy. “Social networks are likely to become the main entry point to the web in the future, prevailing over the existing search engines. The continuous increase of registered users, together with the opening of social networks to business and entertainment spheres, unlocks new opportunities to increase the competitiveness of the web-based European industry”, explains the Commission.

As a result of this meeting, more bureaucracy was created. It’s called “steering group EU competitiveness on the web”. The members of the core layer of the Steering Group are representatives of social networks, online mobile gaming, web-based media, web end-to-end integrators, network service providers, public services providers, manufacturing industries, EU public administrations, and services industries. Interested organisations will also be represented through a second layer.

Top 10 countries in terms of Facebook penetration

Jose A. del Moral — Sat, 28 May 2011 21:30:11 +0000

The people at the Social Times have gone thru data from Facebook and ComScore in order to find out which countries have the highest Facebook penetration. This is: what a percentage of the online population is on Facebook. And these are the results:

1. Philippines: 94%
2. Israel: 91%
3. Turkey: 91%
4. Chile: 90%
5. Argentina: 89%
6. Malaysia: 88%
7. Indonesia: 87%
8. Peru: 87%
9. Colombia: 87%
10. Venezuela: 86%

Facebook becomes 3rd largest video sharing site in Spain

Jose A. del Moral — Tue, 17 May 2011 11:24:42 +0000

Facebook has become the third largest video sharing site in Spain, right after Google (Youtube) and Vevo. According to data from ComScore, in March every Spanish Internet user watched an average of 36 minutes of videos online every day, 17% more than one year ago. Taken to TV advertising measurement equivalents, this means 7,881 GRPs.

Top video sharing sites (march 2011):
1. Google sites (Youtube): 16.9 million people
2. Vevo: 4.4
3. Facebook: 4
4. Microsoft sites (Bing): 3.9
5. Dailymotion: 3.4
6. Viacom: 3
7. RCS (El Mundo, Recoletos): 2.9
8. Ustream.tv: 2.5
9. RTVE: 2.4
10. Mediaset (Telecinco): 2.3

Data from Vevo is quite strange, as currently it’s not possible to watch Vevo in Spain. Vevo is a music video site owned by Sony, Universal and Abu Dhabi Media. As Icaro Moyano tells me, this can only be explained by people watching Vevo videos inside Youtube.