Top 10 Social Networking Sites by Market Share of Visits [July 2012]

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Published on Thursday, 23 August 2012 20:38

By Priit Kallas

Twitter broke through the 2% level with 2.06% of market share of visits in July 2012. This is the highest percentage of market share for them, ever. Twitter has posted 10 months of solid growth and the trend continues.

Yelp the user review, and local search web site is out of the top 10 it’s replaced by MeetMe.

MeetMe has been in the top 10 list for year as it was formerly known MyYearbook. MyYearbook has been on this list for ages but the main trend has been down throughout that time. Now it’s back on the tenth position under the name MeetMe with 0.38 percent of market share.

Slowly, but Google+ moves upward. Google+ has reached 0.87 percent which is smallest gain recorded for the search giants social effort since it entered the list in November 2011.

Pinterest has bounced back up to 0.98 percent of market share. This is almost as much as they had in February when the pinning site started to slide. This is a really big jump an it was followed on August 8 by finally opening the registration for all users. Another big announcement from Pinterest was launcing Pinterest apps for Android, iPad and iPhone.

However, I don’t think that they really get mobile. The post announcing mobile apps ends with optimistic “Happy (mobile) Pinning!” but it’s not really clear how to pin photos you take on the go.

All that being said doesn’t change the fact that Pinterest is number 4 on the list. It is likely to go even higher in the short future.

Other sites: LinkedIn moved down slightly, from 0.75 to 0.72 percent of market share of visits. August might still be weak for LinkedIn but from September it should start moving up again.

Market Share of Visits [July 2012] for the top 3:

• Facebook 62.21% (-)
• Youtube 20.30% (+)
• Twitter 2.06% (+)

Read Full Article at DreamGrow.com

Would you pay for an ad-free Twitter (or Facebook)?

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Published on Monday, 13 August 2012 21:41

By Doug Gross, CNN

(CNN) -- Sure, lots of folks might be excited about a Twitter-like social network with no ads or annoying "promoted tweets."

But would they pay for it?

The founders of App.net think so, and so far they've found more than 10,000 people who agree with them.

The startup promises a "real-time feed" that will never be supported by ads. Instead, they'll charge a fee that, at least for now, looks to be about $50. That's how much it took to support a Kickstarter-like fundraising campaign that has netted more than $670,000 and wraps up Monday.

Founder and CEO Dalton Caldwell says he's been disappointed by the advertising models of sites like Twitter and Facebook and thinks users will be willing to plunk down money for an alternative.

"If we're selling a service, our customers are our users and our job is to make our users happy," he said in a video promoting the service. "If we have a free, ad-supported service, our customers are our advertisers and our job is to make our advertisers happy.

"I think that a lot of the friction we're seeing from these disappointing services are just a reflection that all the financial incentive has to do with pleasing advertisers and not the user base."

The logic contains plenty of not-so-veiled swipes at both Twitter and Facebook. After gaining widespread popularity with no real means of making money, Twitter has begun selling promoted tweets, promoted trends and promoted accounts.

But it's also kept a firm grip on its ecosystem by not allowing much leeway for outside developers to tinker.

Caldwell promises to do the opposite.

The multibillion-dollar profits of Facebook come primarly from advertising, leading to a commonly repeated line that Caldwell appears to echo: "If you're not paying for a service, you're not the customer -- you're the product."

(If that wasn't clear enough, there's also the bristly open letter Caldwell wrote to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg earlier this month, in which he pledges "to never write another line of code for rotten-to-the-core 'platforms' like Facebook or Twitter.")

But the question remains: Will users be willing to pay to use a social network? It would be a model that's never been successful before.

Read Full Article at CNN.com

Why Google Needs to Concentrate on Google+ Hangouts

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Published on Monday, 30 July 2012 17:55

The Feature stands out among other social networks

Written By: Jesse Bouman

Scottish scientist Alexander Flemming will forever be remembered as the man who discovered penicillin. But his discovery was largely serendipitous. Flemming was originally studying the properties of staphylococci and one day discovered a blue-green mold that turned out to be penicillin. Google is out to establish themselves in the social realm, but their latest attempt, Google+ is falling flat. However, Google may have stumbled upon their own penicillin, something that might actually give them credibility in the social sphere… Google+ Hangouts.

 

Google+ Hangouts is the video chat feature of Google+. Users can chat with up to nine other users on one chat, watch YouTube videos together, share their screen, record the session, and broadcast the live chat. With online video continuing to grow rapidly, I believe that Hangouts is what Google must focus on moving forward, turning it into its own social network, in order to succeed in social.

 

Google+ Hangouts is the one Google+ feature that stands out among other social networks. While many point to Circles as the distinguishing feature, Circles requires users to curate their own Circles, which is far too demanding. Facebook and Twitter have both failed at their attempts at manual lists. But Hangouts is an excellent feature that can be built out. For example, it’s a much better experience for business conference calls than Skype. Users’ ability to share their screen and record the session is a great asset for businesses. Especially small businesses, the same companies that use many of Google’s other business products (i.e. corporate Gmail, Google Docs, etc).  No other social network offers a feature that performs like Google+ Hangouts.

 

Google fell into the trap of slow corporate development and dull creativity. They built a social network according to the traditional blueprint of recent social networks. And they had to launch it with every feature they thought users would enjoy. They didn’t have the luxury of being a scrappy startup whose limited resources force them to focus on one vertical. But if Google had done this and focused on Hangouts, I think they could be far more advanced in social than they currently are.

 

Full Article at Technology-Digital.com

Celebrity Endorsements and Twitter: Do We Buy Things When Celebrities Tell Us To?

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Published on Wednesday, 25 July 2012 02:30

By Olivia Roat

With the ever-growing power of social media, more companies are shelling out increasing amounts of cash to advertise on sites like Facebook and Twitter. According to Bloomberg, social-media-ad spending is expected to reach a total of $4.8 billion at the end of 2012 and $9.8 billion by 2016.

While there is a shift underway in the advertising world from investing money in TV spots and magazine ads to purchasing Facebook’s sponsored stories and Twitter’s sponsored tweets, one thing remains the same across different marketing mediums: the use of celebrities to push products. It’s a tactic that has been around for decades (does anyone remember those over-the-top Cindy Crawford Pepsi commercials from the ‘90s?)—and one that is being recycled and reinvented for our current digitally saturated society.

There is solid evidence that suggests that celebrity endorsements (both compensated and uncompensated) can skyrocket a product from relative obscurity to nationwide recognition. The Oprah Effect is probably the best-known example of celebrity-induced rise to commercial fame. Oprah is so influential that she has a Midas-like touch: any product she mentions on her show or bills as one of her “Favorite Things” and any book she selects for her book club gain the attention of millions. Just like some YouTube videos, these products go viral. People want them, think that they need them, and buy them. When Oprah selected Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina for her book club in 2004, the 19^th-century novel reached #1 on USA Today’s Best-Selling Books list. After Oprah featured the book lights and magnifiers from LightWedge on a December 2007 episode, the company website, which previously averaged $3,700 in sales per day, made $90,000 in sales in a single afternoon.

New Time, New Tweet

Oprah isn’t the only celebrity with commercial clout, hence the inability to watch a TV show without seeing at least one celebrity-endorsed ad. But with the millions of people on Twitter, companies now believe they cannot survive on media and print ads alone. It’s a new time in the advertising world. Enter, the sponsored tweet. Celebs (I use that term loosely, because some of the people who send out sponsored tweets are reality stars) broadcast their support for products through tweets like these:

To marketers and advertisers, these stars have two things that make them the perfect product pushers: influence and thousands (sometimes millions) of followers.

Companies who solicit celebs to tweet on behalf of their products believe in the “to make money you have to spend money” philosophy. And spend money they do—a lot of it. These sponsored tweets are not cheap, especially tweets sent out by celebs with a high follower count. According to Vulture, Snoop Dogg makes $8,000 for a single tweet; Kim Kardashian gets paid $10,000, and Charlie Sheen collected a $50,000 per tweet when he plugged Internships.com.

The tweet by Busy Phillips advertising Bacardi appeared on my timeline recently and prompted me to start thinking about the effectiveness of sponsored tweets. Companies spend thousands of dollars banking on the fact that people will take commercial advice from actors, singers, athletes, and reality stars and model their consumer behavior on that of their favorite stars. They hope that we will be influenced by those who are influential.

NYC Pay Phones Get Free WiFi Service In New Pilot Program

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Published on Sunday, 22 July 2012 02:16

By FAY ABUELGASIM

NEW YORK -- New Yorkers have been making fewer and fewer calls on the city's 12,000 pay phones, yet the kiosks will likely be getting heavier use soon.

The city announced Wednesday a pilot program that has converted 10 kiosks in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens into free Wi-Fi Internet hotspots. The plan is to expand the program to all 12,000 pay phones in the city.

"We are taking an existing infrastructure and leveraging it up to provide more access to information," said Rahul Merchant, the city's chief information officer, at a kiosk located at Broadway and 58th Street.

Merchant said the program is part of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's effort to help New Yorkers and the 50 million people who visit the city each year stay connected.

The pay phones remain, but a router is installed at each kiosk. The Internet signal extends a couple of hundred feet, Merchant said.

Users simply approach the kiosk with an Internet device and log on. No password is needed. They can connect for as long as they need, 24 hours a day.

Merchant said the city's plan is not to remove pay phones, but to improve them. The Van Wagner and Titan outdoor advertising companies, which own more than 9,000 kiosks combined, are working with the city to add the hotspot devices and are paying about $2,000 for each setup, said Peter Izzo, Van Wagner's senior operations executive.

"With cellphone companies limiting 3G and 4G access, we saw a growing need for free Wi-Fi," Izzo said.

Cellphones have been driving down pay phone use for years, but Izzo said there were 25 million pay phone calls made in New York City last year.

Izzo said the companies hope traffic to the hot spots – and the advertising there – will generate more advertising profit.

The city will ask the public for feedback and take it into account as the program expands.

Read Full Article at HuffingtonPost.com