Studies & Stats

Facebook The Most Engaging Social Network

This report actually surprises me a bit.  Pingdom, a web monitoring site, has announced that Facebook is the “most engaging social network.”

“Figuring out how engaging a site is can be tricky,” said Pindgom’s blog post.  “We could look at the number of page views per visit, but that number alone doesn’t really tell us much. We also need to take into consideration how often visitors come back to a site. After all, if we return frequently to a site and also view many pages when we do, it’s likely that find the site engaging.” (more…)

Google Gains Lead, Bing & Yahoo Fall Behind

The most recent report from Nielsen, shows that Google continues to dominate the search engines, but the most surprising news, is that they are gaining more users. The report documents the top 10 search engines for the month of December.  Google took 67.3% of those searches.  That’s nearly 6.7 billion people searching Google, compare that to only 1.4 billion on Yahoo!, which followed Google with only 14.4%.   That’s a drop from November, when Yahoo took roughly 15.3% of searches.  That’s close to an entire percent, which is drastic in terms of search.  Bing dropped to 9.9% of all searches, which is down from 10.7% in November.  It looks like those users went over to Google, since in November Google only had 65% of searches in November but jumped 2.3%.  (more…)

Social Media News Brief: Jan. 6, 2010

Facebook decided to dominate Google once again, while Google is trying to make an attempt to bring Apple iPhone sales down.  Find out all the details in today’s social media news brief. (more…)

2009 Online Holiday Shopping Ends High

The numbers are in from the 2009 online holiday shopping season, and it could be a good sign for the economy.  In the report from comScore, the e-commerce industry faired better than the same time in 2008. 

“During [November 1- December 24], approximately $27 Billion was spent online, which represents an increase of 5 percent over the same period a year ago,” said the comScore Press Release. For the period from Black Friday through Christmas Eve, and after adjusting for the additional shopping day in 2009, sales grew by approximately 3.5 percent.” (more…)

Facebook’s Trends of 2009

As I predicted earlier this month, everyone is pumping out data from the what happened this year.  Last week, I shared with you some of Twitter’s most tweeted words.  Now this week, Facebook has decided to share some of the most talked about topics through status updates. 

“Status updates on Facebook help people understand their friends and the people around them–how they’re feeling, what they’re doing and what they’re thinking,” says Facebook’s Lars Backstrom in a Facebook statement. “In the United States alone, people on Facebook are sharing hundreds of millions of words every day, thousands per second, in status updates. When taken as a whole, these words offer a unique barometer into the issues, world events and thoughts that are connecting people.” (more…)

The Most Tweeted Words of 2009

This has been quite the year for Twitter.  Becoming the most popular word of the year, according to the Global Language Monitor, and even a source for breaking news, Twitter is just getting started.  

It’s hard to imagine Twitter without a checking out the current trending topics, but the feature was just released in April along with the Twitter search tool, allowing you to type a certain word or phrase and tweets with those keywords will appear.  Using the trending topics has become a great way to stay up-to-date in pop culture, and news headlines from around the world.  In fact, many Twitter users found out that Michael Jackson had died about 45 minutes before those watching the developments on television.  Twitter was also great to watch during the American Idol finale, as it was the first time American Idol winner, Kris Allen, took the top spot beating out Adam Lambert, who was the number one trending topic every week until that night.  As we near 2010, Twitter has decided to take a look at some of the most interesting trending topics of the year.  (more…)

Facebook’s Safety Board Created

Facebook has always been on top, when it comes to user privacy and keeping their information secure.  On Monday, Facebook announced they were in the process of forming the Global Advisory Board.  The group consists of five organizations including Common Sense Media, ConnectSafely, WiredSafety, Childnet International and The Family Online Safety Institute.

Facebook plans on regularly meeting with the group to get up to date information on security issues, to help protect user information. (more…)

Facebook Passes 350 Million Users, Big Changes Coming

Just the other week, we told that if Facebook were a nation, it’s population would be much larger than the United States.  While that remains true, Facebook’s population seems to be exploding.  Late last night, Facebook CEO & Founder Mark Zuckerberg had sent out an open letter to all of it’s users.  While we reported less than a month ago, that Facebook had 325 million users, Zuckerberg officially announced the site has more than 350 million users.  That is a tremendous increase just within the past month alone. 

Facebook has seen it’s number’s grow drastically this year, more than doubling in population.  Taking a look back, in August of 2008, the popular social networking site had just 100 million users.  It then took nearly 5 months for Facebook to gain 50 million users.  Since then, the site has grown on average 50 million users every 3-4 months.  This year alone, Facebook has gained 200 million users, and there are no signs of slowing down. (more…)

Social Media Turns #Red

December 1 marks World AIDS Day, a one-day campaign to bring awareness to the AIDS epidemic in Africa.  Known as (RED), Nike, along with Internet powerhouses Facebook, Twitter & Google are all trying to bring awareness to the campaign which was started by Bono & Bobby Shriver in 2006. 

Facebook has an entire (RED) fan page, which includes a video explaining more about the campaign.  One of the neatest features you can do through the site is make a contribution.  It’s not just a donation though, it’s an entire store full of items, ranging from Starbucks gift cards, t-shirts, and even a red Dell laptop.  100% of the proceeds go towards the campaign.  Just by shopping, you could help someone with HIV/AIDS in Africa. (more…)

Cyber Monday Sales Better Than Expected

Results are already pouring in from yesterday’s Cyber Monday sales.  While sales were expected to fall compared to last year, they actually grew 13.7%, a significant increase considering the current economy. 

The report comes from Coremetrics Inc, a web analyst company based out of California.  The report also indicated that people spent more money for online sales Monday, compared to Black Friday. (more…)