The Podium
Blog posts tagged with 'Social Media'
Wednesday, May 22
By Brad
A new report from Pew finds that teenagers are increasingly sharing information about themselves on social networks. Some numbers from the report:
• 91% post a photo of themselves, up from 79% in 2006.
• 71% post their school name, up from 49%.
• 71% post the city or town where they live, up from 61%.
• 53% post their email address, up from 29%.
• 20% post their cell phone number, up from 2%.
Also in the report: 95% of teens use the Internet, and a whopping 81% of them use social media sites, the most popular of which is still Facebook (though Twitter and Instagram are making up ground).
Monday, May 20
By Brad
According to Alexis Kleinman of the Huffington Post, there are a whole lot of non-humans active on Facebook:
Facebook loves to talk about its ridiculously high number of users. Yes, Facebook has a whole lot of accounts, but many of them aren’t humans. eMarketer released an analysis of Facebook’s audience, and it turns out more than 10 percent of Facebook’s reported monthly users are not human. Over 100 million active Facebook users are pets, objects or brands.
Weird.
By Brad
Search giant Yahoo! has just shelled out $1.1 billion to acquire blogging service Tumblr. From Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer’s official Tumblr page:
We promise not to screw it up. Tumblr is incredibly special and has a great thing going. We will operate Tumblr independently. David Karp will remain CEO. The product roadmap, their team, their wit and irreverence will all remain the same as will their mission to empower creators to make their best work and get it in front of the audience they deserve. Yahoo! will help Tumblr get even better, faster.
Monday, April 29
By Brad
When the Associated Press’ Twitter account was hacked last week, false tweets that the White House had been attacked led to a tumble in the markets. Examining the fallout, Amy Chozick and Nicole Perlroth of the New York Times report financial institutions are taking a good look at the effect social media can have on the stock market:
On Tuesday, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission plans to hold a public meeting in Washington with a couple of dozen high-frequency traders to discuss whether there should be additional safeguards to protect against the effects of social media on markets.
Even as markets rebounded on Tuesday, some investors lost money on the quick decline while others made money if they bet on a sharp drop.
“In 2010, we passed Dodd-Frank, the big financial reform bill, but nowhere in there do they mention high-speed trading or technology,” said Bart Chilton, a member of the trading commission. “That’s how quickly markets are morphing. Now, here we are three years later, woefully unprepared.”
Friday, April 05
By Brad
Yesterday, legendary film critic Roger Ebert lost his battle with cancer. At paidContent, Matthew Ingram highlights Ebert’s full embrace of social media when he lost his voice:
After a long battle with cancer — which took away his vocal chords and eventually most of his lower jaw — veteran Chicago-based film critic Roger Ebert passed away on Thursday, leaving a host of passionate film buffs mourning his loss. Many of those fans likely formed an even closer connection to him after he could no longer speak without the aid of a computer, because of his enthusiastic use of Twitter and other social-media tools. He may have been just a movie reviewer to some, but mainstream journalists of all kinds could learn a lot from his example.
Friday, March 15
By Brad
Via David Goldman of CNN Money, Wednesday’s announcement of new Pope Francis gave the Internet a jolt:
Overall Web traffic peaked at 32% above normal Wednesday, according to Akamai’s real-time monitor. About 20% of the world’s Internet traffic flows through Akamai’s servers, making it one of the largest content delivery networks on Earth.
Total social traffic on Akamai’s giant network peaked at 2:20 p.m. ET, about 10 minutes after white smoke rose from a chimney above Rome’s Sistine Chapel. Social traffic served by Akamai nearly reached the same level an hour later when Francis emerged from the balcony atop St. Peter’s Basilica.
Unsurprisingly, the biggest Internet traffic spike occurred in South America, where social network traffic jumped more than 50%. Francis is the first non-European pope in more than 1,000 years and the first Latin American pope in the church’s history.
Also of interest, Twitter hit a high of 130,000 tweets a minute, which was close to the benchmark hit during this year’s Super Bowl.
Monday, February 04
By Brad
24.1 million, which is the number of tweets during this year’s Super Bowl. Via Stan Schroeder of Mashable:
Twitter counts tweet volume in tweets per minute, and by that measure, Beyonce was the biggest star of the event, with the conclusion of her show generating 268,000 TPM.
The end of the game generated 183,000 TPM, and the 108-yard kickoff return TD for the Ravens by Jacoby Jones generated 185,000 TPM. Still, both moments were bested by the power outage in the second half, which generated 231,500 TPM.
About that power outage, which delayed the game for over an hour, the Huffington Post’s Jillian Berman reports the blackout turned into an advertising win for enterprising — and fast — companies:
Just minutes after the blackout started brands began bidding for the search term “power outage” on Twitter, according to Bloomberg. While television commentators bumbled to stall up time, brands ranging from Walgreen’s to Audi turned to the social media platform and got themselves in front of millions of eyes, the Financial Times reports. And it seemed to work; one clever Twitter post by Oreo was retweeted at least 13,100 times, according to Bloomberg.
Friday, February 01
By Brad
This Sunday is the Super Bowl, and over at CNBC Julia Boorstin previews what the big game will mean for Twitter:
Twitter is expecting thousands of tweets-per-second, making it one of its biggest events ever. Tweets have become such a powerful tool for advertisers that Nielsen, which last year announced a partnership with Twitter, is releasing a new metric to show the value of the “second screen.”
Here’s an amazing statistic: a Nielsen study revealed that a third of people using Twitter are tweeting about content they’re watching. And Twitter found that 65 percent of people are accessing Twitter via mobile devices while watching television.
Interestingly, Boorstin reports half of the commercials airing during the game will feature Twitter hashtags. Two years ago, only one ad employed a hashtag.
Tuesday, December 11
By Brad
1 billion, which is the number of unique users Twitter now has. That’s a lot of people chirping 130 characters at a time. (Via Mashable.)
Friday, October 05
By Brad
Via Kristen A. Lee of the New York Daily News comes a look at how popular Twitter was during Wednesday night’s presidential debate:
Twitter users sent a record 10.3 million tweets — a new milestone in the revolution of how Americans take part in the political process.
With their iPads and cell phones, millions of people virtually joined the candidates on the debate stage, analyzing their every word in real time.
The last Twitter record was set during Obama’s convention speech last month, which triggered 52,757 tweets per minute at one point.
Thursday, July 19
By Brad
It’s election season, which means voter registration efforts are well underway. And as Rachel La Corte of the Associated Press reports, one state is test-driving an innovative new way to register more voters:
Facebook users in Washington state will have something else to brag about to their online friends: that they registered to vote on Facebook.
The secretary of state’s office said Tuesday it will have an application on its Facebook page that allows residents to register to vote and then “like” the application and recommend it to their friends. It’s expected to launch as early as next week.
Tuesday, July 17
By Brad
Over at Mashable, Sam Laird uses the upcoming Olympics to examine how mobile — and social — our lives have become since the last summer games of 2008:
The increase in mobile technology is sure to have a profound effect on how millions of viewers — and many athletes — experience the 2012 Games. Fans will be able to converse, debate and rave communally as never before because of mobile proliferation and the explosive growth of social media over the past four years.
Included with the story is an infographic. Some of the startling stats: Smartphone adoption increased a staggering 456% since the 2008 games, and the number of tweets per day jumped from just 1.1 million to 140 million.
(Speaking of technology and major sporting events, earlier this year we tried to predict how many hours of streaming video would be watched during the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. You can check out our prediction here.)
Monday, July 09
By Brad
Via George Winslow of Broadcasting & Cable, CNN is looking to make its election coverage more social:
CNN has announced a partnership with Facebook for its 2012 election coverage that will include a second screen “I’m Voting” app, user analytics, surveys and other interactive applications that will be available to CNN’s on-air, mobile and online audiences and Facebook 160 million U.S. users.
Friday, April 06
By Brad
Here’s something cool. Via Anna M. Phillips of the New York Times, a kindergarten teacher in New York is embracing the power of social media:
“Tweet, tweet, tweet!” chirped the kindergartners in Jennifer Aaron’s class last week, as they settled onto the multicolored carpet and began to consider what they would like to send out into the Twitter universe that day.
Three days a week, as the school day draws to a close, the children in Ms. Aaron’s class sit down to compose a message about what they have been doing all day. They then send it out to their parents and relatives through Twitter, the stamping grounds of celebrities and politicians, where few kindergartners have been known to venture.
Thursday, March 29
By Brad
That’s when Facebook will launch its initial public offering (IPO), according to Matt Lynley of Business Insider. Given there are now close to 900 million users of the service worldwide, Facebook hitting the market just might turn out to be a big deal.
Friday, March 23
By Brad
In response to recent stories that some employers have been asking potential hires for their social media passwords, Facebook is weighing in. As Mashable’s Sarah Kessler reports:
“This practice undermines the privacy expectations and the security of both the user and the user’s friends,” [Facebook’s chief privacy officer Erin] Egan wrote on the Facebook Privacy blog. “It also potentially exposes the employer who seeks this access to unanticipated legal liability.”
Among the risks to employers, Egan says, are that they will come across information such as age or sexual orientation that could open them up to claims of discrimination if the applicant doesn’t get the job. Employers may also become responsible for information they uncover while pursuing private profiles, such as that which suggests a crime.
Tuesday, February 07
By Brad
Social networking services like Facebook and Twitter may have gobs of users, but a new report from Pew finds that when it comes to political news during this campaign season, cable news is still dominating. From Pew:
Very few Americans regularly learn about the campaign from Facebook (6%) or Twitter (2%). This partly reflects the fact that these social networks are not used at all by large numbers of Americans. But even among Twitter users, just 17% say they regularly learn about the presidential election from Twitter; another 24% say they sometimes learn about the campaign this way. Most Twitter users say they hardly ever (19%) or never (40%) learn about the election from Twitter.
Similarly, only about one-in-ten (11%) people who use social networking sites, such as Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn, say they regularly learn about the campaign from Facebook and another quarter say they sometimes do. Almost half of social networkers (46%) say they never learn about the election there. Another 17% say they hardly ever learn about the campaign from Facebook.
Not surprisingly, younger Americans are more engaged via social networks, but Pew’s study also points out that so far the younger generations aren’t as engaged in campaigns as they were four years ago.
Wednesday, November 02
By Brad
With America warming up for the 2012 election, Dan Rowinski of Read Write Web points to a number of surveys showing a link between active social media users and registered voters:
The Digitas survey had 2,361 results from U.S. adults aged 18 and over. The survey said that 86% of social media users own a mobile phone and 88% of those social media mobile phone users are registered voters. Of that slice, social media users with mobile phones aged 18-34, 24% said that it was important to receive information about candidates to their devices.
Rowinski’s full article is worth checking out.
Wednesday, June 22
By Brad
According to a new study from Pew, users of Facebook are more engaged in politics. Reports Eliza Krigman of Politico:
Someone who visits Facebook multiple times per day is 2 times more likely to attend a political rally or meeting, 57 percent more likely to influence someone else’s vote and 43 percent more likely to have said he or she would vote, the survey found.
Interestingly, the career-focused social site LinkedIn is tops when it comes to users taking their political activity to the voting booth.
Thursday, March 10
By Brad
At Foreign Policy, Joshua Keating reports that in the wake of Egypt’s recent revolution, the government of Cameroon — hoping to stave off a possible revolution of its own — has officially banned Twitter.
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