2. Introduction
PURPOSE?
Overview of some global social media trends
Social networks
Blogging
Micro-blogging
Mobile
Good starting reference point for latest trends, stats, sites
Help with pitches
3. From the outset
BROADBAND: availability, speeds, costs = crucial
More than 17 million households in the UK, or 67.2% of the total population, will
subscribe to various broadband technologies in 2009
Globally, average broadband take-up was 56 per cent of households in 2007,
compared with 12 per cent in 2002
The UK is above average, with 60 per cent of households connected
The Netherlands leads the way with 81 per cent
Canada = 66 per cent / Sweden and US = 62 per cent and 61 per cent
Limited broadband access/high prices have slowed high penetration in some markets (eg
Italy/Spain) but situations are rapidly changing
BUT: there are also signs that growth rates in the broadband sector are slowing. Only the
USA and Germany have seen a higher growth rate in 2007 than in 2006
eMarketer Oct 2008
4. Clocking up the hours
How much time are we spending online?
The US leads the way at just over 15 hours per week in 2007 - up from 11 hours in
2004
The UK is second at nearly 14 hours per week, an increase of nearly 6.5 hours a
week in 2004
Canadians are the biggest social networkers with 55 per cent of internet users visiting
a social networking site.
More women than men are using the internet
Some 56 per cent of Italian women use the internet compared to 44 per cent of Italian men
Japanese and Spanish women follow at 55 per cent, with the UK and France having an
equal gender split. Women in the US are bucking this trend, at 48 per cent compared with 52
per cent of men using the internet.
5. Global overview: internet users
Internet users:
China: 253m
United States: 228m
Japan: 107m
India: 63m
Germany: 57.5m
Brazil: 50.8m
UK: 41.1m
France: 36.1m
Full list can be viewed here:
http://www.clickz.com/stats/web_worldwide
8. A closer look
FACEBOOK
Currently available in 15 languages
Canada has more active users than anyone else, outside US
with more than 7million
The UK is the third largest country
just under 7million users
Remaining top 10 countries (in order): Australia, Turkey, Sweden, Norway, South
Africa, France, Hong Kong
http://www.slideshare.net/onehalfamazing/social-networking-statistics-and-trends-
presentation
YOUTUBE
Currently in 19 regions across the globe in multiple languages
US, Japan, UK, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Ireland, France, Poland, Brazil, Canada,
Mexico, Australia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, New Zealand, Germany, Russia, Korea
LINKEDIN
More than 30 million people use LinkedIn, widely-regarded as one of the
more well-know social networking site for white-collar professionals
November 08 Metrics in Action
10. Germany cont.
Germans are very loyal to their social networks. Over 70 % said they will
remain long-term active users on their current network
85 % of all Germans who use the internet are members of social networks
The majority said they intend to use social networks via mobile phones in the
near future
Youtube, Clipfish, MyVideo and MySpace = most popular German sites
StudiVZ and Xing are extremely popular as is Niimo.com (like Twitter)
People using all these networks are between 23 and 47
StudiVZ: now one of the leading social platforms in Germany with about 13
million members
PWC study, April 2008
Facebook currently has 2 million members
Social media trend for 2009? Consolidation – large companies are going to
buy up the small ones
Ehssan Dariani, owner and founder of StudiVZ
11. A quick look at France
2009: 7 million users –
http://www.skyrock.com/blog/
fast growth
2009: 4 million bloggers
Over 50% of French bloggers use
Sky Rock as their blog platform
www.copainsdavant.linternaute.com
2009: 10 million users – slower growth
2009: 20,000
users only
12. France cont.
The French distinguish themselves, both statistically and anecdotally, ahead of
Germans, Britons and even Americans in their obsession with blogs
60 per cent of French Internet users visited a blog in May, ahead of Britain with 40
percent and little more than a third in the United States
Comscore
Likewise, French bloggers spent more than an hour in June visiting France's top-
rated blog site, far ahead of the 12 minutes spent by Americans doing the same and
less than 3 minutes for Germans
Nielsen/NetRatings
More than three million Internet users, or more than 12 percent of those online in
France have created a blog
Médiamétrie
French blogs stands out in other measurable ways
Longer, more critical, more ego-centric, more negative and more provocative than US/UK
CRM Metrix
14. It’s all about Twitter!
Twitter is dominated by newer users - 70% of Twitter users joined in 2008
There are currently over 6m users signed up to Twitter
An estimated 5-10 thousand new accounts are opened per day
35% of Twitter users have 10 or fewer followers
9% of Twitter users follow no one at all
There is a strong correlation between the number of followers you have and the
number of people you follow
Hubspot: Q4 08 report
15. The global rise of Twitter
http://www.webanalyticsworld.net/2009/02/twitter-facebook-up-myspace-technorati.html
Twitter visitors up over 750% from last year:
17. Going mobile
Nearly half of social networking users (46%) have visited a social network on a
mobile device
Out of those users, 70% have visited MySpace and 67% have visited Facebook
No other social network, including those specialized for mobile devices, even reached
15% adoption
Based on these numbers, ABI Research concludes that consumers do not want
new social networks for mobile phones - they just want to interact with the social
networks where they're already members
Out of those users, only 1% had visited a social network on their phone only.
ABI Research (November 2008)
With the rise of smartphone-based computing, applications like Brightkite, Loopt, and
others are slowly growing their user base
Bebo - quot;Bebo Open Mobilequot; whose goal is to provide the mobile industry with tools
designed to help integrate the site and its services into manufacturers' handsets – O2
as first UK carrier last month (Beta in December saw 60% growth in traffic in just four
weeks)
Nokia currently in talks with Facebook
Google recently announced a new mobile location-aware application called Latitude,
which lets you track your friends' whereabouts using your mobile phone
18. Mobile cont.
Mobile social networking is helping drive mobile web usage into the mainstream in
Western Europe, where the number of users accessing social nets with their phones
jumped 152 percent from November 2007 to November 2008
ComScore
That translates into some 12.1 million users across the UK, France, Germany, Italy
and Spain all using their phones to access social nets
Leading the way are the British with the highest penetration of mobile social
networking at 9 percent in the three months ending November 2008
Average penetration across all countries is 5 percent
In the three-month average period ending November 2008, 34 percent of phone
owners in Western Europe who visited social networking sites accessed social media
exclusive of all other mobile Web content
Comscore
Women make up nearly half of the audience (48 percent) exclusively visiting social
nets, but only 32 percent who access other forms of mobile web content
19. *Includes top five countries listed.
Mobile
Mobile search via mobile device
June 2007 – June 2008
US and Western Europe
Source: ComScore
Country June 2007 June 2008 Percent change
France 1,483 2,196 48%
Germany 1,316 1,837 40%
Italy 2,010 2,810 40%
Spain 923 1,293 40%
UK 3,454 4,497 30%
Europe 9,186 12,633 38%
US 12,353 20,793 68%
20. Further afield: US
105 million Americans participate in social media
In 2008, 79.5 million people—41% of the US Internet user population—visited social
network sites at least once a month, an 11% increase over the previous year
Seven million are considered quot;heavyquot; social media contributors
This is defined as people who participate in six or more activities and connect with at least
248 people on a one-to-many basis on a typical week. The most popular platforms include
Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, LinkedIn, Twitter, Digg, and Yelp
Time spent communicating online went from 27 percent of time online in 2006 to 32
percent in 2008
This includes activities such as e-mail, instant messaging, posting to blogs, and photo
sharing
Time devoted to entertaining activities online went from 49 percent of the time spent
online in 2006 to 20 percent two years later
Entertainment was defined as participating in online games, accessing videos, and
accessing Web sites for fun
54 percent of micro-bloggers post content or quot;tweetquot; daily
NetPop Research, March 2009
21. US cont.
Across the Web, social networking sites experienced a 13 percent gain in U.S.
audience from December 2007 to December 2008
Top Social Networking Sites by Unique Visitors, December 2008
Property December 2007 December 2008 Change (%)
(000) (000)
Total 183,619 190,650 4
Internet
audience
Social 120,201 135,715 13
networking
audience
MySpace.co 68,905 75,919 10
m
Facebook 34,658 54,552 57
Flickr 13,540 20,698 53
Classmates 10,002 16,553 66
For full list, visit:
Online
http://www.clickz.com/3632665
MyLife.com* N/A 15,018 N/A
*
Buzznet 4,973 9,781 97
AOL 40 9,208 22,701
Community
22. US podcasts
Podcast growth will continue at least through 2013, when there will be 37.6 million
people downloading podcasts on a monthly basis – more than double the 2008 figure
of 17.4 million
As a percentage of internet users, podcast downloaders will grow from 9% in 2008 to
17% in 2013
Males between 18 and 29 are the most common downloaders
Emarketers
http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?id=1006937
25. Asia: China
Chinese govt roles in Social media
The focus has primarily been on internet content, and bloggers are affected. But, social media is
beyond blogging and can be contained in micro venues of social network pages, comments, and
Twitter. As social media continues to pervade in China, it goes to reason that the government is
looking at these outlets as well. It may only be a matter of time before it focuses attention here.
http://brain-vibe.com/2009/02/09/china-governments-role-in-social-media/
26. Asia: India
India had 45.3 million active internet users and 62.5 million claimed internet users in
September 2008
IAMAI & IMRB International
India’s mobile subscriber base topped 350 million users by end of 2008
Its network is the second largest in the world after China
ITU Telecom Asia
27. The global future?
Filters: are rapidly becoming a pertinent issue for developers of social media
services. As a result, social aggregation platforms are in the perfect position to
lead the pack
Challenge: not becoming too noisy
New real-time web app launches that integrates Twitter, FriendFeed & more
iTunes adds social networking features; but it's still a closed development system
Facebook signs up to OpenSocial
Facebook Connect authentication will become dominant method for authentication on
the web
Twitter will start to make more and more money
Twitter is going to continue to grow and eventually get acquired, while Facebook is
going to see further decline
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/social_media_trends_2009.php
28. The global future
•Uber blogs
•blogs that combines different content streams into one large blog with one primary top level
URL, will explode in 2009
•In 2009 big will be better. Not big networks of many sites, but big blogs that break out of the
narrow niche focus that has been typical of commercial blogging until now, and instead go
wide in content but focused on one brand and one URL.
•Duncan Riley, December 2008
•Blog Posts to Become More Interactive
RSS is fantastic but it's a pull in technology. It's not real time
get to a point where Twitter and FriendFeed are mechanisms for this, where blog posts
become a lot more interactive
Matt Mullenweg
29. Summary
Social media is a global phenomenon happening in all markets regardless of wider
economic, social and cultural development
If you are online you are using social media
US / UK very much leading social media revolution, Europe playing catch up
However, emerging markets must not be ignored!
Asian markets are leading in terms of participation, creating more content than any
other region
China has the largest blogging community in the world with 42m bloggers, more than the US
and Western Europe combined
India will soon be a force to be reckoned with – watch this space
Facebook, Twitter, blogging here to stay
Mobile is the next big thing for 2009 as is social aggregation and filtering
That said, globally, (over 17 markets of the world) well over half the population (58%)
do not know what social networking is
Synovate 2009
Constant education, evolution…WATCH THIS SPACE