Statistics

A new study from content-sharing firm Shareaholic has revealed that the social sharing platform Pinterest, which was established less than two years ago, is now the fastest-growing site for referral traffic.

In January, Pinterest drove only a fraction less referral traffic than both Twitter and Google, and more than Google+, YouTube and LinkedIn combined.

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Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. The online event and workshop will feature speakers including Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Michael Brito (Edelman Digital), and Tim Devane (bitly). Register now.

It stands to reason that the United States, the birth-country of Twitter, would be the number one in terms of users. And it is. By far. But new stats have been unveiled that suggest that numbers don’t mean everything, and that the US is actually behind the Netherlands (and two other countries) in terms of how often they tweet.
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Even though the internet is becoming less and less anonymous, people are still treating it like a free-for-all without rules or repercussions. At least according to a recent poll conducted to see just how responsible people are on Twitter and Facebook.
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Twitter has released data showing the network’s reaction to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and while the response didn’t quite stand up to the efforts made by Wikipedia, Reddit and other online communities, Twitter was good for 2.4 million SOPA-related tweets between midnight and 4pm ET.

Not bad, but when you consider that the recent TV screening of 1986 animated movie Castle In The Sky in Japan triggered 25,088 tweets per second (TPS) – or over 3 million tweets in two minutes – it perhaps wasn’t the all-encompassing smackdown that the world anticipated.

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Eeezer have updated their monthly infographic on how airlines are using Twitter (see our updates on this for November, October and September.)

AirAsia was the most popular airline in December, receiving over seventeen thousand tweets from its followers, ahead of American Airlines and EasyJet.

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Disclaimer: Because the company isn’t exactly forthcoming with registration data, calculating Twitter’s userbase is as much guesswork as it is science, so take this analysis with the usual hefty pinch. That as it is, there is some history here, so bear that in mind too.

As you may have seen, Facebook has been tipped to reach one billion active users in August of this year. That’s an absolutely amazing number – approximately 14 percent of the world’s population. What’s even more impressive is these are active users, Facebook’s definition of which is people who log in at least once a month. Which doesn’t seem particularly active, to be honest, but this has essentially become the industry standard now.

So how does Twitter compare?

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New data from Experian Hitwise has revealed how Facebook and, increasingly, YouTube dominate social networking traffic in the United Kingdom, with the two platforms combined accounting for over three quarters of all visits to social networking sites in the UK in December.

YouTube posted the biggest gains month-on-month (1.41 percent) and year-on-year, with the video sharing website seeing an additional 7.37 percent in UK traffic since December 2010. This seems to have come at the expense of Facebook, which posted a surprising -7.21 percent share loss in the UK over the past year.

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With the news that Twitter would begin hosting its own photos, it’s no surprise that photo sharing really took off last year – but just how much might surprise you.

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According to comScore, there’s only one country in the entire world where Twitter is more popular than Facebook. Can you guess which one it is?
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Was 2011 the year of social media?

Facebook now commands more than 800 million active users, adding more than 200 million of those in the last year alone. Twitter now boasts 100 million active users, about a fifth of whom are in the USA. LinkedIn has 64 million users in North America alone, and used this tally to launch a successful IPO back in May.

Moreover, these social platforms also now play a major role in the way that we receive and share news, as well as becoming an important, on-the-spot source of news themselves.

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