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I’m a big fan of infographics, and the latest from Online Schools: Obsessed with Facebook is great visual of Facebook in 2010.

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The following is by no means a comprehensive list, but a starting point towards creating one.

If you know of any other pages that can be added to the list, let me know (minimum 10,000 likes).

To get an idea of where these pages sit on a global scale, here are some benchmarks:

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Sysomos recently conducted a two-month study of 1.2 billion tweets with the following results:

• 71% of Tweets garner no response
• 29% of all tweets produced a reaction
• 23% elicit a reply
• only 6% of all tweets produce a retweet
• 92.4% of all retweets happen within the first hour of the original tweet
• an additional 1.63% of retweets happen in the second hour
• 0.94% take place in the third hour
• 96.9% of @ replies happen within the first hour of the original tweet being published
• only 0.88% of replies happen in the second hour

Quick Insight: If you’re thinking about creating a Twitter profile for your organisation make sure you have a solid strategy for creating a follower base and building engagement (in fact, this is the case for any social media endeavour!). Ensure you create interesting content that is likely to be retweeted or elicit a response within the first hour.

See more at Mashable, original article at Sysomos.

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Is there really a war between traditional news outlets and social media? The way we consume media is changing and traditional news is not as trusted as it once once, they need to get smarter in the way they deliver news to consumers to maintian relevance.

According to Rory O’Connor, Randi Zuckerburg of Facebook believes that ‘expert’ journalists still have their place, people still want an unbiased news source. I completely agree with this. However, the fact remains that many people trust news they hear via their friends more, so if a friend recommends they read a news story, chance are they will. The chart below (from eMarketer, retrieved 7 February 2009) shows that Australian consumers place trust in peers well above both TV news and newspapers. Interestingly enough, online news is also trusted above TV news & newspapers. None of this indicates that people believe journalism is no longer relevant.

In Australia, it seems many traditional news publications feel as though they’re in some sort of war with social media, and rather than embracing it, they simply want to discredit it. But the public has embraced social media, and so traditional media needs to as well to continue to be a relied-upon source of information. Many news outlets are missing out on a great opportunity to find breaking news stories on social media sites such as Twitter. When natural disasters occur – such as the recent Haitiearthquake or last years bushfires in Australia – the news is actually breaking on Twitter as people are able to share updates from their mobile phones whilst on the move. Eye witness reports appear online long before a TV station can secure an exclusive interview, and by the time it makes their 6pm broadcast, it’s old news. This being said, just because something appears on Twitter, doesn’t make it credible, and this is where traditional news has its strength – they have the resources to conduct further research and provide broader and more insightful information. But it needs to be delivered in more thought-provoking and non-traditional formats (no that doesn’t mean a slideshow that will generate 100 clicks for your news site).

Social media provides opportunities for deeper engagement with news content. Imagine, an article is published on a news website, the popularity of this article is based on how many times it is shared (via bookmarking, Facebook & Twitter shares etc.) AND read, rather than a traditional page view metric. The newspaper publisher creates a poll on the popular story to see what more information consumers want on this issue. A follow-up story is published, it is even more widely shared as the consumers feel valued by the newspaper publisher and they tell even more of their friends about it. Ultimately news outlets control what issues we’re privy to, but imagine if the general public were allowed to do the agenda-setting rather than media agencies? There would be MORE news publications, but they would be focussed on smaller niches, be more relevant and we’d end up with news we actually valued!

Traditional journalism still has it’s place. There are naysayers out there who will argue that. But we DO still need an unbiased source for our news. To remain relevent I believe news needs to be delivered in more convenient formats (at the moment that may be via Twitter or a Facebook Application) and cater to smaller, but more engaged audiences by supplying niche news.

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Here’s a quick insight into the popularity of some of the best known social networks and social media platforms.

The below shows the Google search volumes of Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, YouTube & Flickr in Australia for 2009.

Facebook clearly dominates the search queries and has grown steadily in popularity throughout the year. YouTube is a distant second with less than half the volume of searches, which have remained fairly steady throughout the year. It’s interesting to see that as Facebook has grown in popularity, MySpace has decreased in popularity. MySpace garners only about one in four as many queries as Facebook. Twitter and Flickr seem to get a fairly negligible portion of the search volume.

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Recent research from Hitwise has shown that Banking and Government are leading the way in social network referrals to their websites.

Social Networks & search have experienced the most growth in referrals in the last year, at the expense of email, portal & news referrals.

This should be a wake-up call to those companies not yet looking at social media strategies, and to those relying on more ‘traditional’ online marketing methods.

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While it comes as no surprise, it is nice to have fresh numbers on the gender split on social networks.
According to recent statistics from Information is Beautiful women dominate on the majority of social networks, Digg being the exception with a 64% male skew. Women dominate on the following popular social networks:

MySpace – 64%

Facebook – 57%

Twitter – 57%

Flickr – 55%

Read more statistics, and see Information is Beautiful’s chart.

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I recently came accross this brilliant video called Social Media Revolution, from the folks behind Socialnomics.

It is full of statistics and eye-openers for anyone who may still think Social Media is a fad.

If your company is not thinking about getting into the social media space, it’s time to start!

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