July 4th, 2011, 4 Comments »
I’ve had a few days to kick the tires on Google+ (pronounced ‘Google Plus’), Google’s shot across the bow of Facebook and, to a lesser degree, Twitter. It’s a nascent social network built around the concept of ‘circles’, where you group friends and acquaintances into clusters so that your online social interactions are more distinguishable than in other tools.
For a primer, read Stephen Levy’s long piece in Wired on Google+. Chris Brogan also wrote a good post full of early observation and speculation, as did Steve Gillmor.
Google hasn’t had a great track record in software products in recent years. Sure, Chrome has been a massive success, but Knol, Wave and Buzz all failed to cross that trough of disillusionment after a flurry of early excitement.
Will Google+ make that leap? It faces the tremendous inertia of Facebook, whose more 600 million have invested serious time and effort in their profiles. That feels like a nearly insurmountable obstacle.
That said, let’s look at some of the possible reasons why they might:
- Users get bored with tools and platforms. We saw it happen when Facebook eclipsed MySpace, and when Gmail eclipsed Hotmail.
- I haven’t tried it yet, but maybe there’s a sweet spot for Google+ Hangouts, group video chat sessions. On the other hand, there are rumours afoot of a Facebook partnership with Skype which might quash this competitive advantage.
- Users might start seriously caring about privacy, and they trust Google more than they trust Facebook.
- Google+ is being integrated into all of Google’s products. If you’ve got a Google Account–for Gmail, Google Reader, Docs and so forth–then you’ll see the ‘Sandbar’, the black bar at the top of our Google apps. Much like Facebook, there’s a red notification number on this bar that will constantly be reminding you of Google+ activity. Google has an enormous existing user base, and they’re not going anywhere, so this ever-present hook into the user may be the difference-maker.
Of those four, I think only the last reason has serious merit. Why do you think Google+ could win?
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February 23rd, 2011, No Comments »
About 18 months ago, I did a pretty unscientific analysis on Mashable regarding the clickthrough rate for Twitter accounts. That is, when you share a link on Twitter, how many of your followers click it?
I arrived at a clickthrough rate (CTR) of 1.7%. Looking at a couple of other sources, that seems quite accurate. It’s safe, I think, to estimate a CTR of 1% to 2% for Twitter for a small to medium Twitter account (say, up to 10,000 followers).
It’s worth considering Anil Dash’s great analysis of being on the famed (and now deprecated, I think) Suggested Users list. As he notes, he acquired hundreds of thousands of new followers, but “being on Twitter’s suggested user list makes no appreciable difference in the amount of retweets, replies, or clicks that I get.”
As with all forms of marketing, quality of audience matters far more than quantity.
That’s all a bit of a long introduction to this observation, which reminded me of a phenomenon on Twitter and other corners of the social web.
Earlier this week, I had a (quite unremarkable) tweet retweeted a lot. Here it is:
As you can see from this Bit.ly page for the shortened link, it was clicked 3872 times. I’d never actually checked out the top referrers for this page–that is, where people were when they actually clicked the link:
As a second data point, here’s a recent tweeted link that was clicked about a thousand times.
So, that means that 52% of the clicks came from that first big category, and 38% of traffic comes from the Twitter site. It’s too bad that Bit.ly can’t further unravel that first category, eh? How much comes from HootSuite, how much from SMS, how much from chat and so forth. As you can see, most people access Twitter without visiting Twitter.com.
In our workshops and talks I give, I often have to explain to people that they should think of Twitter and Facebook as services or utilities, as opposed to websites. As we can see here, Twitter is water that flows from a lot of different taps, not just from Twitter.com.
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August 16th, 2010, 1 Comment »
I’m not a big man for stationery, but Julie recently received this awesome card (also amusing because Julie is not fond of pigeons). Click to make it legible:
It’s from this store (here’s the actual listing), and designed by Frank Viva.
How could it not remind me of Twitter?
1 Comment »
June 21st, 2010, 2 Comments »
I have a small problem. I really like the World Cup. Yet the games are played in the morning, with the last game finishing up shortly after lunch. I sometimes watch one game in the morning, but I have to record the rest and watch later in the day as time permits. I also occasionally do this for hockey games, particularly eastern ones that begin at 4:00pm here on the West Coast.
Of course, I spend a lot of time online, working and playing in the real-time, flow-oriented social web. So there’s a high risk of my learning the outcome of sports events before I get to watch them. I’ve heard similar complaints from people who time-shift television shows–the finale of Lost, for example, or the season premiere of True Blood.
I address this problem by going very light on Twitter, Facebook and, uh, high-risk blogs until I’ve watched whatever I recorded.
Smart Filters to Avoid Disappointment
There are various apps which offer muting functionality for individual keywords or users. What I could really use is a view of Twitter and Facebook that magically removes all messages related to, say, the World Cup.
How would we achieve this? The simplest route would be using bundles of related keywords as a filter, maybe gathered through a crowdsourced process. For the World Cup, we might block all country names and team nicknames for starters. Then maybe common terms like ‘goal’, ‘keeper’ and so forth. Next you’d probably want to block all player names. This presents an immediate problem, as you’re filtering out a bunch of common names like Lee, Kim, James and Green.
I asked about this on Twitter, and Dave Johnson suggested that it might be a good task for Google’s Prediction API.
Ideally, I guess you want a service that can algorithmically discern between “Blimey, England keeper Robert Green concedes an easy goal” and “Blimey, our England office is never going to make our goal of going green this quarter.” Presumably the service would track a user’s historic data, too, and adjust the prediction based on the likelihood that they’re talking about soccer.
2 Comments »
May 29th, 2010, No Comments »
Occasionally I have odd little ideas. Sometimes I actually do them, sometimes I just write about them or sometimes I disregard them out of hand. The other day I had the notion to create a Twibbon–a little add-on to your Twitter and Facebook avatars–for Ivory Coast, the World Cup team I’ve decided to support. You can see it on my Twitter avatar.
Then I thought it would be fun to make avatars for the other 31 teams participating in the World Cup. James helped out, and we went to Photoshop Town. If you, like me and most of the rest of the planet, are excited about the upcoming tournament, you can find your team and Twibbon it up.
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April 25th, 2010, 1 Comment »
From a little sign at the aptly-named Smart Mouth Cafe in Gastown. A rare insight into the magic of Twitter.
Yes, I’m as troubled by the title case error as you are.
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November 22nd, 2009, No Comments »
Over on our book blog, I wrote a longish post about the hot social media topic du jour: sponsored tweets in your Twitter stream. Here’s an excerpt:
Things get punchy whenever people explore monetizing a new channel. Let’s begin by thinking about some other controversial forms of advertising in social media, and how sponsored tweets might relate:
- Static ads on blogs – Not particularly relevant. In my experience, the majority of income from blogging comes from one’s archives, not the front page flow.
- Sponsored posts – The blogosphere dabbled with these for a few years, but I rarely see them anymore. This could be because I don’t read the sort of blogs that would employ sponsored posts, or because they’re utterly forgettable, but I don’t think they’ve caught on in any significant fashion.
- As in RSS feeds – This is somewhat germane, though I usually see these ads not as separate feed items, but rather as add-ons to existing posts. Sponsored tweets are standalone units of content.
- Ads in IM conversations – In a way, this seems like the most relevant comparison. That said, I’ve never actually seen an ad in an IM chat. I mostly use Skype or Google Chat, though. Maybe something like Omegle will start inserting one-line text ads into its hosted, serendipitous IM conversations.
There’s also the Facebook Beacon debacle, among others. In short, people’s tolerance for advertising in their social media channels feels pretty low.
I know it’s a bit lame to excerpt and redirect you, but what can I say? It’s a busy week ahead.
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July 9th, 2009, 7 Comments »
Last month, I wrote about what sort of clickthrough rate you could expect from links shared on Twitter. I rewrote and expanded that post over on Mashable. Thanks to those who commented on my original post–your thoughts informed my rewriting.
I hoped that the Mashable post would enable me to expand the survey I ran, so that I could gather a more consequential amount of data. I was a little surprised to only gather another 80 or so data points, but that did move the numbers a little bit.
Working with about 140 responses who collectively have 333,000 folllowers, I found that the average clickthrough rate was 1.7%. The trend of more followers equaling a lower click through rate has definitely held true, though. For those respondents with more than 5000 followers, the click through rate is a mere 0.9%. For those with less than 5000 followers, it’s 3.5%. For those with less than 1000 followers, it’s 6%. This scatter graph hopefully illustrates that trend. That’s followers on the x-axis, and CTRs on the y-axis. To make the diagram more readable, I excluded a couple of the really big follower counts (click for the largess):
A recent FriendFeed comment from Tim O’Reilly also bears this out. He’s discussing the huge boost in followers he’s received since being added to Twitter’s Suggested Users List:
I had about 60K twitter followers when I went on the SUL; my peak click through-rate has perhaps doubled now that I have 10 times as many. Organic followers are what matters, except, as I say, for the media credibility that you get from people who don’t know any better.
As I mentioned on Mashable, I’m not a statistician, so take this kind of analysis with a big salt lick. I also mentioned several other mitigating factors. I’m uncertain about what impact bots spidering Twitter and following links are having on these results. I welcome any insights you might have on that, or any aspect of my sketchy math. Another consideration is that when a URL gets retweeted, you’re adding the retweeting user’s followers to the mix. Lastly, I asked those who completed the survey to pick an ‘average’ number of clicks, so that depends on each respondent’s potentially unscientific estimate.
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