Social Media Global Trends -Impact of Time Spent on Social Media Campaigns

Nielsen recently published some interesting statistics on the growth of different social media sites across the globe.You can see the main chart above.

They show the unstoppable rise and rise of Facebook, to over 100m monthly visitors, though Twitter's rate of growth is now higher than Facebook's. Twitter saw growth of 579% year-on-year, from 2.7 million unique visitors in December 2008 to 18.1 million in December 2009.MySpace's decline also continues unabated.

Interestingly, the time per person dedicated to visiting social media sites shows the US, UK and Australia leading the way (Canada is not included in the data, but presumably would be amongst the leading group too). You can see this in the table below from the Nielsen study.

Any social media campaign would do well to take the time per person factor into account, as this will impact the degree of penetration of the campaign. Social media users in countries with higher time spent per user can be enagaged at a deeper level with both the social media campaign and its message. Conversely, if a country has a lower time spent per user (like Switzerland), this would indicate that campaign 'bursts' with shorter engagement times would be more effective.

European Entrepreneurship & Social Media @Plugg

BRUSSELS-The first couple of themes from Plugg this morning focused around European Entrepreneurship (and differences with US entrepreneurship) and Social Media.

Inma Martinez , founder of Stradbroke Advisors (and speaker at Mobile 2.0 in Barcelona last summer) marked out three categories of European Entrepreneurship: Clueless, Pirates and Super Bad.

The Clueless category includes entrepreneurs with great ideas but no idea as to how to market them (see Collaborative film making experiment Wreck A Movie and their great trailer www.ironsky.net), the Pirates include entrepreneurs not afraid to break the rules (PirateBay from Sweden was quoted) and the SuperBad includes those with cheeky ideas but not much more.

The key message? It is good to be cheeky and also European Entrepreneurs should focus on product and not on technical excellence.

Jo Caudron from ONE agency stated how the Web 2.0 era has now moved us from a model of media consumption of 'feeding fish to penguins' to a 'birds and the bees' model, where the bee is spreading the word and has the real power in the social environment.

He also emphasized how Web 2.0 companies can make money by understanding that they are dealing not merely with social media but all-encompassing social business, where the social element effectively permeates all parts of traditional business spheres.