Experimenting with various ways to share an article means I now have more facebook and twitter aps than you can shake a stick at:  in the column, in the article and on the wibiya toolbar at the bottom.  There is an argument for less is more. Nevertheless….

What are the stats on Twitter and Facebook influence?

Twitter reply and RT

Sysomos examined 1.2 billion tweets posted in the last two months (what do they do in their spare time?). Their analysis is worth a read. They surmise that a tweet that generates a reply or a retweet suggests it is interesting enough that it has sparked a conversation or people want to share it with their network (which is what you want if you are blogging for example).

29% of tweets generate a reply or a retweet

• Of this group of tweets, 19.3% were retweets (maybe because it’s quick and easy to do) and the rest replies, in other words of the 1.2 billion tweets examined, 6%, (or 72 million) were retweets.

Most retweets happen in the first hour

• Which means timing your tweet if you have just published a blog post is important (you may want to post the tweet more than once for different time zones for example).

Facebook ‘Like’

According to facebook + media, the like button is important.  They asked ‘Who are “likers” and found:

• People who click the Facebook Like button are more engaged, active and connected than the average Facebook user.
  The average “liker” has 2.4x the amount of friends than that of a typical Facebook user.

• They are also more interested in exploring content they discover on Facebook
  They click on 5.3x more links to external sites than the typical Facebook user.

• The ‘like’ button is favoured by a younger audience.
  The the average “liker” on a news site is 34, compared to the median age of a newspaper subscriber which is approximately 54 years old, (as reported by the Newspaper Association of America).

Again, maybe because the like button is easy to use (like the retweet) people favour using it and it means content is shared quickly. So, although less is more, for the moment, twitter and facebook are here to stay on this site for a while.

Australian Twitter Statistics

2010

Overall the state of the twittersphere is:

• Globally twitter’s audience levels grew by more than 400% in 2009 [1]
• Demographics globally show the majority of users (39%) are aged between 18-34 years and are Caucasian [2]
• UPDATE Nov 2010: Twitter has 190 millian users, tweeting 65M times a day [4]

Although Twitter accounts in Australia lag far behind Facebook, there has been a big rise in Twitter usage:

• There are approximately 2.5M twitter accounts in Australia although only 16% of twitter users are aged under 24 years old [2]
• Within Australia nearly a quarter of online Australians (23%) read ‘tweets’ in the past year [1]
• 14 percent ‘followed’ companies or organizations via Twitter (up from 5% in 2008) and 13 percent posted ‘tweets’ (up from 4% in 2008) [1]
• The majority of accounts are in NSW (over 35%), seconded by Victoria (27%) [3]

More Web Metrics

References

[1] http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/global/australia-getting-more-social-online-as-facebook-leads-and-twitter-grows
[2] http://www.webkrunk.com/2010/04/13/twitter-demographics-infographic/
[3] http://blog.tribalytic.com/2010/05/13/how-many-australian-twitter-users-are-there-and-where-are-they-from/
[4] http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/08/twitter-190-million-users/