Women are connecting like never before with online communities to do their shopping research and share information. That’s according to the 2009 Women and Social Media Study (PDF File) from iVillage, BlogHer and Compass Partners, which was released last week.
The Study illustrates how women are turning to many forms of social media, including blogs, for fun, entertainment, community and connection, but that we are more than twice as likely to go to blogs versus social network sites when we’re seeking information, advice and recommendations.
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Facebook is catching up with MySpace in the U.S., according to comScore.
Facebook added about 4 million unique visitors in March to reach 61.2 million and close within 9 million of MySpace, the top social network in the U.S. But while MySpace’s audience of 70.2 million has shrunk by 4% in the last year, Facebook’s has jumped 72%.
At the current rate of growth, Facebook is poised to overtake its social networking rival in the U.S. in the next few months. The company already surpassed MySpace last year as the most-trafficked social network globally. Facebook this month announced that it crossed the 200 million mark in active users worldwide, while MySpace has an estimated 130 million. Read more... (199 words, 1 image, estimated 48 secs reading time)
Saw this over on Buzz Networker where they linked to a slideshow at O’Reilly Radar on Facebook trends. Click the O’Reilly link for the full presentation of Facebook trends, but here some interesting facts:
- 193+ million users broken down 51% Female and 45% Male
- Largest age group of active users in the USA – 18-25
- Largest growing category in the USA – 55-59 ( with 60-65 not far behind)
- Top countries in Asia for Facebook usage – Indonesia and Hong Kong.
- Only Africa books the trend with more male than female users.
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A mediapost article reported that total video streams increased almost 9% to 9.7 billion in March. As expected, YouTube dominates the video streaming market with nearly 5.5 billion streams in March. Interestingly, Hulu was second with 348.5 million streams and Yahoo third with 231.8 million.
Hulu.com is a partnership between News Corp. and NBC’ and is now a solid second to YouTube in online video. It continued its steady rise in March increasing streams about 10% and adding about 600,000 unique viewers for a total of 9.5 million. Another traditional media site is Fox Interactive Media who are fourth with 207.5 million streams; up from 194.3 million in February Read more... (184 words, 1 image, estimated 44 secs reading time)
Facebook announced this week that it added its 200 millionth user on April 8, 2009. The US had more Facebook users than any other country. However, the largest concentration of users was in the Eastern US and Western Europe.
In Q1 of this year, the fastest-growing segment of the US Facebook population was people ages 26 to 44, and other countries will undoubtedly follow that path. See our earlier post on this called the Graying of Facebook.
The challenge for Facebook and advertisers is to get users to click on ads, as brands are still looking for ways to leverage the social networking space. Read more... (168 words, 2 images, estimated 40 secs reading time)
According to comScore , U.S. Internet users viewed 14.8 billion online videos during the month, representing an increase of 4% versus December 2008.YouTube led the growth charge, accounting for 91% of the incremental gain in the number of videos viewed versus December, as it surpassed 100 million viewers for the first time.
“Even though YouTube continues to gain the most online video viewers, it barely monetizes those billions of monthly streams,” said David Hallerman, senior analyst at eMarketer “That underpeformance continues to leave the door open for its competition to take in more of the still-growing video ad revenue pie.”
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Last week I was at a meeting at Facebook and as Facebook was talking about their demographics, one of the statistics that struck me was facebook’s demographics is starting to mirror those of the U.S. of A.
According to comScore, more than 50% of Facebook’s users in the U.S. are over 35; the single biggest age demographic in the U.S. on Facebook is now between 35 and 44, and that Facebook’s fastest growing demo is 55-plus. Read more... (331 words, 1 image, estimated 1:19 mins reading time)
Generation Y are those in the 18- to 28-year-old range and as you might imagine they are the most tech savvy of any generation. That means that if you are a company targeting this demographics that you need to be aware of what and how these twenty-something’s are using technology. Forrester recently released its 2008 North America Technographics Benchmark survey and here are some of the findings for the Generation X and Y group.
Generation Y Stats
- 90% of Gen Y own a computer (I would have expected it to be a little higher)
- 82% own a mobile phone
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I was reading in Advertising Age Cartier, a brand better known for diamond necklaces and $10,000 watches, will advertise its latest collection, Love by Cartier on MySpace,
Now this is not the first time that a luxury brand has hooked up with a social network. Last year I blogged about how Neiman Marcus had picked YouTube as a place to publicize its 100-year anniversary.
What surprised me where comments by Travis Katz, managing director-international operations for MySpace.
Travis was talking abut MySpace demographics and he claimed that: Read more... (350 words, 1 image, estimated 1:24 mins reading time)
It has been a bad week for Rupert Murdoch and MySpace. Last week we wrote about how Facebook has passed MySpace in total visitors for the first time and now Compete releases data that shows MySpace is rapidly losing market share to Google and Yahoo.
MySpace has traditionally made money because of its heavy focus on entertainment (nee video), so the alarm bells must be going off at News Corp. that MySpace has seen its online video market share fall from 8.9% to 5.1% in one year. That is a 42% drop which is huge.
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