We Are Social: Tuesday Tune-Up #16
1. The ARIA Awards all of a Twitter
On Sunday night We Are Social helped the Australian Recording Industry Association or ARIA celebrate their 25th Annual Awards night. On the night the We Are Social production unit was on the red carpet pumping content live to Australian music lovers on Aria’s social channels. The Awards ignited passionate discussions on Twitter, with 9 out of 10 trending topics on the night being driven by the Awards. Aria was mentioned in 12,848 tweets with over 25% of tweets being conversational @replies or retweets.
In the lead up to the event, We Are Social created a Facebook public voting app to give the fans a voice on the night. The app attracted 5,000+ votes for Best International Artist, Best Australian Artist and Best Australian Live Artist.
2. Australian modern day love story takes social media by storm
GetUp, the Australian grassroots lobby group, launched a campaign to legalise same-sex marriage.
The campaign is spearheaded by a 2 minute YouTube video called ‘Love Story’. Within 48 hours of going live the video received over 1 million views. It has had over 1.8 million views to date.
The video caught the attention of key influencers, including Stephen Fry who tweeted it out to his 3.4 million followers. Subsequently, stories have been written about the campaign all over the world.
The campaign drives people to sign an online petition. The petition will be delivered to the ALP National Conference, where the Labor Party will decide on their stance on same sex marriage.
3. Is the news industry going down the toilet?
David Higgins, News Limited’s Innovations Editor, certainly thinks so.
It’s no secret that the print industry is scrambling to adapt their business model to ensure their survival. Recently at the Walkley Conference in Brisbane, Higgins told a packed room that the industry needs to go much further though and find new audiences in new places.
“I think we should be taking this more seriously and getting over to our correspondents the idea of telling stories in ways we are not used to doing, allowing us to go into environments and to markets, particularly young people who are not reading as much journalism as we would like.”
“There’s a shocking lack of innovation. We’re going down the toilet. Our lunch is being eaten by companies like Google and Apple… if we’re serious about having a secure future, we need to put investment into this technology, taking it more seriously.”
“We’re starting to see this sort of thing at News Ltd. We need to take our craft and our products out into the market.”
Watch this space.
4. Digital coming of age
According to a Digital Diaries survey, by the time most kids in the West turn eleven, they have already moved onto mainstream social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Japanese children have the lowest social network penetration out of the surveyed countries.
5. The Anatomy of Facebook
In collaboration with researchers at the Università degli Studi di Milano, Facebook have released a pretty impressive account of the social network’s digital anatomy. Their study covered all 721 million active Facebook users at the time – that’s more than 10% of the global population.
Using the ‘six degrees of separation’ model, which states that, on average, any two people are separated by no more than six intermediate connections, the study found that six degrees actually overstates the number of links between typical pairs of users; the average distance in Facebook between users is 4.74 hops. That’s down from 5.28 hops in 2008. Therefore, as Facebook has grown over the years, representing an ever larger fraction of the global population, it has become even more connected. How social is that.
6. Mobile social networking continues to grow
Research by comScore has found that the audience for mobile social networking in Europe’s five largest markets grew 44% in the last year. comScore Europe vice president for Mobile, Jeremy Copp, says that this growth has been “driven largely by the growth in smartphone adoption, making it easier than ever for users to stay connected and engage in social activities while on-the-go”. 46.8% of this audience access social networking sites daily, and Facebook remains the most popular site, with an average monthly audience of 39m mobile users in Europe during September.
Apps are pushing the growth of mobile social networking, with a doubling in the number of people using them for social networking compared the previous year. However, most mobile users still access social networking sites via a mobile browser. comScore’s study also reveals that 44.3% of mobile social networkers reading posts from brands. Furthermore, more than one quarter reported receiving coupons, offers, or deals on their phones.
7. Comments more valuable than likes
EdgeRank used Facebook metrics to figure out the value of comments and likes, finding that for every comment a post gets, it received an average of 15 clicks, compared to just 3 for every like. This means that a comment is roughly four times more valuable than a like, reinforcing the importance of creating engaging content that will stimulate discussion. Day of the week is also important, with posts on Wednesdays having the best shares and clicks ratios.
8. Google’s new organisation of a brand’s Facebook pages still a little off
Google algorithms now organise a brand’s Facebook pages by name, grouping together results as below:
Although this has resulted in a number of strange groupings, this is still great news for brands. If they have an overarching Facebook brand page, their smaller pages can now be found more easily by users. It also adds site links to individual pages as well, which should drive more traffic to these pages.
9. Google+’s big players
Another reason to dust off your Google+ account – Barack Obama is on the site now. This is big news for the social network, since Obama’s social media clout is pretty sound and is often touted as a major factor in his successful first presidential campaign. And yet the lack of excitement surrounding Obama’s arrival is rather disappointing – his first post had just 110 shares after 12 hours. Furthermore, Britney Spears is now the most followed person on Google+, with 773,805 followers. Obama has only 7,346. Come on, Barack, get your act together.
10. Hotel owners fear blackmail from Tripadvisor users
We all know the damage a bad review can do, and it seems that some Tripadvisor users are leveraging this to try and get free upgrades, refunds and extras from hotels, despite nothing being wrong with their experience. More than 80 hotel and bed-and breakfast owners have reported being subjected to such threats from customers, and thousands more have claimed fraudulent reviews. Tripadvisor have spoken out against such practices by its users.