International social media trends

Conversational PRClare Hamilton-Eddy

March 5th 2009

Introduction

PURPOSE? Overview of some global social media trends

Social networks Blogging Micro-blogging Mobile

Good starting reference point for latest trends, stats, sites Help with pitches

From the outset

BROADBAND: availability, speeds, costs = crucial More than 17 million households in the UK, or 67.2% of the total population, will

subscribe to various broadband technologies in 2009 Globally, average broadband take-up was 56 per cent of households in 2007,

compared with 12 per cent in 2002 The UK is above average, with 60 per cent of households connected The Netherlands leads the way with 81 per cent Canada = 66 per cent / Sweden and US = 62 per cent and 61 per cent Limited broadband access/high prices have slowed high penetration in some markets (eg

Italy/Spain) but situations are rapidly changing BUT: there are also signs that growth rates in the broadband sector are slowing. Only the

USA and Germany have seen a higher growth rate in 2007 than in 2006 eMarketer Oct 2008

Clocking up the hours

How much time are we spending online? The US leads the way at just over 15 hours per week in 2007 - up from 11 hours in

2004 The UK is second at nearly 14 hours per week, an increase of nearly 6.5 hours a

week in 2004 Canadians are the biggest social networkers with 55 per cent of internet users visiting

a social networking site. More women than men are using the internet

Some 56 per cent of Italian women use the internet compared to 44 per cent of Italian men Japanese and Spanish women follow at 55 per cent, with the UK and France having an

equal gender split. Women in the US are bucking this trend, at 48 per cent compared with 52 per cent of men using the internet.

Global overview: internet users

Internet users: China: 253m United States: 228m Japan: 107m India: 63m Germany: 57.5m Brazil: 50.8m UK: 41.1m France: 36.1m

Full list can be viewed here:http://www.clickz.com/stats/web_worldwide

Global overview: social networks

2007 Myspace Facebook Classmates.com Myyearbook.com Bebo.com Livejournal.com Blackplanet.com Hi5.com LinkedIn Tagged.com

Twitter = 22

Social network map

http://www.oxyweb.co.uk/blog/socialnetworkmapoftheworld.php - November 2008

A closer lookFACEBOOK Currently available in 15 languages Canada has more active users than anyone else, outside US

with more than 7million The UK is the third largest country

just under 7million users Remaining top 10 countries (in order): Australia, Turkey, Sweden, Norway, South

Africa, France, Hong Kong http://www.slideshare.net/onehalfamazing/social-networking-statistics-and-trends-presentati

on

YOUTUBE Currently in 19 regions across the globe in multiple languages US, Japan, UK, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Ireland, France, Poland, Brazil, Canada,

Mexico, Australia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, New Zealand, Germany, Russia, Korea

LINKEDIN More than 30 million people use LinkedIn, widely-regarded as one of the

more well-know social networking site for white-collar professionals November 08 Metrics in Action

A quick look at Germany…

Germany cont. Germans are very loyal to their social networks. Over 70 % said they will

remain long-term active users on their current network 85 % of all Germans who use the internet are members of social networks

The majority said they intend to use social networks via mobile phones in the near future

Youtube, Clipfish, MyVideo and MySpace = most popular German sites StudiVZ and Xing are extremely popular as is Niimo.com (like Twitter)

People using all these networks are between 23 and 47 StudiVZ: now one of the leading social platforms in Germany with about 13

million members PWC study, April 2008

Facebook currently has 2 million members Social media trend for 2009? Consolidation – large companies are going to

buy up the small ones Ehssan Dariani, owner and founder of StudiVZ

A quick look at France

www.copainsdavant.linternaute.com2009: 10 million users – slower growth

Over 50% of French bloggers use Sky Rock as their blog platform

http://www.skyrock.com/blog/2009: 7 million users – fast growth

2009: 20,000 users only

2009: 4 million bloggers

France cont. The French distinguish themselves, both statistically and anecdotally, ahead of

Germans, Britons and even Americans in their obsession with blogs 60 per cent of French Internet users visited a blog in May, ahead of Britain with 40

percent and little more than a third in the United States Comscore

Likewise, French bloggers spent more than an hour in June visiting France's top-rated blog site, far ahead of the 12 minutes spent by Americans doing the same and less than 3 minutes for Germans

Nielsen/NetRatings

More than three million Internet users, or more than 12 percent of those online in France have created a blog

Médiamétrie

French blogs stands out in other measurable ways Longer, more critical, more ego-centric, more negative and more provocative than US/UK CRM Metrix

The rest of Europe

It’s all about Twitter!

Twitter is dominated by newer users - 70% of Twitter users joined in 2008 There are currently over 6m users signed up to Twitter

An estimated 5-10 thousand new accounts are opened per day 35% of Twitter users have 10 or fewer followers 9% of Twitter users follow no one at all There is a strong correlation between the number of followers you have and the

number of people you follow Hubspot: Q4 08 report

The global rise of Twitterhttp://www.webanalyticsworld.net/2009/02/twitter-facebook-up-myspace-technorati.html

Twitter visitors up over 750% from last year:

Global Twitter patterns

Going mobile Nearly half of social networking users (46%) have visited a social network on a

mobile device Out of those users, 70% have visited MySpace and 67% have visited Facebook

No other social network, including those specialized for mobile devices, even reached 15% adoption

Based on these numbers, ABI Research concludes that consumers do not want new social networks for mobile phones - they just want to interact with the social networks where they're already members

Out of those users, only 1% had visited a social network on their phone only. ABI Research (November 2008)

With the rise of smartphone-based computing, applications like Brightkite, Loopt, and others are slowly growing their user base

Bebo - "Bebo Open Mobile" whose goal is to provide the mobile industry with tools designed to help integrate the site and its services into manufacturers' handsets – O2 as first UK carrier last month (Beta in December saw 60% growth in traffic in just four weeks)

Nokia currently in talks with Facebook Google recently announced a new mobile location-aware application called Latitude,

which lets you track your friends' whereabouts using your mobile phone

Mobile cont.

Mobile social networking is helping drive mobile web usage into the mainstream in Western Europe, where the number of users accessing social nets with their phones jumped 152 percent from November 2007 to November 2008

ComScore

That translates into some 12.1 million users across the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain all using their phones to access social nets

Leading the way are the British with the highest penetration of mobile social networking at 9 percent in the three months ending November 2008

Average penetration across all countries is 5 percent In the three-month average period ending November 2008, 34 percent of phone

owners in Western Europe who visited social networking sites accessed social media exclusive of all other mobile Web content

Comscore

Women make up nearly half of the audience (48 percent) exclusively visiting social nets, but only 32 percent who access other forms of mobile web content

Mobile

*Includes top five countries listed.

Mobile search via mobile device

June 2007 – June 2008

US and Western Europe

Source: ComScore

Country June 2007 June 2008 Percent change France 1,483 2,196 48% Germany 1,316 1,837 40% Italy 2,010 2,810 40% Spain 923 1,293 40% UK 3,454 4,497 30% Europe 9,186 12,633 38% US 12,353 20,793 68%

Further afield: US 105 million Americans participate in social media In 2008, 79.5 million people—41% of the US Internet user population—visited social

network sites at least once a month, an 11% increase over the previous year Seven million are considered "heavy" social media contributors

This is defined as people who participate in six or more activities and connect with at least 248 people on a one-to-many basis on a typical week. The most popular platforms include Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, LinkedIn, Twitter, Digg, and Yelp

Time spent communicating online went from 27 percent of time online in 2006 to 32 percent in 2008

This includes activities such as e-mail, instant messaging, posting to blogs, and photo sharing Time devoted to entertaining activities online went from 49 percent of the time spent

online in 2006 to 20 percent two years later Entertainment was defined as participating in online games, accessing videos, and accessing

Web sites for fun 54 percent of micro-bloggers post content or "tweet" daily

NetPop Research, March 2009

US cont. Across the Web, social networking sites experienced a 13 percent gain in U.S.

audience from December 2007 to December 2008

Top Social Networking Sites by Unique Visitors, December 2008

Property December 2007 (000)

December 2008 (000)

Change (%)

Total Internet

audience

183,619 190,650 4

Social networking audience

120,201 135,715 13

MySpace.com

68,905 75,919 10

Facebook 34,658 54,552 57

Flickr 13,540 20,698 53

Classmates Online

10,002 16,553 66

MyLife.com**

N/A 15,018 N/A

Buzznet 4,973 9,781 97

AOL Community

40 9,208 22,701

http://www.clickz.com/3632665

For full list, visit:

US podcasts Podcast growth will continue at least through 2013, when there will be 37.6 million

people downloading podcasts on a monthly basis – more than double the 2008 figure of 17.4 million

As a percentage of internet users, podcast downloaders will grow from 9% in 2008 to 17% in 2013

Males between 18 and 29 are the most common downloaders Emarketers

http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?id=1006937

Asia: China

Asia: China

Asia: China

Chinese govt roles in Social media The focus has primarily been on internet content, and bloggers are affected.  But, social media is

beyond blogging and can be contained in micro venues of social network pages, comments, and Twitter.  As social media continues to pervade in China, it goes to reason that the government is looking at these outlets as well.  It may only be a matter of time before it focuses attention here. http://brain-vibe.com/2009/02/09/china-governments-role-in-social-media/

Asia: India

India had 45.3 million active internet users and 62.5 million claimed internet users in September 2008

IAMAI & IMRB International

India’s mobile subscriber base topped 350 million users by end of 2008 Its network is the second largest in the world after China

ITU Telecom Asia

The global future? Filters: are rapidly becoming a pertinent issue for developers of social media services. As a

result, social aggregation platforms are in the perfect position to lead the pack Challenge: not becoming too noisy

New real-time web app launches that integrates Twitter, FriendFeed & more

iTunes adds social networking features; but it's still a closed development system

Facebook signs up to OpenSocial

Facebook Connect authentication will become dominant method for authentication on the web

Twitter will start to make more and more money

Twitter is going to continue to grow and eventually get acquired, while Facebook is going to see further decline

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/social_media_trends_2009.php

The global future

•Uber blogs•blogs that combines different content streams into one large blog with one primary top level URL, will explode in 2009•In 2009 big will be better. Not big networks of many sites, but big blogs that break out of the narrow niche focus that has been typical of commercial blogging until now, and instead go wide in content but focused on one brand and one URL.

•Duncan Riley, December 2008

•Blog Posts to Become More Interactive RSS is fantastic but it's a pull in technology. It's not real timeget to a point where Twitter and FriendFeed are mechanisms for this, where blog posts become a lot more interactiveMatt Mullenweg

Summary Social media is a global phenomenon happening in all markets regardless of wider

economic, social and cultural development If you are online you are using social media

US / UK very much leading social media revolution, Europe playing catch up However, emerging markets must not be ignored! Asian markets are leading in terms of participation, creating more content than any

other region China has the largest blogging community in the world with 42m bloggers, more than the US

and Western Europe combined India will soon be a force to be reckoned with – watch this space

Facebook, Twitter, blogging here to stay Mobile is the next big thing for 2009 as is social aggregation and filtering That said, globally, (over 17 markets of the world) well over half the population (58%)

do not know what social networking is Synovate 2009

Constant education, evolution…WATCH THIS SPACE

Questions

Feedback for 2009 plan