The Mobile Impact of Social Media

Increasingly, we’re seeing mobile play a key part in our research for clients. In fact, we saw a 30% increase in mobile driven engagement of Social Media tools in the first quarter of 2010 than compared to 2009.

In the microblog segment alone, we saw over 40% of the posts (over 50,000 measured in total) made in 80% of our research projects coming from mobile devices (Twitter and Identi.ca and a few others.) Similar results were found in looking at blogs and services like Posterous. We do not measure SMS/txt messaging.

People are increasingly pushing content via mobile devices. If Apple does in fact add increased video capability and with video becoming a key component of mobile smart phones in 2010 and onward, this only further drives the proof that mobile needs to be seriously addressed by business looking to engage in Social Media.

And if you’re thinking it’s just kids, it’s not. We found that over 35% of the mobile posts were made by the 30% demographic. Generation X and Boomers alike are increasingly using mobile phones. And we found that overall, they are more likely (62%) use a mobile device to post to social networking services such as Facebook.

Mobile will increasingly impact citizen journalism, instant commenting on restaurant service and similar service-experiences. Are you ready to address that capability?

(Author: G. Crouch)

Social Media Channel Decline by Users

We’re always doing research into how people are using Social Media, much of it for clients, much of it the result of the research we do for clients. One interesting trend we’ve noted over the past few months – people are turning off the garden hose. We’re learning to filter.

As humanity, we’ve suffered from “filter failure” ever since more books were printed than a human could read in their lifetime. All we’ve done is increase the volume, now more significantly.

When we do research for a client, we always look for the “power user” those engaged more than others. We also look at the Echo Ratio (our own stat based on the Solidarity Value of economics) and applying the Power Law Curve. I’m just stating our process here.

Up until 3 months ago, the average joe user of Social Media (i.e. engaged 5-10 hours per week in social media channels) had 5.4 channels they engaged in (that most often comprised in Canada, UK and USA of a social network, microblog, email, blog and one or two others.)

Over the past 3 months we’ve seen that decline quite significantly, down to an average of 3.25 apps per average user of social media channels.

Are we learning to apply filters? We’re now looking at heavier users. I like the posting recently from David Armano on a similar vein.

What do you think?

The Off Topic Conundrum of Newsgroups

Hopefully I can stay on topic with the topic of going off-topic. I think we’ve all noticed this effect and so we did a little research to look at this common occurence in Social Media channels and here’s what we found. To do this we examined the comment sections of 1,200 blogs that had an average of 5 comments per post and a posting frequency of at least once per week. Then we looked at 1,200 newsgroups and forums across multiple topics (auto’s, knitting, model building, tool and home repair.) We then compared. Continue reading »