As we heard last week, Twitter made a bold move regarding its ecosystem, stating that third-party developers should no longer try to compete with Twitter on native clients; instead they should focus on things like data and specific verticals for Tweets. In the email sent to developers, Twitter said that some 90 percent of active Twitter users now use official Twitter apps on a monthly basis to access the service. Social media analytics company Sysomos decided to track Tweets on the day that Twitter made this announcement to determine if there was any truth to this assertion.
Sysomos analyzed 25 million Tweets last Friday and found that 58 percent of Tweets were sent from official Twitter apps, and 42 percent of Tweets were sent from third-party clients (or non-official Twitter apps). The analytics company highlights the trend that third-party clients are losing marketshare to Twitter clients, as the communications platform expands its offerings, and acquires third-party clients. In June 2009, a Sysomos report showed that 55 percent of Tweets were made using non-official apps, and as we learned, that number has dropped to 42 percent. → Read More
Rumors of social media monitoring and analytics startup Sysomos’ acquisition by Marketwire swirled in the blogosphere yesterday, but today it’s been made official. In a blog post on Sysomos’ site today, the company announced that has been bought by the press release wire service. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Sysomos, which is profitable, offers a data anlaytics produtcs, including MAP and Heartbeat, that ollects and analyzes more than a billion new online conversations a month. Brands such as Microsoft, Proctor & Gamble, Coca-Cola, Disney and Shell use Sysomos’ platform to tap into the conversations taking place on the social web. You can read our posts that report on Sysomos’ data here. → Read More
At first glance, our Twitter account, @TechCrunch, doesn’t have much in common with @BarackObama‘s. He’s the President, we are a lowly tech blog. His staff Tweets out quotes from his speeches, we Tweet out links to our stories. He has 5.3 million followers, we have 1.4 million. But according to social media analytics firm Sysomos, both of our followers have the same average authority—2.4 on a scale of 0 to 10.
The average is so low because the law of large numbers starts to take hold with accounts above one million followers. The authority ranking is based on how many followers each person has compared to how many people they follow, as well as how active they are in terms of retweeting and other factors. Basically, if you are passive and have no followers, you get a score of 0 (these are the Twitter bots that bring down the average), but if you have a lot of followers, follow only a few people and retweet a lot, you get a higher score. → Read More
Social media monitoring firm Sysomos is launching a new service for marketers to measure the dollar value of each person who visits their company’s website. It is called Sysomos Audience (currently in private beta). Sysomos Audience is an analytics tool which at first looks similar to Google Analytics, but with one big difference: it goes beyond measuring visitors directly from referring sites and tries to determine where else a visitor has been on the Web, including competitor’s sites, blogs, and social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. It then estimates the ROI of each visitor by putting a dollar value on each one based on the other sites that person has been to recently. → Read More
Many of you may have heard of or played the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, which is a trivia game based on the idea that any actor can be linked to actor Kevin Bacon within six steps through roles in movies. Of course, this game is based on an actual philosophical theory, Six Degrees of Separation, which refers to the idea that everyone is at most six steps away from any other person in terms of relationships. Today, social media monitoring and analytics startup Sysomos has released a report examining the interconnectedness of Twitter users and has uncovered a number of interesting results.
First, Sysomos examined the 5.2 billion Twitter friendships (the number of friend and follower relationships) to determine how connected users are with each other. And based on this, Sysomos discovered that Twitter is mostly a network with only five degrees of separation, with nearly everyone on Twitter just five steps (or friends, i.e. people you follow) away from each other. → Read More
Paris-based Semiocast, which helps brands understand and interact with real-time Web services, has again done a study on Twitter usage. After finding that only 50% of tweets are in English, based on an analysis of 2.8 million tweets, the company has now looked at nearly five times as many Twitter messages in order to gain more insight on the increased international presence of the popular micro-sharing service.
According to an analysis of 13.5 million tweets published over the course of one week, Semiocast concluded that users located in the United States account for only thirty percent of all tweets. The next English-speaking country on the list comes in fifth, with only 6 percent of tweets analyzed originating from the United Kingdom.
Top countries are the U.S., Japan, Brazil, Indonesia and the UK, in that order. → Read More
I’ve long suspected that the basic usage pattern for Twitter is that people try it, don’t get it or become discouraged because they don’t know anyone else on it, but it grows on them eventually until they start using it every day. Many people, of course, never come back, but for those who do, they need to get past that familiarity curve before it becomes an essential communications tool.
Now I have some data to back up my theory. Social media analytics company Sysomos just released some data based on its analysis of over one billion Tweets which shows the contribution of updates by how long people have been on the service. The most active users are those who joined Twitter more than nine months ago. They account for 41.6 percent of all Tweets. → Read More
With the SXSW conference approaching in Austin, we are seeing a lot of geo-location launching this year. A lot of startups are taking advantage of Foursquare’s APIs in particular to get their geo apps quickly out of the gate.
Take FourWhere. It is a pretty basic mashup of Foursquare comments and venues overlayed on Google Maps. You can search by city and neighborhood, and see all the recent tips from people who have checked into various nearby restaurants, bars, stores, and offices. The site forces you to right-click to see comments or venues instead of just having a menu in the side, but it does the job. → Read More
In this age of instant Internet celebrity, anyone can become famous for 15 seconds (to rework Andy Warhol’s oft-quoted maxim). But what does famous mean exactly when anyone can have a Facebook fan page—those public pages on Facebook set up by brands, media outlets, celebs, and wanna-be celebs. As it turns out, being popular is not as easy as it looks. A full 77 percent of Facebook fan pages have less than 1,000 fans, according to an upcoming report by Sysomos, a social media monitoring and analytics firm.
Once a fan page is set up (here’s ours), anyone on Facebook can become your “fan,” which is like following someone on Twitter in that it doesn’t require a reciprocal friendship. Sysomos analyzed 600,000 fan pages on Facebook and came up with the distribution curve in the chart above. The vast bulk of fan pages have between 10 and 1,000 fans. Only 4 percent have more than 10,000 fans, and less than 1/20th of a percent have more than a million fans. It breaks down as follows: → Read More
Oh, the burdens of popularity. We already know that most people on Twitter are sheep with few followers and who don’t Tweet much. But what about the rams? If you want to lead a flock on Twitter, you need to be heard. People with 100 followers send out an average of 2.4 Tweets per day, while those with 1,800 followers Tweet an average of 10.2 a day, according to a new study by Sysomos, a social media analytics company based in Toronto. The inflection point seems to be between 800 followers (2.8 Tweets a day) and 1,000 followers (6.4 Tweets a day).
The more followers you have, the more you Tweet. Perhaps once people attract a large enough audience they feel obligated to keep them entertained. More likely, the more you Tweet the more followers you get, provided you actually have something interesting to say. As it turns out, not everybody uses Twitter as a broadcast mechanism. Many people simply tune in passively and skim their feeds. Sysomos looked at 11.5 million Twitter accounts and concluded that the top 10 percent of Twitter users produce 86 percent of the Tweets (which closely matches a Harvard Business School study that estimates the top 10 percent of Twitter users do 90 percent of the Tweeting). It is even more concentrated than that. The Sysomos data indicates that the top 5 percent of people on Twitter account for 75 percent of all Tweets. → Read More
