Marketing Pilgrim Published: “Twitter By Their Numbers” plus 1 more

Link to Marketing Pilgrim - Internet News & Opinion

Posted: 15 Mar 2011 04:54 AM PDT

Twitter has posted some numbers on their blog with the intent of making the world (and particularly those at SXSW I suppose) go "Ooooo! ahhhhh!" here are the highlights

Regarding the number of accounts:

572,000. Number of new accounts created on March 12, 2011.

460,000. Average number of new accounts per day over the last month.

182%. Increase in number of mobile users over the past year.

Regarding the number of tweets

3 years, 2 months and 1 day. The time it took from the first Tweet to the billionth Tweet.

1 week. The time it now takes for users to send a billion Tweets.

50 million. The average number of Tweets people sent per day, one year ago.

140 million. The average number of Tweets people sent per day, in the last month.

177 million. Tweets sent on March 11, 2011.

456. Tweets per second (TPS) when Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009 (a record at that time).

6,939. Current TPS record, set 4 seconds after midnight in Japan on New Year's Day.

OK, the numbers are impressive. There is no denying that Twitter has a very real place in the world. As marketers though we need more detail because if there is one thing that the Web 2.0 has shown us is that quantity and quality rarely have a direct correlation.

In fact, we have learned to take any numbers we hear as 'evangelical' (meaning those used to promote a service) and go so far as to cut them in half in order to think we are closer to reality than the number provider really is.

We that in mind here are a few questions that would really help marketers.

How many of these accounts are placeholder accounts from people who have simply squatted or protected a name or idea?
What percentage of new accounts represent real people?
How many of these accounts have thousands of followers but have not produced a single tweet themselves?
If you took away the social media 'insiders', in other the words the 'super user' how many tweets would you have?
What are your plans to rid Twitter of the automated junk and spam that has made the service untenable on many days?

There really isn't a need for many more questions although I suspect that if our readers had the chance to ask Twitter to truly 'open the kimono' on the true numbers behind the service we might see a different picture.

So readers, what questions would you love to see Twitter answer about their service, the numbers associated with it or really any other aspect? What if you had one question to ask the service if you knew they had to answer it and answer it truthfully? What would that question be?

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StumbleUpon Paid Discovery: Advertising That Sneaks Up on You

Posted: 14 Mar 2011 05:52 PM PDT

Imagine yourself wandering along through the internet jungle, minding your own business, checking out the virtual flora and fauna and wham — you discover a gem hidden amongst all the clutter.

Exciting, isn’t it? StumbleUpon thinks so and that’s why they’re about to release their latest advertising arena which they call Paid Discovery. Now, when you think about it, Paid Discovery is kind of an oxymoron. The word “discovery” implies that you found it accidentally and yet “paid” implies that someone put it there on purpose. Still, that’s the concept behind the new service that could be quite advantageous for creative marketers.

In case you aren’t aware, StumbleUpon is a website that allows you to take an exciting trip around the World Wide Web with your areas of interest acting as a virtual GPS. The user checks off categories such as cooking, politics, blogs, or humor then they use the StumbleUpon bar to page through websites giving each a thumbs up or thumbs down as they go. These ratings help the system better target the user, so they get served more appropriate websites with every visit.

What StumbleUpon’s Paid Discovery does is add sponsored websites or full page web ads into the stream based on the interests of the user. For example, a studio might pay to insert the website for their latest movie release into the streams for people who chose entertainment as an interest. People who like cooking may find a full page ad for Wisconsin cheese inserted in their run.

Since the ads are webpages the marketer can deliver so much more than he could with a traditional banner. That means you can get creative and interactive, two things that will go along way toward making your brand memorable.

Says StumbleUpon:

There's a certain excitement one feels for the discovered object, whether that be a shell on a beach or a great movie trailer on the web. But, as social media marketing guru Max Gladwell argued, this "a-ha moment" can't seem forced. . . your future customers need to come across you as if by accident, and also not feel that they're getting a sales pitch or a social recommendation from an online connection who doesn't really know their preferences all that well.

It’s simple, but very true. Discovery is a cool thing, even if someone seeded the beach with diamonds before you got there.

You can get pricing and see some test cases at the StumbleUpon Paid Discovery webpage.