Category Archives: Social Networking

Wonder what social networking is, need some advice or ideas on where to go and how to get started or even advanced use of different social networking systems? Then this is the place to get social and get networking.

Social Media People and the Twitter Followers Trend

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Strong relationships can only grow through interaction and that’s a fact.  Much as the current trend is about having as many twitter followers as possible, something I believe is a fad and has no real worthwhile value, people are slowly realising that its the interaction thats important.

The important thing is people…

People such as @sethsimonds and @jimconnolly had relatively large follower bases on twitter (45k and 20k respectively) but made the difficult decisions to unfollow large numbers of people or simply start again from scratch.

The reason for Unfollowing?

Simply put, the numbers ceased to matter, in fact they became a serious problem. They both realised that it was the people behind the numbers who where the real value and found it extremely difficult to create meaningful relationships with such large followings and keep track of what was important to them.

After all, just how many people can you expect to communicate with or form relationships with at any given time and how do the people with massive follower counts cope?  In all honesty, very few of them care and if we cannot see that we simply serve as another notch on the belt or mark on the scoreboard that makes you even less significant and them all the more unreachable as you get drowned out in the static of the twitter stream.

Both Seth and Jim seem  much more comfortable and in control of the information they receive and much happier with the relationships they are forming or re-establishing.

I say hats of to you guys for making the right decisions even though it must have been incredibly difficult. Now maybe the rest of us can avoid making the same mistakes.

You can read both Seths and Jims stories on the links below:

Seth Simonds – Why I unfollowed everybody on twitter

Jim Connolly – Twitter and Me

Important News will find the Social Media generation

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“If the news is important, it will find me”

College Student of Jane Buckingham from Intellignece Group
during a  focus group on the  “social media generation“

This simple little quote is quite profound and gives us massive insight into how the world of news and communication is being viewed by the so called “social media generation“.

I came across this article completely by accident while browsing the web and doing some research for a blog post and it quite simply made me stop in my tracks and consider what the implications of this statement are.  Such a huge pity we don’t have the name of the student that said this simple simple words.

Reading through the article by Ben Stelter called Finding Political News Online, the Young Pass It On in the New York Times it goes on to crunch some eye opening numbers regarding the percentage of people in different age groups and where they gain their information from. While all very interesting it misses the point on what this simple statement signifies to the social media generation.

The point is…

Think about it, the next generation will only value information that comes directly to them from their peers, friends and social groups and if they haven’t heard about it then it could not be important. Have we any idea what affect this will have on issues not directly affecting people in the future.

Will the social media generation actually give a damn about world affecting subjects such as starvation, wars or other such crisis or will they become a nucleus of self serving groups all more interested in who’s dating who and the latest fashion trend within their social group?

That views a little extreme in my book, I think the opposite will actually occur (and is occurring right now).  Our ability to gain new information rapidly from a range of independent sources such as twitter, social bookmark sites and blogs and of course Google search  is something that was beyond comprehension a mere 3 years ago but is the norm today and growing at an incredible rate as more and more individuals become involved.

Subjects broached by the people we meet, people who we may never have had the opportunity to listen to before in such an intimate and personable way and the subjects that interest or even concern them can become a very real part of the social media generations future so rather than pushing big issues out of the way it actually can help to make them smaller, more managable to us individuals and also more important.

Social Media goes Viral – the power of the ReTweet or RT

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A Social Media Case Study.

This is a case study to illustrate, in real numbers, exactly what can happen when an item or post on your site is of interest to the community and network you have created on Twitter showing just what can happen when social media is put into practice and becomes an effective traffic source.

Basically when a post or piece of information goes viral in social media it is viewed by the community to be valuable enough in itself or from a trusted source that they make the decision to send broadcast this information via a ReTweet or RT to their own followers essentially creating a snowball effect as it is retransmitted again and again.

The “My Favourite Tweet” Case Study.

On Thursday the 14th of May I was on twitter and working on a client project (late in the evening). Innocent enough day as it went.  While scanning the tweets coming in I happened across one by @mattuk saying:

“Want to find out who has your Tweets as their favourites? http://tinyurl.com/rcgyea – Replace my name with yours

10:30 PM May 14th from web”

I was curious.

I tested it out myself and sure enough saw that a few of my tweets had been made favourites by people. I added this tweet to my favourites as well and decided it was interesting enough to write a post about on my blog, for the record, giving @Mattuk full credit for the discovery.

Nothing happened until the morning of Sunday the 16th. I was finishing of some work and making plans for the rest of my Sunday afternoon and chatting on Twitter with some folks when @mayhemstudios made this tweet.

“FYI: If you missed any of my Tweets. Look on my Twitter profile Favourites. All bookmarked there. :)

about 10 hours ago from TweetDeck” (approximately 12 noon GMT+1 time)

This immediately made me think of the post I had wrote about displaying all the tweets people have added to favourites on my blog so I sent this tweet to @mayhemstudios (real name Calvin Lee – check out his blog Mayhem Studios!):

“@mayhemstudios Or get the tweets most people have added to favourites by trying this: http://bit.ly/PaI2Z

about 10 hours ago from TweetDeck in reply to mayhemstudios” (just a few minutes after @mayhemstudios post).

I only sent Calvin the information as it was relevant to the subject he was talking about and afforded him another way of displaying his tweets that others have made their favourites as a search result and a favourite in the familiar Google SERPs, but specifically because it allowed Calvin to see the favourites that other people had decided where of importance to them and thus retained them for future reference.

Calvin decided that this tip on my post was worth a ReTweet and sent it out to his network of 23,724 followers. From that point on the tweet with the link to my blog spread rapidly as more and more people found value in it and retweeted the information to their own networks. The tweet went viral.

Helping the tweet go viral I noticed two important twitters who where quick to retweet the message, these where @smashingmag and @mr_gadget, both of whom have  35,957k followers and 52,811k followers respectively.

I realised that others where Retweeting Calvins message as my name was still embedded within, @justinparks, and that every time it was being rebroadcast I saw my @reply column in TweetDeck add a new face I decided to track what was going on and measure the effect with Woopra, a live statistics application I have installed on my blog.

Over the next few hours my traffic rocketed in comparison to previous numbers. On any typical day I will usually get an average of 80 visitors to a variety of different posts but today this happened.

Social Media & Twitter- Viral RT Effect

Social Media goes Viral the power of the ReTweet or RT

From the Graphic overview above it is quite evident where the traffic spike occurred. As you can see the hours previous are a quite static and in the low numbers.  These are live stats so they represent the time around 6AM until 11 AM on a Sunday morning, no big surprise really. But around noon you can see the massive surge in traffic spiking at around the 500 visitor mark. As the day progressed the traffic began to yield and fall causing much smaller spikes to continue during the gradual decline leaving the total number of visits for this single post at 1446 for Sunday alone.

Not bad for a day off.

Other stats which may be of interest are included below:

Number of Visits for Sunday 17th

Social Media goes Viral the power of the ReTweet or RT

The Landing page of these visits:

Social Media goes Viral the power of the ReTweet or RT

The Bounce rate of Visitors that day:

Social Media goes Viral the power of the ReTweet or RT

And finally, the country of origin of the visitors.

Social Media goes Viral the power of the ReTweet or RT

Other information which is of interest is this URL detailing the number of ReTweets of this particular item: http://retweetist.com/urls/2570630

Ok so now you can see all the stats and yes the numbers look all fancy but what’s your point you may be asking…

Heres the Point…

I have read hundreds and hundreds of post glorifying social media and how great it is, how it is so effective and how it will make us rethink the way we communicate and do business, but NONE of these posts backed up what they where saying with real evidence. Not one. It was all based on hearsay.  That really pisses me off, for me the proof is in the results.

So I thought I might take the time to show how social media can work (Yes I am a believer) with some real time experimentation, application and most importantly the process and evidence of results.

I didn’t monetise the post while it spiked in traffic, I didn’t add in an affiliate scheme, or try and move visitors to any financial benefit for myself. But I could have. I benefited from this.

Over the course of the last few days I have DOUBLED the number of RSS subscribers on my site. I have also gained 92 new followers on twitter out of a possible 125, I choose who to follow back carefully, always have done and will continue to do so (I hate bots) and I got excellent exposure to people who where every interested in the information meaning that the quality of people coming to the post was high and relevant. This overall effect is still continuing and more subscribers are appearing on my feed and more followers on twitter abit at a slower rate than before but a higher rate than previous to the traffic surge.

Had I been an business with a specific product, service or aim I would have been benefiting from the increased targeted traffic without a shadow of a doubt and I would have loads more pictures to show you, but I don’t.

In Conclusion…

Quite possibly, this small case study will help somone out there understand just want social media can do and what it can achieve if implemented correctly with a specific aim or focus in mind. Also it might also help illustrate that, much as in life: Its not always what you know, its who you know that counts but do remember this, the post went viral because the people that decided to ReTweet saw value in the information. The  reason  it started of in the first place was because of a strong realtionship I had already established and a solid following of twitter users who also saw value in the information and me. Thats the most important fact to remember.