Maybe Instagram wants to quell rumors that Instagram is leaking users. Maybe they simply thought it was the right time. Whatever the case, they have just put up monthly active user stats for public consumption, for the first time ever.
Of course, now is an interesting time for Instagram to unveil its monthly active user count. Around the holidays, reports emerged that said Instagram was bleeding users, and fast. For their part, Instagram denied this, saying that the data (provided by AppData) was “inaccurate.”
“We continue to see strong and steady growth in both registered and active users of Instagram,” they said.
Many suggested that the purported data plunge was either just a blip, or that it was symptomatic of the holiday season, which causes a drop in plenty of other apps’ usage as well. Plus, AppData’s data only comes from Facebook-connected users, which only represent a small portion of Instagram’s total users.
You may remember that Mark Zuckerberg said Instagram had passed 100 million users back in September 2012, but that was just users, not monthly active users. So it’s probably not the case that users have actually declined over the past few months.
Today, LinkedIn is announcing a pretty significant milestone. The social network for professionals has just topped 200 million members. For reference, LinkedIn hit 100 million members back in March of 2011 – meaning it’s taken them nearly two years to double their user base.
“This milestone is more than just a metric — it’s a reminder of the global footprint and the scale of impact our network has each day. Members come first at LinkedIn and we remain focused on creating economic opportunity for every professional in the world. We look forward to bringing the power of the LinkedIn network to many more professionals in the coming years,” said LinkedIn’s Deep Nishar in a blog post.
LinkedIn boasts that their 200 million users hail from over 200 countries and territories, and use the service in 19 different languages.
According to the stats, the U.S. is LinkedIn’s biggest user base – by a lot. With 74 million members, the U.S. dwarfs the next largest users base of India, which sits at 18 million members. Turkey, Colombia, and Indonesia are the countries that are growing the fastest on the network. The largest subset of LinkedIn members come from the Information Technology and Services industry.
Of course, this is a members announcement – not an active users announcement. I’ve reached out to LinkedIn for specific MAU figures, and will update this article if I hear back. It’s safe to say, however, that LinkedIn’s MAUs do not quite total 200 million.
That’s because in the world on social media, “members” or “accounts” is oftentimes a misleading metric. Take for instance Twitter, which reportedly sports over 500 million accounts. Less than half of those are active on a monthly basis, though. The latest figures put Twitter’s MAUs at 200 million.
Facebook assured Instagram users that their experience with the service wouldn’t change post-acquisition, and that Instagram would continue to “grow independently.” While Facebook isn’t necessarily backtracking on that position, they are beginning to integrate the two services little by little.
The latest integration comes in the form of user reporting. Now, when Instagram users choose to report a user (for whatever reason), they are directed to a Facebook page to complete the report.
The Facebook page asks users to use the form to report an Instagram Web Profile and gives the options of spam, nudity, hate speech, and underage user. There are links on the Facebook page the direct users back to Instagram for clarification on types of reporting.
“Instagram is owned by Facebook, so if you’re logged into Facebook we may use your Facebook account info to help us figure out what’s going on,” reads a message on the report form.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that Facebook is beginning to integrate parts of Instagram after last year’s big acquisition. But that vague “you’re logged in, os we’re going to use that to find stuff out” message may give some privacy hounds some concern. Especially after the big privacy dustup that saw users enraged at Facebook/Instagram for changing its privacy policies to permit the selling of user photos. Kind of.
It’s Facebook’s world – every other social network is just living in it. Big blue’s virus-like spread has been well-documented, as the company has spent the past three years making up ground in countries like Brazil, Mexico, India, and more to become the most-popular social network in the world (and in a majority of countries).
Social media analyst Vincenzo Cosenza has been tracking the state of social media across the world since 2009, and every six months he has put out his “World Map of Social Networks.” In June, he looked at 137 countries using Alexa data and found that Facebook was the most-popular social network in 126 of them, a truly overwhelming majority.
Now that six months have passed, it’s once again time for another map. This new map does indeed show gains for Facebook, but holdouts remain in various countries in the East.
As of now, Facebook holds sway over 127 of the 137 countries Cosenza analyzes. The major countries that boast networks more popular than Facebook include Russia, China, and Iran.
What’s interesting is that the map now features the least amount of networks ever considered. As of December 2012, only 5 networks dominate the world: Facebook, QZone, V Kontakte, Odnoklassniki, and Cloob.
V Kontakte and Odnoklassniki battle it out in Russia, of course, and QZone dominates the Chinese market. Cloob is the network of choice in Iran, where Facebook is more or less blocked by the government.
Although Facebook’s only unconquered territories lie in Asia, Facebook currently has the most of its 1 billion+ users hailing from Asia.
“One of the drivers of its growth is Asia that with 278 million users, surpassed Europe, 251 million, as the largest continent on Facebook. North America has 243 million users, South America 142 million. Africa, almost 52 million, and Oceania just 15 million (source: Facebook Ads Platform). In the latest months Zuckerberg’s Army conquered Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia and Vietnam,” says Cosenza.
Here’s a nice little GIF of Facebook’s global takeover, from 2009 to the present.
Twitter has just announced a pretty significant milestone: 200 million monthly active users. Twitter has reached this milestone in less than seven years of existence.
Back in March, Twitter officially turned six years old (it was the anniversary of the first-ever tweet, sent out by Jack Dorsey). At that time, the company announced 140 million MAUs who were sending 340 tweets per day. That means that Twitter has grown by around 60 million MAUs in about nine months.
Twitter hit the 100 million MAUs milestone back in September of 2011. At that time, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said that about half of Twitter’s MAUs log on every day. So, considering that trend has stayed relatively level, about 100 million Twitter users access the service every single day.
Of course, we know that Twitter has a fake account problem. Not only that, but they also have a pretty big inactive user problem as well. Back in July, Twitter reportedly topped 500 million “accounts,” but only around 160 million MAUs. That means that Twitter is hauling around a significant amount of dead weight.
Of course, they’re not the only ones. Any social network has to contened with inactive, fake, and spam accounts.
For fun, if you compare Twitter’s MAUs to other popular social networks, they come in way behind Facebook. Big blue has claimed over 1 billion MAUs. Twitter is still edging out Google+, however. Google just announced 135 MAUs for their fledgling social project.
Twitter announced 200M users in a tweet, saying that “you are the pulse of the planet. We’re grateful for your ongoing support!”
Want to take a trip through your top moments on Facebook this past year? Well, you’re in luck. Facebook has just unveiled their year-in-review materials, and one of them is a user-specific 2012 Timeline of top stories.
Just log in and go to facebook.com/yearinreview to see your own personalized year in review Timeline for 2012.
The first thing you’ll see is a rotating collage of important photos from the year. For me, Facebook did a pretty good job of capturing memorable moments from 2012. Right below that, Facebook will show you how many friends you’ve added and how many pages you’ve like in the last 12 months.
Under that, Facebook has selected your “20 biggest moments” to display.
According to Facebook, these “big moments” include “life events, posts you’ve highlighted, popular posts you’ve been tagged in, and popular posts you’ve shared.” So your year-in-review Timeline will be a lot better if you’re an active Timeline user – as in someone who manually highlights and removes stories to make it truly personalized. But I’m not really a Timeline tinkerer and Facebook did a great job of highlighting my top life events, photos, and popular updates from the year.
It’s a fun little walk down memory lane, considering you are active enough on Facebook for the Timeline to be populated with relevant and important stories. You can check yours out today.
Music streaming service Spotify has just announced its current user stats, and they show that the company has increased its paid user base by two million this year alone.
Back in July, Spotify announced 4 million paid subscriptions and in January the figure was 3 million. At this rate, Spotify is growing roughly one million paying customers every six months.
Of course, Spotify is not only concerned with paid subscribers. Any non-paying user is a potential paying user, any Spotify has plenty of those too. According to the company, it now sports 20 million total active users who have generated over a billion playlists. Back in July, it was 15 million total users – so Spotify basically has the same paid to non-paid user ratio as it did six months ago (3.75 to 4).
Another interesting stat from Spotify’s announcement? Apparently, users have created more than 4 million different playlists that a simply titled “Love.” I’ll just leave that there with no comment.
Today Google launched Google+ Communities, which allows users of the social network to create and join large common interest groups complete with discussion, hangouts, and seamless sharing across the web. They also announced that former iPad app of the year Snapseed, which Google acquired back in September, is now available for Android.
But inside those announcements, Google Senior VP Vic Gundotra also dropped some new Google+ statistics. Mainly, the network (by itself) now has 135 million active users.
“Today Google+ is the fastest-growing network thingy ever. More than 500 million people have upgraded, 235 million are active across Google (+1’ing apps in Google Play, hanging out in Gmail, connecting with friends in Search…), and 135 million are active in just the stream,” says Gundotra.
So, Google+ has over 500 million users – but not really. When you look at Google account holders who actually access plus.google.com (or the mobile app), that figure is only about 27%.
Still, 135 monthly active users is hardly a “ghost town,” which is a two word phrase that we all expect Vic Gundotra and others around Google are probably sick and tired of hearing.
Back in September (when Gundotra announced the acquisition of Snapseed), Google claimed 400 million registered Google+ users and 100 million monthly active users. That means that Google+ has gained 35 million active users in about two and a half months. Extrapolated, Google+ is on a rough pace of 160 million new active users in a year.
I know we make the “Google+ is Google” argument all the time to explain that every Google product is connected, and to think of Google+ as a standalone social network (as opposed to the glue that holds many other services together) is an egregious error. But back in September, when Google announced 100 million MAUs, Gundotra said “while Google+ is all about creating a better experience across Google, it’s also a destination.”
So make no mistake – Google is very happy to see 135 million MAUs for Google+.
As a country, we are obsessed with liking, sharing, tweeting, and pinning. Seriously obsessed. Nielsen has just published their Social Media Report for 2012 and the numbers are staggering.
According to Nielsen, Americans spent a total of 121.1 billion minutes on social media sites during the month of July. Make a few calculations and we find that over 230 millennia was spent on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and other social networks in a four week span. That’s just incredible. Nielsen’s stats include sites like Blogger and Tumblr, so were really talking about social networking and blogging here – but still, it’s pretty unbelievable.
Year-over-year our total time on social media increased a whopping 32.7 billion minutes.
Nielsen also determined that our socia media obsession is moving more toward mobile. While 87.8 uniques accessed social media via mobile (web and apps combined) in July of 2011, 166.9 did so in July of 2012. When you look at who is doing the most social networking, Nielsen’s findings echo previous claims that say young women are the most active.
Facebook remained the top social network, followed by Blogger, Twitter, WordPress, and LinkedIn. Pinterest saw the biggest increase from 2011, with users spending 1.25 billion minutes via web, 120 million via app, and 720 million via mobile web.
You can check out Nielsen’s full social media report here.
If you prefer to hide behind the veil of anonymity when posting reviews, Google Play is probably not the place for you anymore. In a move that will pretty much wipe Google Play of nameless, faceless feedback, Google is now forcing reviewers to log in in order to post.
When users post a review for an app, movie, album, or any other item available in the store, their Google+ profile will be attached to the comment – that means their names and photos.
Google pushing conspicuousness when it comes to their products shouldn’t really surprise anyone. Google’s real name policy on Google+ comes to mind. Plus, they’ve been suggesting that users use their Google profiles to comment on YouTube videos. That requirement has just recently rolled out to users.
Now, when a logged-in user attempts to leave a review, a message pops up notifying them that “from now one, reviews you write will be posted publicly using your Google+ name and picture.” It says that they are now “reviews powered by Google.”
Any reviews you made before this change will appear under the generic name “A Google user.”
And if you’re not signed-in to your Google profile, it simply won’t let you write a review:
Google is clearly pushing accountability here, and attempting to improve the quality of Google Play reviews by forcing people out from behind the curtains. With this move, it’s pretty hard to stay anonymous while leaving a comment – at least a pain in the ass if nothing else. I guess users could make fake Google profiles in order to anonymously review stuff, but Google’s (rightly) assuming that most users will just log in.
Google weaving Google+ into more Google products. Who woulda thunk it?
In early October, Facebook expanded their promoted posts service to allow individual users to pay a small fee to promote one of their statuses, photos, events, etc. With every one of those updates a U.S. user posts, a “promote” option now appears next to the “like” and “comment” button. Tempting, of course, if you have something really important or witty that you want a bunch of people to see.
Promoted Posts for People work similarly to Facebook’s Promoted Posts for Pages, which debuted during the summer. Pay a few bucks, and Facebook pushes the status up to the top of your friends’ news feeds. Facebook markets Promoted Posts as a way to make sure the really important stuff is seen by everyone important.
The price to promote a personal post is around $7 for most users, and the promoted post will feature a “sponsored” tag when it appears in a friend’s news feed.
One of the caveats that Facebook announced when they unveiled Promoted Posts for People was a friend-limit. Only users with less than 5,000 could play to promote their posts.
Now, that changes. Facebook has now expanded the Promoted Post for People initiative to include Facebook’s more popular power users.
“We are continuing to test promoted posts in the U.S.,” Facebook told VentureBeat. “As part of this, we are opened up the test to enable people with 5,000 or more friends and subscribers to use the product. We are also continuing to experiment with different pricing models. The price of promoted posts is based on a number of factors, including the reach and the number of people you are promoting to.”
Of course, the price would necessarily jump a little bit. For instance, VentureBeats’s Jennifer Van Grove has just shy of 500,000 Facebook subscribers and was given a price of $49 to promote her post.
But for a user with hundreds or thousands or even millions of friends/subscribers, it might be worth it to promote something really, really big.
Facebook currently boasts over 1 billion monthly active users, with more signing up every day. In order to help protect those users from the get-go and possibly avoid any future privacy quagmires, the company is now inserting a new privacy course into its new user tutorial.
At Facebook, we’re committed to making sure that you understand how sharing works on our site and that you are in control of what you share and with whom. That’s why we’re pleased to be rolling out more prominent and detailed educational privacy information to new users as soon as they begin the process of signing up for Facebook. These updates to our sign-up process will be visible to most new users around the globe starting today.
We’ve implemented these enhancements as part of our broader effort to integrate more privacy education into the new user experience. We appreciate the guidance on this effort that we’ve received from the Irish Data Protection Commissioner’s Office, the regulatory oversight agency for our services outside of the United States and Canada.
Starting today, new Facebook users will receive a crash course in a handful of topics during the sign-up process, including ads, accessing their own data, tagging, apps, and choosing who sees their content.
When a new user signs up, they’ll also be able to select a specific audience for key information like education and employer background.
Facebook says they’ve also updated their Help Center to include any recent privacy changes to their products
Facebook wants to know what you think about Facebook.
Some users are being greeted with a survey prompt when they login this morning. The box appears at the top of the user’s news feed and says “we’d like to hear from you, please take 3-4 minutes to tell us about your experience using Facebook.”
Clicking on the link launches a 15-question survey that covers a variety of topics including privacy, friends, ease of use, and how much fun the network is.
Overall, how satisfied are you with your Facebook experience?
How likely are you to recommend Facebook to someone you know?
How important is Facebook in staying connected to: close friends and family; acquaintances; celebrities and other public figures?
How well or poorly does your profile represent who you are and what you care about?
How do you feel about the number of friends you have on Facebook?
How much do you feel in control of your personal information on Facebook?
How much do you trust Facebook to handle your personal information responsibly?
How well do you understand how to control your privacy on Facebook?
How reliably does Facebook work the way it’s supposed to (I.e., without bugs, errors, or delays)?
How easy or difficult is Facebook to use?
How useful is Facebook overall?
How much fun is Facebook overall?
How trustworthy is Facebook overall?
In your opinion, how much value does Facebook place on providing a good experience for users?
The survey also has an open-ended response section where users can provide the company with additional feedback.
This isn’t the first time that Facebook has asked users to complete a survey about their experience with the network. Last month, Facebook prompted users to fill out a survey, but it devolved into a strange political quiz. That survey was axed, as Facebook said that they accidentally sent out an incomplete survey to a small batch or users.
I’ve reached out to Facebook for more info on the survey and will update this article accordingly.
We knew it was bound to happen sooner rather than later. After reporting 955 million monthly active users in their May IPO filing, Facebook just announced last Thursday that they had crossed the 1 billion users threshold.
According to the company, they hit that mark at 12:45 pm PT on September 14th.
“This morning, there are more than one billion people using Facebook actively each month. If you’re reading this: thank you for giving me and my little team the honor of serving you. Helping a billion people connect is amazing, humbling and by far the thing I am most proud of in my life. I am committed to working every day to make Facebook better for you, and hopefully together one day we will be able to connect the rest of the world too,” said CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
One billion users is a huge milestone indeed, and some of the additional stats Facebook provided with the announcement are even more incredible. For instance, Facebook users have uploaded over 265 billion photos, and have clicked the “like” button over 1.13 trillion times since February of 2009.
Of course, U.S. House members, Senators, Governors, and Mayors make up a portion of those 1 billion active users (albeit a small portion). As we barrel toward election day, the interaction between politics and social media is as strong as ever. With that in mind, Facebook decided to ask some prominent U.S. politicians about their 1 billion user milestone.
Here’s what some of them had to say:
John Boehner, House Speaker: “One billion means yet another illustration of the nearly unlimited potential of digital media. Mews, views, and information can now move in ways never thought possible. Used responsibly, it can be an unprecedented tool for the exchange of knowledge and truth in our world.”
Harry Reid, Senate Majority Leader: “One billion means- What problems can one-billion individuals solve by working together? I am working hard to ensure Americans have access to good-paying jobs and quality education so our children’s future can be brighter than ours. With one-billion strong, we can work to ensure everyone had opportunities to thrive.”
Nancy Pelosi, House Minority Leader: “One billion means we have the power to change the world we live in. If I could communicate to all of them, my message would be to take some time to translate your online engagement into offline activism, go vote, run for office, or serve your community.”
Steny Hoyer, House Minority Whip: “One billion means no one can question the fact that we are all connected, and with that connection comes a responsibility to our neighbors near and far. One billion means more ideas can be generated, travel farther and faster than ever, and result in actions that could change the world.”
Marco Rubio, Senator: “One billion means harnessing the power of the internet and spreading it to places where repressive governments ban it out of fear. This would profoundly impact our society because of the internet’s virtually unlimited power to help people achieve unprecedented freedom and rise above the circumstances of their birth.”
Martin O’Malley, Governor of Maryland: “One billion means the ability to connect and communicate like never before. It means revolutionizing the way we fuel, feed, and heal our people and planet while moving our children forward to a stronger, more sustainable future through unprecedented global collaboration, learning, and the effective sharing of resources and information.”
Antonio Villaraigosa, Mayor of Los Angeles: “One billion minds mean the power to bypass the entrenched ideology of the left and right. By linking one billion citizens we can realize the dream of a true radical center and one that takes on the big challenges and solves the real problems across the world.”
Earlier today, Google announced that they had acquired iPad app of the year Snapseed and its makers NIik Software. As a part of that announcement, Google’s Senior Vice President of Engineering Vic Gundotra posted a welcome message to Nik software, and inside that message he divulged some Google+ statistics.
Mainly, Google+ now has over 400 million registered users and over 100 million monthly active users. He clarifies that that includes both desktop and mobile users.
Welcome Nik Software!
Today I’m excited to welcome +Nik Software to the Google family! We want to help our users create photos they absolutely love, and in our experience Nik does this better than anyone. Check out the examples from some of the world’s greatest photographers, and you’ll see what I mean.
This week we also hit an important milestone–over 400,000,000 people have upgraded to Google+. It was only a year ago that we opened public sign-up, and we couldn’t have imagined that so many people would join in just 12 months. While Google+ is all about creating a better experience across Google, it’s also a destination. And here too, I’m happy to report that we have just crossed 100,000,000 monthly active users on Google+ (plus.google.com and mobile app).
It seems like Google+ has been fighting off proclamations of its utter demise before it even launched, and even with hundreds of million of users has been labeled a “ghost town.”.
Strangely enough, at this year’s Google I/O back in June, Gundotra announced 250 registered users and 150 million monthly active users for Google+. So, at first glance it would appear that someone screwed up the metrics at some point. But according to Gundotra, the I/O figures included gmail users who used circles or people that simply +1’ed something.
This time, the 100 million MAUs only refer to those who access plus.google.com and use the mobile app.
By comparison, Facebook has reported nearly 1 billion MAUs, which means that Google+ is roughly one tenth the size of Facebook. A few months ago, Twitter announced 140 million active users. So, if we’re going by the networks’ own claims, Google+ is still chasing.
You may have done a double take when you first heard that Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook had agreed to purchase revenue-less photo sharing app Instagram for a cool $1 billion. You may have wondered how in the hell a startup like Instagram was worth that much money.
Well, I don’t think that you can justify an acquisition with a single number, but this one is pretty impressive nonetheless.
In April, the month that Facebook first announced the acquisition, DAUs were just shy of 1 million (860,000). If you’re quick with the math, you already know that’s over 1000% growth in less than six months.
Of course, jumping under the Facebook umbrella probably didn’t trigger the massive growth. The app did finally launch on Android just days before the acquisition was announced. But the app is on a rocket-like trajectory. Facebook may be struggling on the stock front, but they did manage to close the deal on an astoundingly popular app.
101-year-old Florence Detlor graduated Occidental College in 1932, likes books, and lives in Menlo Park, California. She has an interesting title, as well: Oldest registered Facebook user.
Or so says Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. Detlor visited her and CEO Mark Zuckerberg yesterday, and Sandberg posted a photo of it on Facebook.
“Honored to meet Florence Detlor, who at 101 years old is the oldest registered Facebook user. Thank you for visiting us Florence,” she said in a post.
Reports last year noted a significant rise in social media use by seniors. One Pew report noted a 60% increase year-over-year in social media use by those aged 50-64.
Sandberg’s post seems to have motivated some users to get their grandparents and great grandparents on Facebook. “Ok, so now I’m feeling competitive and ready to get my grandma on Facebook,” said one user. “She’s 103!”
It’s pretty safe to say that everyone on Twitter is followed by at least a few fake accounts. We always knew that bots ran rampant on the site, but recent studies into the buying and selling of fake Twitter followers has put a spotlight on just how serious the problem really is.
Plus, there was that whole thing about Mitt Romney’s follower count making a suspicious 100K+ jump overnight.
But in terms of sheer volume, President Obama dwarfs the presumptive Republican nominee in fake followers. A new tool from Status People allows anyone to look at the breakdown of followers of any Twitter users to see how many are “fake,” “inactive,” and “good.” And using that tool, we can see that 31% of President Obama’s followers are deemed fake. Since Obama has around 18.8 million followers, we can calculate that just shy of 6 million of them are fake.
Mitt Romney, on the other hand, only has 900,000 followers total. Only 16% of those are fake, according to the tool. That amounts to around 144,000 phantom followers.
And these figures don’t even take into account the “inactive” percentages, which total 39% for the President and 31% for Romney. Any number of those “Inactive” users could be fake.
Really, it all comes down to how many followers you have. The more you have, the bigger the percentage of fakes you have as well. We recently crunched the numbers and found that, on average, over 27% of the top ten Twitter accounts’ followers are fake. That means that although Mitt Romney was in the news recently due to speculation that his campaign had bought over a hundred thousand followers overnight, he’s far from the only Twitter user to have a fake follower problem.
Fake Twitter followers are on everyone’s mind. Last month, GOP Presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s Twitter followers jumped substantially overnight, leading some to accuse the campaign of buying followers. They denied it of course, but it led to a much more prominent discussion of the somewhat depressing reality that many of your tweets may be falling on deaf ears. Deaf, fake ears.
A recent study into the “Twitter Underground Economy” demonstrated just how easy it is to buy fake followers on the site. The study found that the average cost of buying 1,000 fake followers was about $18, and the average user who buys fake followers has about 48,885.
When we say “fake,” we mean fake – accounts conjured out of thin air for the sole purpose of boosting follower counts and egos. They can also be used as retweet factories, but then again, who needs a fake account with no real followers to retweet your tweets anyway?
Twitter has a little over 140 million active users. CEO Dick Costolo said so a few months ago. But some analysts have claimed that Twitter has over 500 million registered accounts. It doesn’t take a mathematician to see that that’s a huge percentage of inactive users.
It’s pretty clear that Twitter is full of fake and inactive accounts. That’s not debatable. We thought it would be fun to look at the top 10 Twitter accounts (according to number of followers) and see just how many of their followers are fake and inactive.
Lucky for us, Status People has just released a new tool that allows any Twitter user to check their (and their friends’) follower breakdown.
“We take a sample of your follower data. Up to 500 records depending on how ‘popular’ you are and assess them against a number of simple spam criteria,” says Status People. “On a very basic level spam accounts tend to have few or no followers and few or no tweets. But in contrast they tend to follow a lot of other accounts.”
They also say those with 10,000 or less followers will get the most accurate breakdown, but they feel confident that their tool is accurate for all Twitter users. Of course, determining what is and what isn’t a fake account isn’t an exact science, but Status People’s tool gives us a nice insight into how authentic these massive celebrity Twitter followings really are.
We looked at the top 10 Twitter accounts in terms of follower count, and we found that that 27.1% of their followers are listed as “Fake,” on average. And a whopping 40.5% of the accounts are said to be “Inactive.” That means that only 32.4% of the accounts that follow the top 10 Twitter accounts are “Good,” legitimate users.
Twitter Queen Lady Gaga only registered 29% “Good” followers.
The star of the top 10 was Kim Kardashian, who registered 44% “Good” followers and only 18% “Fake.”
Note: The top 10 Twitter accounts in terms of followers currently belong to (in order) Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, Rihanna, Britney Spears, President Obama, Shakira, Taylor Swift, Kim Kardashian, and YouTube.
UK & Ireland Netflix members now total over one million. Netflix says that this is the fastest that any territory has ever hit one million users.
“This membership milestone is evidence that Netflix has rapidly gained popularity in the UK and Ireland,” said CEO Reed Hastings. “Our British and Irish members clearly enjoy the ability to instantly watch a large variety of TV shows and films streaming from Netflix on their favourite devices whenever they want.”
Netflix also boasts that this achievement propels them ahead of the early milestones of other prominent companies, for instance 1 million members in seven months is four times faster than Twitter’s preliminary growth rate. And its double that of Facebook and Foursquare.
To be fair, I’m not really sure what Foursquare’s global member growth has to do with Netflix’s growth in a new market, but Netflix seems to see a comparison.
Two fun facts about Netflix’s fast-growing UK & Ireland audience: Their favorite genres are comedy and drama, and Sunday night is the peak night for streaming activity.
Last week, Netflix announced that they were expanding into another market later this year: Scandinavia. Netflix says that before the end of 2012, their streaming service will be up and running in Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland.
There’s been a lot of debate lately over whether or not Google+ is actually doing anything for the search giant. Google was quick to point out during I/O that the social network now has over 250 million users with 70 million daily active users. A report from early August suggested that Google was slowing acquisitions and funding for Google+ because it wasn’t performing to their expectations. A recent study seems to confirm that report.
UK-based social media firm Umpf recently looked at Google+ engagement and found some surprising statistics. Let’s start with the good news first. Google+ really is in second place in terms of members, but not by much. Umpf says that Google+ only has 170 million users while LinkedIn has 161 million. Facebook is still the king with 955 million users.
The good news ends there. Umpf looked at the actual engagement on these social networks and Google+ does not look good. The study found that for every 100 million users, only 6 million Google+ users were likely to share a story. Compare that to the 197 million people like to share a story on Twitter and the 41 million likely to share on Facebook.
As for activity, folks on Twitter are 33 times more active than their Google+ counterparts. Facebook users are seven times more active and LinkedIn members are 2.5 times more active.
Umpf finally broke down the shares percentage that each social network enjoys for a variety of stories. Google+ performs well in business, but that’s still only 2.6 percent. Facebook and Twitter are much higher sharing 45.7 and 32.1 percent respectively. It doesn’t ge any better from there with health stories being shared by only a paltry 0.4 percent of Google+ users compared to 62.7 percent of Facebook users.
What does all of this prove? Google has a massive social network, but nobody is using it. Sure, you may use it, but the majority of the world doesn’t. We all got a Google+ account because we have a Gmail account or some other Google product. The only reason Google+ accounts are growing is because Google is integrating into their products. It’s great for numbers, but it does nothing for engagement.
That being said, Google+ is a fantastic product and it deservers better. I’m not sure what Google can do to increase engagement on the network. They might need to perform a massive overhaul that scraps everything and start over. They could also focus more on Hangouts, arguably the most popular component in Google+.
Facebook and Twitter are dominating everything. Google has stated that it’s not their intention to compete, but they’re going to be compared to the others regardless of their stance. When numbers like these comes out, it doesn’t look good for them. Here’s hoping they can turn Google+ around before it ends up like Wave, a great idea killed early by limited engagement.
