Buzzgain » delicious

Social Media Stastics: The million users mark

Mukund — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 13:26:19 +0000

Jeremiah talked about what’s on the mind of several startup Marketing VP’s and Venture Capitalists yesterday. We get requests daily from many of the same on another question that’s top of mind. The magic Million users number.

So using BuzzGain Analytics dashboard, we the “All Star Cast” of Web 2.0 companies – StumbleUpon, Upcoming, Delicious, Flickr, MyBlogLog and Twitter. The reason we chose them was 3 fold – the year the started, their relative success (either acquisition or tremendous traction) to date and our ability to discern and analyze quality data from that property.

The oldest company in the list is StumbleUpon (2001) and the youngest is Twitter (2006). The one with the most number of users is delicious (9.54 Million) and the least is Upcoming (230K).

In terms of fastest growth to a million users it has been another player in an adjacent space – Skype.

This is explained more clearly in the “network effects” and the “viral nature” of the product. Its useful for the individual (like Upcoming) but awesome in a network (Skype).

Of these 6 players the fastest growing has been Twitter.

Which of the Top 10 Social Bookmarking Sites should you focus on?

Mukund — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 13:23:29 +0000

There are over 50 social bookmarking websiteswhich primarily perform the function of allowing users to bookmark, share and annotate the web. We track 10 of them includingDelicious, Ma.gnolia.com,StumbleUpon, Diigo,Backflip, Blogmarks,Clipmarks, Furl, Simpyand Buddymarks.

We wanted to capture the value and difference of these sites not as a user of social bookmarks, but more from the standpoint of generating viral behavior and target specific audiences. To that end we also wanted to make some recommendations on which sites provide you specific value and hence might be a better use of your time to target and nurture the users of.

The value these bookmarking sites provide includes:

1. Traffic increase: If you get StumbledUpon expect a significant traffic increase within a short period (bursty) followed by a lull.

2. Relevance and link priority: As users tag your blog post or web page, they add their own filters, which help you understand a) your brand perception and b) your relavance with that communities sphere of influence

3. Ability to understand and create your early adopter base. For our solution, it was relatively easy to find out the users who bookmarked the content, hence were very interested in the relevant solution and would be keen on learning more when the beta was available. We built our entire list of 1033 beta users to provide us feedback on our product based on who bookmarked us and who they recommended us to.

Here are the recommendations:

1. Most # of users: Delicious and StumbleUpon are way ahead of the pack. StumbleUpon users tend to be more casual users and the traffic you’ll get will be fast and swift. Delicious traffic is more like a simmering pot, but depending on your content can get you

2. Topic focus: If you are an enterprise software company, Diigo and Backflip have the most users with content relevant for that space. ForMusic, Furl and BackFlip do a great job, and for Lifestyle topics Blogmarks is the most extensive. Its probably a function of the initial users and their likes / dislikes, but the content relevance for those topics is the most in those sites. Health related topics makes Delicious and Clipmarks the best. Finance related topics are most frequent onFurl.

3. Speed of propogation (Virality): Although Delicious has the most users, StumbleUpon, Furl and Diigo have the fastest velocity to user traction.

What do you think? Which ones do you use and why?

How to define “authority” on the web – 21 metrics from BuzzGain

Mukund — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 12:55:02 +0000

Chris had a very interesting post on how does the web define authority.

In that he questions “It would be easy to bog ourselves down in definitions of the word “authority” itself. In this case, let’s agree that the working definition as it pertains to this topic is: a blog or website or even an individual person and their credibility, knowledge, and reputation on the Web. Is this close enough? How would you change this?”

How do we define authority though? BuzzGain does it with 21 metrics.

1. Blog content and tags for a vertical – in this case social media. Its an exhaustive list of about 25 to tags ranging from facebook to personal branding and from social news to blogging & blogs. The more you write about these topics the more likely you are an authority on some or all of them. You are more likely passionate about them, which is a start for being an authority.

2. Location of posts on SERP (Search engine results page) related to tags on Google Search. The higher you appear, (i.e. if you come on the first page of the SERP, you are higher than on the second page and so on) the more authority you have.

3. Frequency of posting. More frequent the better obviously.

4. Traffic & Visitors: Both website visitors and # of RSS subscribers define traffic for a blog. We track them both to assign a metric number between 1 and 5. More traffic = higher the authority.

5. Engagement of readers: How many comments do you have per article. How many overall? What is the time to comment – i.e. How quickly does someone comment as soon as you post an article? More engaging readers define a more social experience and a higher authority.

7. Quality of posts: Thanks to our partnership with AideRSS, we can tell which posts of yours are of high quality. This usually means which ones got “Dugg” or “Bookmarked” and how many comments exist on that post. Posts that have the highest quality are the ones we consider towards your authority.

7. Twitter: Of the 126 “socially aware” applications, this is the King Kong of social connections. We track # of followers, your “tweet frequency”, and the # of @ replies to your tweets. The assigned number for your Twitter authority comes as a combination of these characteristics.

8. Social Bookmarking: Currently we support Stumbleupon and delicious although we have been looking at diigo, Magnolia and Furl. More bookmarks and more followers indicate a sense of higher authority.

9. Social News: How many followers you have on Digg and the velocity of your digg posts to their overall appearance on the top of the digg homepage.

10. Social Network presence: This is obvious but the more “in the field” links to other folks you have on LinkedIn and Facebook the higher you rank in our authority list. We are looking to support other social networks, but these are the primary ones in our belief.

There are 11 other metrics that define authority, which I will mention briefly since this post is very long already. They include presence in blog directories, blog search engines (IceRocket, for e.g.), # of your incoming links, Google Pagerank, presence on photo sites and other microblogs, frequency of sharing items on Google reader, whether you podcast and videocast, # of times you guest blog on other “authority blog” and frequency of your interviews on other relevant / related blogs in your field.

image credit: Allposters