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.

Enterprise use of Social Media is largely non existent – SAP TechEd 08 BuzzGain

Mukund — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 12:08:36 +0000

Much as the technology industry is claimed to be an early adopter of all things social, Web 2.0 and community, its not making as quick progress as people think it is.

SAP TechEd08 is the annual SAP developer conference, is currently taking place in Berlin. Our good friend Mike Prosceno (who authors a good blog in his own right BTW) is there and so are many of the other SAP folks we know. I dont believe its for lack of trying. They have a TechEd Blog, a full time twitter account just for the event and forums for discussion. Over 16,000 people attend the show worldwide and a good number (over 30%) just in Berlin. So we should expect a lot of sharing, blogging, twitter, etc. Right?

1. Tweet volume (# tweets) over the last few days barely broke 300 (Just to give you a comparison, BlogWorldExpo broke 3000+ tweets daily).

2. By the hour tracking shows tweeting was more frequent in the afternoon (very counterintuitive) than in the morning. This was again very different from BlogWorldExpo.

3. The people LOVED the show though, so SAP’s gotta be happy. Positive sentiments showed up overwhelmingly which is again very different from BlogWorldExpo (where it was at 55% positive).

4. The number of unique people that did twitter was less than 0.01%. That’s very low compared to the 43-55% for BlogWorldExpo. Maybe the SAP guys are just not the chatty types.

5. Here is the best chart. Who were the influencers? The top 7: SAPTechEd, Mike Prosceno, Mike Stopforth, IdaRose Sylvester, Vuk Trifkovic, Phillip Pott, Dennis Howlett.

I do have all the data on blog posts, delicious and the rest of social media to give you a comprehensive perspective, but this post is already too long.

Summary: Few people did share and talk, and the ones that did absolutely loved it.

Questions:

1. If even a technology company with leading edge early adopters (developers) is not very socially engaged, is the market still early? Or is social media just getting acceptance? What stage do you think we are?

2. What other questions would you want to have me address from a social media perspective (what reports do you wish to see) on SAP TechEd so we can get a more comprehensive perspective?

# Update: We were primarily tracking SAPTechEd, SAPTechEd08, TechEd as the keywords. Mike and Tom Raftery emailed me saying they are seeing a lot more twitter and delicious folks, who are using no associated words to describe the event.

Buzzgain » social media stats

Social Media Stastics: The million users mark

Enterprise use of Social Media is largely non existent – SAP TechEd 08 BuzzGain