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?

Buzzgain » stumbleupon

Social Media Stastics: The million users mark

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