Sep 09

Who’s using social sites? Your Mom!

By Josh Martin Facebook, Twitter View Comments

I ran across some great data, illustrated by the team at Flowtown, that highlights the latest demographic statistics about social network usage. Surprisingly, the majority of users are no longer college students, but are older than 38 years old. In fact, the most significant growth in the last few years have been adults 50 years and older.

A few stats that stood out to me:

  • The average Facebook user is 38 years old, and 64% of Twitter’s users are 35 or older.
  • Almost half of Internet users ages 50-64 are using social sites
  • 18-29 year olds use social networks (60%) almost as much as email (62%)

Any stats surprise you?

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Jul 19

Golf + Social Media = Awesomeness

By Josh Martin Social Media, Twitter View Comments

One of the things I love about social media and sports is how it brings fans closer to the game/athletes. I’m a huge golf fanatic (if you’re a golf fan, be sure to check out my golf blog at iLikeBigPutts.com or follow me  @iLikeBigPutts) and one of the pro golfers that I follow on Twitter is Stewart Cink. He was one of the first golfers to embrace Twitter and has over 1 million followers.

Cink’s major sponsor, Nike Golf, came up with a brilliant idea in preparation for his title-defense at the British Open this past weekend: decorate his golf bag with tweets from his fans and followers. Nike asked users to submit their messages on Twitter and Cink selected his favorites to display on his golf bag.

What do you think of the mix of social media and sports? Do you follow sports stars on social media channels?

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Jul 13

Twitter adds names to search results

By Josh Martin Social Media, Twitter View Comments

Twitter has finally made it easier to find other users by integrating Twitter names/handles within search results. This has been one of my biggest pain-points within Twitter by not being able to find Twitter names easily.

Now when you perform a search for celebrities or brands on Twitter, the top three Twitter names will appear (See Chick-fil-A example below). It’s important to note that this feature doesn’t work on search.twitter.com as of yet.

What do you think of this new feature? What other changes would you like to see on Twitter?

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Jul 02

World Cup dominating social chatter

By Josh Martin Facebook, Twitter View Comments

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock (or you don’t have a Facebook or Twitter account), it would be hard to miss what’s going on with the World Cup. Around 80% of the world’s population has been watching the games and you can imagine how this has impacted productivity in the workplace. When games are played, social networks are buzzing with World Cup chatter (even causing Twitter to go down at times).

On Twitter, fans are tweeting about everything from teams, players, coaches, and even those annoying vuvuzelas (and by the way, there is an equally annoying Vuvuzela iPhone/iPad app if you’re interested). Mashable has been updating the Top 10 World Cup Twitter Trends on a weekly basis. From there you can see the most tweeted teams and players. It’s interesting to see how these change from week to week as teams are eliminated from play.

Facebook revealed some interesting graphs/charts that illustrate trends among status updates. In the image below, the spikes in the graph are where users used the word “goal” in their status updates on Facebook.


The chart below show the frequency of Facebook status messages during the England-US match. About 30 percent of all status updates on Facebook during the course of that match included a word relevant to the World Cup.


The thing that I have enjoyed the most about social media during the World Cup is that when I don’t have access to a TV, I can follow along on Facebook/Twitter and know what exactly is happening (score, close shots, bad calls, etc.).

Have you been following the World Cup through social networks? What do you think?

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Mar 24

What is Twitter’s future?

By Josh Martin Social Media, Twitter View Comments

Twitter celebrated its fourth birthday over the weekend (March 21). This got me thinking – has Twitter reached it’s full potential or is there something more? I’ve read several posts on how Twitter’s growth has plateaued and the number of active Twitter users are steadily declining. However, just last month, Twitter hit 50 million tweets per day. The number of tweets per day have increased astronomically over the past 3 years. I’m using Twitter more so than when I started over a year ago, but I do go through phases in terms of how active I am on Twitter.

  • What are your thoughts on Twitter? Are you using it more/less?
  • Do you think Twitter will make money this year? in 3 years? in 5 years? ever?
  • Will Twitter’s @Anywhere Platform be a game changer?

While you ponder those questions, enjoy Letterman’s Twitter Top Ten list.

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Mar 16

SXSW 2010 – Twitter announces @anywhere

By Josh Martin Social Media, Twitter View Comments

I attended my first keynote session at SXSW on Monday where Twitter CEO Evan Williams announced to the audience a new integration platform called @anywhere.

This new platform will allow websites to integrate some basic Twitter functionality without requiring users to leave the website. For example, if you were reading an article and you liked the journalist you could follow them on Twitter without having to leave the page, search for them on Twitter, follow them, and then navigate back to the website.

I was able to get a decent seat among the large crowd and capture Evan talking about the @anywhere platform. Check out the video and let me know what you think of @anywhere.

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Jan 22

Twitter to launch location-based trending topics

By Josh Martin Social Media, Twitter View Comments

According to a breaking-news Mashable article, Twitter will launch location-based trending topics. All I can say is, about time! This new feature will allow you to set your specific location, so that you can see what’s trending around you. It looks as though it will be limited to a few counties and cities, specifically 15 U.S. cities and Atlanta is one them. :)  I think this is a really cool feature and a good move for Twitter. It will be interesting for users to see what’s trending in their home city and it will be beneficial for local businesses/brands to see what’s going on around them.

Twitter will be rolling this feature out to 1% of Twitter users today. Unfortunately, I’m not in the lucky 1%, but Mashable was able to get some screenshots of the new feature. Check them out below.

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Jan 20

Twitter to release usernames

By Josh Martin Social Media, Twitter View Comments

It looks like Twitter is planning to release usernames that are either inactive or have been deleted. If you were a late adopter to Twitter, you may have had trouble trying to lock down a particular username (even if it was abandoned by other users) and there was no way to reach out to previously owned Twitter names. Twitter’s current policy states that “An account is considered inactive if it hasn’t been logged into or updated in over 6 months. Inactive accounts may be automatically removed from Twitter. To keep your account active, be sure to log in and post an update within 6 months of your last update.”

So it looks as though all of those innactive accounts will be recycled and released back to the public. There is no official date of the release, but Mashable is already predicting a username land grab similar to the Facebook’s vanity URL rush back in 2009. Remember that day? When you got up at 7 am to get your customized Facebook URL … you know you did! ;)

So, the question of the day is, are you happy with your Twitter username or will you go hunting for a new one?

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Jan 19

Facebook gets another Twitter feature

By Josh Martin Facebook, Social Media, Twitter View Comments

Is Facebook becoming Twitter-ized?

Last September, Facebook introduced their own version of Twitter’s @mentions feature the ability to include other users in messages using the “@” symbol. The feature includes an auto-suggest, so as you type Facebook lets you select your friends from a drop-down menu. After you’ve tagged someone in an update, they get a notification and it gets posted on their wall. I thought this was a nice feature, but I haven’t found myself using it all that much.

New this week, Facebook has tweaked the “Share” feature. Now when you click to “Share” a link or a YouTube video from one of your Facebook friends or Fan Pages, you’ll now see a line of text that says “via [your friend's name].” However, it looks like you do have the option of removing their name (but you wouldn’t want to take credit for your friends cool viral video, would you?). Content that you share will appear on your wall as well as in your friends’ News Feeds.

This feature is essentially Facebook’s version of Twitter’s retweet. I’m not a huge fan of Twitter’s new version of the retweet (and other Twitter users feel the same way), but I think this feature could take off in Facebook. And I do agree with Inside Facebook’s Justin Smith in that this feature provides incentives for Fan Pages and Apps to encourage users to “reshare” feed content on their profiles.

What do you think of these “Twitter-like” features on Facebook? Like/dislike? Will you use them?

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Jan 17

Your Privacy on Facebook is Over

By Josh Martin Facebook, Social Media View Comments

That’s right. The days of sharing information with a small group of friends is no more and guess who you have to thank, Twitter. I believe that this shift in privacy was inevitable, but you’ve got to think Twitter’s surge in popularity put a lot of pressure on Facebook to open up on their privacy settings. In a recent interview with TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said if he were to create Facebook starting today, user information would by default be public. According to Zuckerberg:

“When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was ‘why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?’

And then in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information.   People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social     norm is just something that has evolved over time.

We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.

A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they’ve built, doing a privacy change – doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner’s mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.”

I imagine this will continue to be a HUGE issue with Facebook going forward. Recently, Facebook notified users of privacy changes via a pop-up notification and if you were like me and just clicked through the pop-up, you were in fact making much of your data public. Check out this YouTube video, Facebook privacy settings: What you need to know, to learn more about how the new privacy changes will effect you.

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