Google+ has achieved 1.15bn users, but only 35% of those use are active monthly.
These figures come from We Are Social, after analysing the growth trends for Google+ year on year, globally and locally.
Is this data a damning insight into the general malaise around Google+ or is this merely reflective of general social media sign up trends?
As some of the world’s best athletes battle it out in Sochi, another significant competition is taking place among the sports brands they use and endorse.
New research from digital innovation think tank L2 offers key insights into the digital landscape for sportswear brands.
We’ve included some key trends in the latest edition of our Internet Statistics Compendium.
Pinterest drove an unprecedented amount of traffic to retail sites in Q4 2013 achieving a 50% quarter-over-quarter increase in revenue-per-visit (RPV).
In fact, Pinterest has overtaken Facebook for UK referral revenue and is expected to do the same in the USA this year.
This should come as no surprise. The business case for retailers investing in Pinterest is well past the tipping point. With over 70m global users, Pinterest is now the third most popular social network.
Also, with the amount of Pinterest Pin it buttons overtaking the amount of Facebook Likes on product pages, retailers are realising that Pinterest is a key way to drive sales.
It’s a storm in a coke can.
The 2014 Super Bowl achieved a record breaking 111.5m viewers, making it the most watched event in USA history, just scraping past the 111.3m who watched the Super Bowl two years ago.
Of course the Super Bowl isn’t just about the football, it’s about the adverts. In fact much of what we read relating to the big game in the UK is mostly about the marketing: ‘it costs $4m per advertising slot’, ‘Scarlett Johansson and Soda Stream banned’, ‘David Beckham and H&M gamble with t-commerce’ and one story involving Coca-Cola that you can’t have failed to notice…
Coca-Cola’s unveiling of the controversial ‘Big Game’ commercial that carries the hashtag #AmericaIsBeautiful, in which the traditional American song ‘America the Beautiful’ is sung in nine different languages: English, Spanish, Tagalog, Mandarin, Hindi, Hebrew, Keres, French and Arabic.
A predictable storm of protest followed from the Conservative quarters of the USA, with many right-wing pundits and politicians choosing to take the ad as a provocative blow to their ideals and all the things they perceive to be ‘American’.
Albeit one from the most famous, American corporation on the planet.
How has this controversy affected the brand? How does the advert itself stack up against the competition in terms of online sharing; a barometer of general opinion away from the political world?
Touchstorm has sent us over some data from its Super Bowl Video Scoreboard that tracks the #AmericaIsBeautiful controversy over YouTube, in terms of post-Super Bowl shares, comments and likes. But first, a little insight into the controversy…
We all assume that mobile commerce is big business in Asia-Pacific and that the region is light years ahead of Europe and the US in terms of mobile adoption.
However if you dig deeper into the stats you notice that all is not quite as it seems, with huge disparities appearing across the different APAC nations.
To find out a bit more about the state of mobile commerce and marketing in the region, I’ve rounded up several studies and surveys that reveal some interesting stats.
Here is a checklist you can hold against your agency’s ‘about us’ section. Don’t worry, it is equal parts ‘do’ and ‘don’t’.
Make sure you weed out examples of the latter and add in some of the former and your copy should improve. This list is solely about the content of your copywriting, the words you choose, not the formatting or style.
If you wonder why I’m qualified to create such a checklist, I can only cite my personal and professional interests in writing. I haven’t worked for many clients or won any awards but I have doggedly scrolled through many agency websites.
I must say that my favourite, in the end, was e3, which forgoes an ‘about us’ section altogether, opting instead for a little piece of copy on the homepage.
However, there are lots of great ‘about us’ pages out there, and even some of the ‘don’ts’ I have gathered work well in context. That means having a great copywriter on your team is essential.
Aside from this checklist, other resources worth looking at include my post on building a personal brand, and Chris Lake’s oldie-but-goodie, the A-Z of online copywriting.
One need only look at the trending topics on any given evening to know that Twitter is a popular tool for discussing television shows.
The network has become the go-to forum for reaction to TV programmes and is one of the few things that ensures people still watch live TV rather than relying on on-demand services.
However a new report suggests that Facebook may also be a popular talking shop for TV shows.
This is a topic we’ve previously discussed in articles looking at why Facebook can’t beat Twitter for social TV and a best practice post on driving live engagement.
But the new report suggests we may have been wrong to dismiss Facebook’s potential for TV chatter, with up to a quarter of the television audience posting content related to the show they are watching on Facebook.
Prince and 3RDEYEGIRL played another surprise show in London last night as part of their Hit N’ Run tour to promote the band’s new single and forthcoming album.
The gig in Shepherd’s Bush was announced on BBC Radio 6 early on Sunday morning which sent Twitter in a Prince-inspired frenzy.
The ‘guerilla’ shows are part of Prince’s policy of avoiding middlemen and traditional marketing channels to promote his gigs and new music releases.
Last week he played two surprise shows in Camden’s Electric Ballrooms following a closed press conference held in a friend’s flat in East London.
Our SEO Best Practice Guide is always one of the most popular reports on Econsultancy, and last week we posted a significant update to the guide.
To keep our guides the best they can be, we go to those working at the coalface of search marketing to get their contributions so they are relevant and up-to-date.
One of our contributors is Alex Moss, director at FireCask. Alex contributed to the mobile SEO section of the guide, so we asked him to share his knowledge following Joe Friedlein’s thoughts on on-page optimisation last week. His thoughts are below…
As has been the case for the past while, the start of a new year brings a whole host of predictions, rich with content about the importance of mobile (thankfully, this year we avoided the dreaded ‘year of mobile’ proclamations).
For PPC campaigns this year, one of the key challenges will be ensuring that the opportunity for increased sales via mobile traffic is efficiently and profitably taken.
Russia is currently in the spotlight, preparing to host the Winter Olympics, with all the associated negative press for its government.
But whatever the irregularities of Vladimir Putin, Russia has the third highest economic growth rate in the world.
Although online sales in Russia account for just 2% retail sales, this is estimated to rise to 5%, or $46bn, by 2015 according to Morgan Stanley.
And Russian internet users are in thrall to overseas brands. In 2013 the top 25 brands searched for on Yandex, the top Russian search engine with 61% share, were all overseas fashion brands.
So what are international ecommerce outlets waiting for? Shouldn’t everyone be importing into Russia?
One new hurdle to expansion into Russia is increased complexity in shipping since new import laws were implemented in December 2013.
What do you need to know about Russia, who’s already taking advantage and how can you follow suit? This post and our Russia Digital Market Landscape report can help.
This week, Liz Heron revealed WSJ’s five steps to social media success in an interview with Abigail Edge on Journalism.co.uk.
In just two years since emerging media editor Liz Heron joined, WSJ saw an increase of 235% followers on Twitter and 375% followers on Facebook.
It all seemed like pretty sound advice and I thought it was worth sharing here.
Rather than just repeat her advice verbatim though, I’m going to use some of her quotes as jumping of points to show actual examples of the WSJ social media strategy.
The venerable financial news institution achieved over 4m Twitter followers last weekend and its Facebook page is edging closer to achieving 2m Likes.
For what could be considered a niche publication, this is an incredible achievement. How about the competition though? These numbers may not mean much without comparison…
In the UK there’s the Financial Times, which has 1.75m Twitter followers and 1.2m Likes for its Facebook page.
Back in New York there’s Bloomberg News offering a similar finance based news service. It has 1.3m Twitter followers and just 444,000 Likes on Facebook.
Clearly The Wall Street Journal is doing something right.