Royal Pingdom has calculated that Twitter’s activity–as measured by the number of tweets–has increased by 33% in the last 3 months. Twitter processed a total of 2.64 billion tweets in the month of August, which comes to an average of 85 million every day.
Twitter co-founder Evan Williams has published a post on the company’s blog in which he discusses advances the company has made in improving ease of use for the service.
He cites the release of official Twitter apps for the iPhone (via the Tweetie acquisition), Blackberry and Android as contributing to the company’s 62% growth in mobile use, adding that 16% of all new users to Twitter start on mobile now, as opposed to the 5% before the launch of the first Twitter-branded mobile client. …more…
According to a new study from ABI Research, advertisers are likely to spend $1.8 billion on location-based marketing programs in 2015.
ABI Research’s “Location-Based Marketing” examines the dynamics of the mobile location-based advertising market: drivers, inhibitors, key players and forecasts; it profiles consumers’ opinions, and includes case studies and a guide.
TechCrunch reports that a Loopt promotion Virgin America promotion appears to have been extremely succesful.
On Tuesday, August 31, 2010, Virgin America and location network Loopt partnered to offer two-for-one tickets from California to Cancun or Los Cabos. To earn the deal, customers had to check in on Loopt at SFO, LAX, or at one of a variety of taco trucks in San Francisco and Los Angeles in a 4-hour window.
According to Loopt, 1,300 people checked in to a single taco truck in San Francisco, and 80% of those people have already bought tickets on Virgin America for flights. Loopt claims that it was Virgin’s fifth-highest revenue day ever. …more…
SmartBlog’s Megan Conniff has published an interview with David Rutkauskas, the founder, president and CEO of Beautiful Brands International, who is responsible for the successful launch of worldwide, franchised restaurant brands, including Camille’s Sidewalk Café and FreshBerry Frozen Yogurt Cafe.
Rutkauskas reports that, in the last 90 days, Freshberry has increased its Twitter followers from 750 to more than 9,000, while Camille’s follower count has increased from 900 with Camille’s to currently more than 12,000. With Facebook and Twitter alone, FreshBerry and Camille’s now has potential digital connection with more than 45,000 consumers.
More interestingly, the brands’ engagement and Web mentions have grown from less than 1,400 per month to more than 21,000 digital mentions, including Retweets, @mentions, Facebook posts and Web mentions in the same period. Rutkauskas equates this with massive success in store openings and local store marketing.
The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project has release a new report that shows remarkable growth in social networking use among older U.S. adults. The report is primarily based on data from telephone interviews April 29 and May 30, 2010, among a sample of 2,252 adults, age 18 and older.
According to the report, social networking use among internet users ages 50 and older nearly doubled—from 22% in April 2009 to 42% in May 2010. Among internet users ages 50-64, social networking use grew by 88%–from 25% to 47%. During the same period, use among those ages 65 and older grew 100%–from 13% to 26%. By comparison, social networking use among users ages 18-29 grew by 13%—from 76% to 86%.
TechCrunch reports that Foursquare hit the three million user mark some time in the last few days.
The location-based social network reached the 2 million user mark in July. It took a year to reach one million; 3 months to hit 2 million, and 6 weeks to hit 3 million.
Foursquare’s co-founder Dennis Crowley recently told the LA Times that the startup is growing at about 180,000 users every 10 days. Mashable calculates Foursquare’s growth rate at nearly half a million users per month.
Promoted Tweets are only in their infancy, but at least one firm is showing huge gains from trying out the new marketing technique. Zecco, an online brokerage firm, says that in several cases it has achieved between 280% and 300% increases in click-through rates on “hot” topics, especially around …more…
Market research company NPD Group has released a report, ” Social Network Gaming,” based on a June 2010 survey of U.S. social network gamers and non-gaming social network users age 6 and up.
According to NPD, 20% of the U.S. population ages 6 and older reports having played a game on a social network in the past three months. This equates to 56.8 million U.S. consumers, a significant number for a relatively new gaming activity.
35% of these social network gamers have never participated in any other type of gaming before they started playing games on social networks. …more…
